UnMetal and the Publishers

Greetings my dearest players,

It's been already a month since UnMetal was supposed to come out on Steam. I'm really sorry for that, and I'm going to explain the reason to you:

VISIBILITY

7 years ago, when Unepic was released, Steam was a digital store where everyone learned about your game. Only 6 new games were released every week. Publishing a game was enough to let everyone know about it, let the magazines talk about it, and have a decent number of sales.

After the removal of Steam's selection filters such as GreenLight, and the massive usage of Unity, a big amount of games started to come out. Nowadays, the average of new release on Steam is 20 games every single day. 

As a result, we now have a massive saturation of indie videogames that makes visibility barely impossible. Anything published on Steam is practically unseen. Just publishing is no longer enough. In fact, the 80% of games on Steam barely have any sale. Not because they're not good, but because nobody gets to know them.

STEAM SUMMER FESTIVAL

To help incoming videogames, Steam created a "demo festival" with the purpose of grant some visibility to those games through their demos. UnMetal participated in order to take advantage of this opportunity. The demo was going to be known and played!

The outcome of that demo festival was a disaster. It was so overcrowded with demos that even people who was searching for UnMetal on purpose were unable to find it. People wrote me asking why UnMetal was not there.

What it was supposed to be a festival to help indie games with no marketing was nothing but a reflection of the main store: games with a lot of whishlists were forever on the main page of that festival in the featured list the whole week, while other games kept buried without a chance of being features a few hours to be known by players.

Besides, technical problems made the situation worse. In my case the demo was visible 24 hours later and, no matter how I insisted, I was never Fable to broadcast my game. In the end I had to broadcast from Youtube instead of Steam losing any advantage from the store.

CHANGING COURSE

I was aware that if I didn't invest on marketing, UnMetal was going to be sold in Spain, but it would be unknown abroad.

Then, on June, one of the best indie publishers contacted me. They told me they liked the demo, and they would possibly publish it.

It was just what I was looking for! That was the great marketing campaign I needed. I accepted. For the first time in my life I was going to launch a game through a top publisher instead of publishing it by myself.

THINGS GRIND SLOWLY

We kept in contact on June and July, asking me for material and information. They wrote me every 2 weeks to ask something to me. In the end, at the end of August, they told me that after dwelling and debating it internally, they were not going to publish it.

That was so sad. Not only I lost that great publisher but also wasted two months.

THE SEARCH FOR A PUBLISHER

Due to that fact, I pitched the game to the 5 top indie publishers and 15 days later, 3 of them replied telling me that they were interested on it. They loved UnMetal. That were great news!

After spending the end of September and October talking to them, I'm now about to make a deal with the one I consider is the best.

I'd loved to make an agreement before, but dealing with companies is sometimes slow. Every step was followed with a week of waiting. But looks like this is about to reach a happy end.

I wanted to have the publishing stuff sorted out, so I could tell who is going to publish UnMetal. But as this is taking longer than expected and we're already a month late, I have decided to explain to you all why UnMetal did not come out in October as it was scheduled.

THE MARKETING CAMPAIGN

All publishers I talked to have something in common: they need at least 3 months to carry out their marketing campaigns before the game is published. That means that, unfortunately, UnMetal won't come out before February or March 2021.

Good news are that all versions (PC, Switch, XBOX y PS4) will be released at the same time, no consoles won't have to wait longer.

And that's my story of today. Thanks for reading!