Goscurry got greenlit! Hints & Obvious Tips

A few days ago, after almost a year, Goscurry got finally greenlit. I honestly don’t know if a miracle happened, or if it was just because Valve felt pity for it, since it was standing there all alone for so long. Or maybe it’s because they’re gonna shut down Greenlight and thought “Let’s make some people happy before we render it all useless”. Anyway, that happened.

I suck at marketing and social presence, but I learned a few things from my Greenlight failure (since yes, taking almost one year to be greenlit should be considered a failure, even if I’m very happy the situation finally changed), and here they are.

The first week is when you gotta rock

Greenlight will do some immediate marketing for you, and show your project to tons of new people. But that will last only while you’re in the first page, which means something like a week (maybe even less by now). Take advantage of that time frame, because afterwards you’ll have to play the marketing game by yourself.

Your trailer must be short and powerful

The main reason people will vote YES, as far as I understand, is because they like your trailer — that is, unless they know you and trust you already. Even if your project is still in the land of the mystic prototypes, push your creativity and make something stunning. Also, make it short: cool things should start happening after the first few seconds.

One of my big mistakes was actually posting too quickly, while I still had a crappy trailer. I replaced it after a few days (another mistake, since even the new one was still not good at all, but at least it was better), but the damage was already done. I finally posted a good one only a couple months ago. Bad me. Bad.

If you got reviews, you better show them

And if you don’t, maybe you should wait and get some before opening a Greenlight project.

While I already had some pretty nice reviews about Goscurry, I wrote them on Greenlight only after that first week went by. Big mistake. People might not know who you are but, quite banally, might know the magazines that wrote about you, and if those magazines were nice to you, gamers might feel like being nice too.

Put links to your Greenlight page everywhere

‘Nuff said.

An epilogue to this banality

I apologize for not having written anything special. But as I said, I suck at marketing so, even if the previous points might seem obvious to 99% of you, I failed them all, thus they might help those silly people that rest in that single percentile club I’m part of.

All in all, both Isak and I are superhappy that Goscurry has finally a chance to be on Steam, and we send big strong squeezing hugs to everyone that helped. I have big bureaucracy issues right now (my accountant made a tricky mess and left me with tons of unexpected money to pay, for which I’m suing him but who knows). As soon as they’re solved it’s Steam time. And then I’ll brag for at least one day.