Case: How nonexistent game trailers made Polish PlayWay the most ‘desirable’ publisher on Steam

Polish Way to play collected in To smoke more wishlists than any other editor, leaving far behind Square Enix, SEGA and Electronic arts… In this she was aided by a controversial marketing strategy. The company has made trailers for hundreds of games, but only released a few titles.

Flipper House

Portal PCGamesN talked about it with Krzysztof Kostowski, CEO of PlayWay. We have chosen most of the equipment:

• your first shot, Auto Mechanic Simulator 2014, the publisher released in 2014 – three years after the founding of PlayWay. Until then, none of the publishers wanted to cooperate with the Polish company. Today, Kostowski is happy that no one has agreed to invest in Car Mechanic, because it has reinforced the philosophy of PlayWay: you always have to publish games yourself;
• Since then, PlayWay has published 70 projects, among which the most famous are House Flipper, thief simulator and Mr. Prepper. Now the editor is formal works over 111 other projects. However, only two of them have an official release date;
• according to Kostovsky, his company is as open as possible to all ideas. Any employee can have an idea for an internal group game by Discord… As soon as ten developers approve it (and there are 126 in PlayWay), the project will immediately go into pre-production. From this moment, an active marketing campaign begins;
• PlayWay launches game trailers on Youtube and Facebook (usually using pre-render or CGI graphics), then add the project to Steam. At the same time, on the game’s store page, there is often no information on the release date, or a video with real gameplay;
• in essence, PlayWay acts as a hyper-casual game publisher. She monitors the public’s reaction and then decides whether or not to continue with the project.

“We read the comments, look at what people are saying on Facebook, YouTube and Steam, and we adapt to that.”, – said Kostovsky. – “Where can we get these discussion groups for free?” Only on the Internet ”.

• it’s no surprise that many games just don’t live up to their release. If the project does not find the support of the players, the development is canceled. However, his Steam page forever remains as Valve “Doesn’t really want to” remove games from their store;
• As Kostowski explained, it doesn’t matter for the platform whether the game is in development or not. As a result, even older games often end up in users’ wishlists. According to analysts, at the end of March, 29 PlayWay titles were among the best Steam wishlists. In comparison, Square Enix has only nine, while SEGA has six;

• this strategy helps PlayWay not to rush to produce games. Some titles took a lot longer than expected, but the projects were still successful. For example, Uboat was created for four years instead of two, and Mr. Prepper – five years instead of the same two;
• moreover, this approach protects developers from crunches, which, according to Kostowski, do not contribute to the success of the games;
• Another advantage of the PlayWay strategy is that the publisher does not take on too much responsibility. As an example, Kostovski cited the as yet unpublished document The builders of Egypt… One of the users complained that the developers had not written anything about the development of the title for a long time, when they should have kept the users informed, since they “bought” the demo version . Nonetheless, the authors of Builders of Egypt did not receive money from users to access the demo and all that the players spent – emotions for the game and time for comments;
• Kostowski compared the PlayWay strategy with Kickstarterhowever, the publisher does not charge upfront for projects that may never come out. By the principle of work, the publisher is similar to the now closed service. Steam green light, where independent games enjoyed by a large number of users have been published.

PlayWay is not the only Polish company pursuing this controversial marketing strategy. Do the same Games factory… It buys the rejected PlayWay projects and refines them. Last year alone, it bought back five games, but has yet to release them.