[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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TikTok: classes from Mortal Rite’s social success

So, we received contacted by Alex Estevan from Round Toast Studios, “an indie studio with 5 people working full time (4 developers and 1 marketing person, me).” The workforce is engaged on in-development 3D motion RPG Mortal Rite, and Alex defined to us:

“We’ve already organically gotten over 120 million TikTok views, 640k TikTok followers, and over 60,000 Steam wishlists – even though we are still at least 6 months away from an Early Access release. We’ve done all this without spending a single dollar on paid advertising or marketing agencies.”

So in fact we needed to know extra about that. And forward of the sport’s Kickstarter launch on Tuesday – alongside the primary full gameplay trailer – he gave us an entire bunch of finest practices. So – take it away, Alex:

“Firstly, here’s some stats on our TikTok account: Followers: 647,800; Total Views: 126,115,388; Total Likes: 14,376,435; Total Comments: 134,402; Total Shares: 123,877; Average views per day: 256,852; Total videos: 253; Average views per video: 498,480; Average Posting Consistency: 1 new post every 1.96 days; Total Steam Wishlists: 61,749.”

Alex additionally handed alongside a chart of Mortal Rite’s ‘daily TikTok Views to daily Steam wishlists’. As you may see, the sport’s TikTok views are largely instantly linked to their variety of new wishlists:

Alex talked about that the ‘sweet spot’ for him was TikTok movies with excessive ‘Average Watch Time’, excessive ‘Watch Full Video %’, and excessive engagement fee. And as you’ll see, movies with each a) a dev’s face in them and b) subtitles are additionally finest practices which are key to Mortal Rite’s success.

These are the actual sorts of movies that Alex thought labored significantly properly with TikTok’s algorithms and viewers:

1. Progression movies: “People love seeing your personal progress and success when working on something. Showing: ‘hey our first concept looked like this, and then we added color, and then we added this functionality, and now the final product looks like this’. These types of videos typically really encourage the viewer to stick with the video and watch until the end.” Example: this Mortal Rite ‘great wall’ development TikTok has 8.5m views and 1.3m likes! (And this full development vid did higher!)
2. Videos of issues which are ‘half done’, after which asking the neighborhood for suggestions: “Pretty much every video on our page falls under this category a little bit. The main challenge is becoming okay with posting things that aren’t fully done or that don’t look quite how you want them to look… if someone sees you work start-to-finish on something and then the final product turns out really good, they are already a lot more invested – and will care more about your game!”
3. Take one thing difficult about sport dev, and make it straightforward to grasp: “If you are able to do this in an interesting way, people will feel like they’ve learned something new! It also helps the average player get invested in the intricate details of your game that they probably wouldn’t have normally paid attention to.” This Mortal Rite TikTok on making a ‘secret area’ beneath the map for enemies to spawn is one instance.
4. Video replying to individuals’s options or questions: “Obviously these videos usually require a lot of development, and can’t be made very easily. But if you see a comment of something you like and you know that you’ll eventually implement, take a screenshot of it, so you can reference it later.” Here’s an instance.
5. Videos that play together with traits. “Most videos probably take me about 3-8 hours to complete. However, a lot of videos that are trend-followers are typically much easier to make, usually requiring about an hour of work max. If you just search in the TikTok app for brand-relevant terms, like ‘game dev’ for example. TikTok will provide you with a list of videos.” Here’s two cute examples.

Intriguingly, the Mortal Rite people additionally generally make general-interest TikToks about sport information unrelated to their sport – right here’s two examples – to get individuals to concentrate and comply with their web page. That goes past what lots of you’d do, proper?

But how do you get individuals off TikTok, and onto your Steam web page or different media? Alex says: “This can be very difficult to do (only about 1 in every 2,000+ people who view a video of ours will go and wishlist it.) But here are some tactics that we’ve found help improve these odds.

1. Have a quick ‘call to action’ at the end of your video. We have a little animation of someone adding Mortal Rite to their wishlist at the end of a lot of our videos.
2. Talk directly about wishlisting, and say very openly: ‘Hey, this is a great free way to support me’.
3. Have a link to your Steam page in your TikTok bio.

If you want to boost another one of your socials, let’s say a Discord server, making a video about someone in that community that did something cool is a great way to do that. Example: this TikTok got us about 750 new Discord members.”

So there you could have it. Obviously, Mortal Rite will should be an amazing sport – along with expertly marketed on TikTok – to interrupt by. But Alex and workforce are actually going about it the correct means to date! Much good luck to them…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your premium PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]