Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land Released on PC, Trailer and Editorial
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And then a snip from the piece:
So the promotion of the game began with that initial press release, which carried currency because of the IP of Chaosium far more than it would have with us just being a new studio. We talked to Cthulhu/Lovecraft fan sites and built a relationship with them, which helps because I too am a fan, but also because we're working with Chaosium. This outreach was ongoing from the very early days, not something as a games designer I'd originally envisioned doing, but each week I'd spend time building up our social media fan base and relations with blogs and sites. Facebook is our most important outlet with Twitter a close second, but what you can see from the graph [left] of our numbers over time is that there was no sudden burst, more a steady building of presence.
The combined effect of this and our work with games media outlets was to ensure that by the time the iOS launch came along we'd got a buzz going. Note our marketing budget was £1000; so what we did had to count (that's roughly 500 games we'd have to sell to break even on just that spend). Upon release we opted for a high price-point (£3 but only relative to iOS - I still think £3 is a tiny amount to pay for a game, as for 69p... a total bargain in most cases) which we felt would be justified by the quality of the game and the IP. It also had the effect of putting off casual gamers, which meant less sales but also less bad reviews, as to buy it you had to be committed. This is key as Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a geeky game, a mix of the X-Com classics of yesteryear and the Call of Cthulhu paper RPG system. The existing IP awareness meant we got a lot of coverage upon release and so it sold well (charted at no.1 RPG on iPhone UK charts for example) and continues to sell well. But it has a lot of ground to cover and iOS was only ever intended to be our beachhead...
