Game Launcher Review
Entry posted by Josh ·
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Leadwerks Game Launcher was released last week as a free early access title. This means the release did not appear on the Steam new releases list, and its visibility is very low on Steam, unless someone is specifically looking for it. The final "real" release will see a period of high visibility. So right now the only traffic you should expect to get is what we drive to the Steam store page ourselves.
That said, Leadwerks Game Launcher now has 2000 users, and has very positive reviews so far. Aside from a news story on IndieDB, this was organic growth, so we should expect to see a steady increase of users over time. We don't want to go too big yet because the software still has glitches to iron out, and the games are still being created by our community. Early Access allows us to test the software out with a wide range of users, so that we can polish everything for the final release, at which point the number of users will go up by a lot.
Some of you are starting to get feedback directly from your players, and now is a good time to learn how to handle that, because the volume will increase a lot during the final release. At that point, I think you can expect to add a couple of zeroes to whatever number of players your game has now. My goal of 10,000 users after the final release appears to be very doable based on what I've seen so far.
The purpose of Leadwerks Game Launcher is to get you players and build your community. I can promote your games as a whole much more efficiently than I could individually. I am very curious to see in time how this method performs compared to alternatives. A Demon's Game released a demo at the same time on IndieDB and Leadwerks Game Launcher. It's interesting that the IndieDB file has 33 downloads while the Workshop game has about twice as many subscribers. So already we are seeing an improvement. Leadwerks Game Launcher allowed the author of this game to triple the number of players he would have otherwise.
I noticed a couple of people re-published their game under a new Workshop file ID. This isn't a problem right now, but in the future you won't want to do that because you will lose your ranking in the Workshop and all your fan comments. Let me know if you run into any trouble with the update feature.
Finally, I just want to ask you about your experience so far. Have you learned anything interesting from this process? Have you started communicating with fans yet? It's still early, but I am interested in hearing anything you have to say about your experience as an author.
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