RimWorld Expansions: A Marketing Postmortem - Tia Young | Vancouver Game Dev Series

[@busgamedevs]

Join us in person December 11th for the final VGDS event of the year! We'll be having Q&A's with Clara Sia from Devolver Digital and Noel Berry from EXOK! Tickets available at bit.ly/vgdsdec2024

[@generationm2059]

Mood: +10 "Watched an informative presentation about Rimworld's marketing.

[@HelloLopi]

Very good video! 😊 I remember Tia's first post in reddit and I found it very interesting. All the weekly updates for the last expansion that she did were very good and keep the community engaged! As an argentinian, I saw very close the situation with the regional prices.. It was very sad that a lot of people with vpns were taking advantage of that. As Tia said, this was a problem for a lot of games. After some time, Steam implemented a way of checking the credit cards, so to buy in Argentina now you need to have a credit card from there. Also, the prices are not in local currency anymore, now are in USD, so you avoid the problem of having the prices of the expansion higher than the base game. But I hope developers keep taking into consideration Steam's regional prices, because it is true that a game costing 25 usd can be 10% of a salary. And now, it is not so broken as in their beginnings. Congrats for all the work done, to Tia and Ludeon!

[@I_Am_This_Guy]

Fascinating look at one of my favorite games from such a different angle, thank you Tia and BUS for sharing!

[@OskarPotockiVE]

Really good video, I wish it was slightly longer

[@Conthemon]

Whoa it's the guy!

[@frankmckenneth9254]

@@Conthemon it's the dude with the stuff!

[@dakaodo]

17:00 "Children added rich new storytelling" I rememeber 8-ish years ago, people were citing Tynan Sylvester as saying he would never add pregnancy and children to Rimworld. :D I'm glad he was willing to back away from that hill instead of dying on it, b/c that (and other aspects of the Biotech DLC) really was a great addition to RW. Some players at the time were very vocal about insisting it was too much work, highly inappropriate for a game that is often jokingly referred to as a warcrime simulator, etc. For me, this was not the first time or the last time to see people rationalizing something to stay the way it is, and/or why a hypothetical change would be bad. Humans are risk-averse and thus conservative by nature -- change causes uncertainty, and historically uncertainty could often mean IRL death for our ancestors for 200,000 years. But since we don't regularly get eaten by cavebears any more, we channel these primal instincts into other life choices: xenophobia, dysfunctional/abusive relationships, sticking with a bad job, wanting more of the same even when it's mediocre (chain fast food) or a new alternative could be better or worse but PROBABLY would be better (taking a chance on a local small-biz burger shop). This last point very much applies to games and movies. Established fan bases often become extremely militant about reboots, revamps, sequels, new DLCs, etc. It's absolutely true that publishers, producers, directors, devs etc are also guilty of often reinventing a worse wheel -- but they have to reinvent their IP enough so that it's not a complete copy-paste job for every new installment. And they're incentivized to do this because players and audiences are notoriously cheap and fickle about taking chances on completely new titles or IPs. Only stellar new titles go on to breed their own franchises, while average new titles go on the trash bin. Better a bad franchise than a new average original work. So for Rimworld DLC and other games/movie sequels, part of the trick is to positively bait and switch audiences -- rope the established fan base in with enough elements of the familiar old ways, while lacing each new installment with enough new content to massage the product towards a desired direction. If done right and overall customer satisfaction is high or outright enthusiastic, the new changes get rolled into the game's overall positive image. But it takes a high level of commitment, risk appetite, and a belief that to some degree the devs know more than their vocal fans do. When the devs/publishers/producers completely lack this drive or vision, you get conservative corporate cash cows like COD BLOPS 6 -- very expensive to make, high production value compared to crappy little indie phenomena like oh say Vampire Survivors, but COD players are basically paying full AAA prices for new DLC story expansions that rehash the same game and story narrative pacing that every other COD has used (because it works for that audience), and that happen to be bundled with an incrementally revised version of the same game engine every time. Said tongue in cheek: I don't see any xenogenes or children in BLOPS 6, after all. XD But seriously, if Rimworld was Call of Duty, each DLC would have been released as a completely separate game. Tia addressed this with the point about managing risk -- less risk to release DLC for an existing title instead of making it a new title, even as a sequel. Both COD and Rimworld see new incremental changes to their core game engine with each release, but RW packages it as a free update to the base game plus an optional DLC purchase. For years, I've thought RW and a number of other indie games going on a decade-plus have come up with some great ways to monetize player time, stay relevant, while also respecting their players instead of treating them like a resource to be milked for cash. Project Zomboid and BeamNG are the most hardcore I can think of -- they use a strategy of "we'll keep developing if players keep buying the base game." Never a DLC yet. More similar to Rimworld are Arma 3 and Space Engineers -- they also use the hybrid base game free updates plus additional optional DLC content model. I'm sure there are many more examples and variations on indie monetization, so this list is not complete or even the best examples.

[@SomeoneSneaky]

It was fascinating getting a peek behind the scenes. Excellent presentation!

[@mechicanalnumbariaro]

Im surprised she didn't talk about mods much at all. considering that's the sole reason the game was kept alive for so long.

[@jerrybarnette5148]

For real, Oskar is the best employee they have

[@XXX-XX-X-X]

They don’t sell or market mods, so I think that would be pretty out of place.

[@Dorinda-q3f]

Thanks for being so informative 🙂

[@suefancer9453]

Go Tia, go love it

[@namajeff4199]

of course ambigiousamphibian is there! I started playing the game a while ago because of him

[@laiaa9178]

this game already a Legend they dont really need Marketing and Tynan is always vanish for 1-2years then new expansion pop up out of nowhere hahaha

[@Selene-xf9yi]

Very interesting

[@Nowhere-01]

tia got some idea

[@piedpiper1172]

18:30 As someone who owns all Rimworld expansions and Star Citizen: the constant creation of in engine promo material that simply can’t be achieved in game is a big part of why I stopped supporting SC.

[@Hazik_YouTube]

Honey, we've been playing the game long before you've joined the company.

[@lem2004]

My only reason to love sandbox game as long it includes some war crime in it. And rimworld hitting all the checkmark for me, such as butchering human and creating human leather cowboy hat. It was fun but you are punished with mood debuff. That until ideology dlc come to play where you set your colonist belief, meaning you can build a colony without limited by inhumane act such as slavery, skull spike, robbing other camp and converting people to your belief.

[@JoshuaTrinh1611]

the game still doesn't have toilet

[@leshommesdupilly]

Dub's bad hygiene

[@emmyturner7385]

I hate how to sees the art i love as a cash cow. She doesn’t know what makes it good. If it didn’t sell well she wouldn’t think rimworld is good. She feels evil.

[@WelcomeBub]

I don't see what's wrong with getting compensation from people willing to give it for making the art. Continuing a success is how they fund more ventures. And yeah if it doesn't sell well then clearly people don't want it. You can't expect artists and developers to just cater to niche audiences and visions with little support.

[@piedpiper1172]

The art you love is made by artists who need to eat, have places to live, go on vacations, pursue hobbies, and all the things that make lives worthwhile. Marketing itself isn’t good or evil-the artists do need to earn a living. It’s all down to the strategies they use. They emphasize being honest in their advertising and building organic support by delivering what their players want. Imo, that’s ideal.

[@leshommesdupilly]

**Richard Stallman intensifies**

[@emmyturner7385]

I hate how to sees the art i love as a cash cow. She doesn’t know what makes it good. If it didn’t sell well she wouldn’t think rimworld is good. She feels evil.

[@aaronmartin8027]

This is the second time this account posted the same comment, word for word, to the same video. Is this an actual person or is this a bot? It feels like a bot.