Highs and Lows: Next Fest Edition

Hey friends! It’s been a while since you’ve received this newsletter. I was really busy for the weeks leading up to, and during, Steam Next Fest. We’ve got a lot to cover: celebrating some Bibidi wins, look at some stats, and see what’s next on the roadmap.

How Am I Doing?

Next Fest kept me pretty occupied, but it’s over now. I had a little vacation and I’m back in the routine! I also got into making marketing materials over on TikTok and Instagram, which left me with little to no energy to actually write this newsletter. But I’m pretty recharged now!

They say to celebrate your wins, so I thought it would be fun to dig into some before and after stats for Bibidi Bibidi’s Next Fest run. If you’re more interested in seeing this in a video format, there’s a deVlog out you can watch instead. So thanks everyone who played the demo and left a review!

Bibidi Bibidi! Wishlists

The main metric we use to measure pre-launch interest in your Steam game is wishlists. Essentially, players see your store page and hit a big button to keep notified if your game launches or is on discount. We went into Next Fest with about 1,200 wishlists. We came out the other end around 1,900. Now the interesting part is that we got picked up by some relatively high profile streamers, and we actually got more wishlists from those then everything else combined.

Screenshot of Daily Wishlist Actions, a line graph that shows, spikes in sequence. A is a spike of 20 wishlist additions, B 100, C 250, D 150 respectively. — Various wishlist spikes annotated.

What you see above is a graph of spikes in wishlist additions. A was when we launched the Demo before Next Fest, B was the start of Next Fest. It ended June 22, so right before the spike at C. That’s when Retromation (a streamer known to play a lot of roguelikes) tried the demo. Then spike D is caused by another big streamer, Wanderbots. The spike behind that, that I didn’t annotate, is very likely because of this Eurogamer review we got. I feel like traditional games journalism really legitimizes your efforts somehow haha.

As you can see, when you have certain momentum, other spikes like that kind of keep appearing and tapering off, so we’re now well above 3,000 wishlists! That’s not quite launch numbers, it’s generally advised to launch with at least 10k, but it’s very promising nonetheless.

Bibidi Bibidi! Playtime

Another fun chart to look at is playtime. You can pretty much correlate this to retention rate, as far as I’m concerned. Playtime is divided into buckets of 10 minutes, 30, minutes, 1 hour, 2 hour and 5 hours respectively, so you can see the percentage of users who have dropped off between those points.

Screenshot of the Steam dashboard playtime stats, comparing the Bibidi Bibidi! Playtest stats to that of the Demo. All the stats in the Demo are about 10% higher than those of the Playtest. — Playtime KPIs of the Playest versus the Demo.

On the left we’re showing stats of the playtest we’ve been running since July last year. First thing to notice is that the amount of people who actually played it (Lifetime users measured) absolutely skyrocketed with the launch of the demo, so our sample size is more than 4 times as large.

Then, the percentages of people who stuck around up to 1 hour is significantly larger. I think part of that is the quality of life and first time user experience improvements we implemented over the lifetime of the demo. Jonas spoke to a publisher once who was looking specifically for the following retention stats for games they would consider publishing:

75 – 80% 10 minutes
30 – 50% 30 minutes
10 – 15% 2 hours

So we’re well within, and in some cases well above the referenced KPIs. Specifically the 2 hour+ bucket I’m excited about. It means that people are already coming back to the demo for another session, or are so absorbed in the their current session they keep playing for multiple runs.

Another fun outlier is that 4% played more than 5 hours. 4% of about 2,000 players is 80 players. So 80 players have either forgot to turn off their computer as they were going about their day or come back to play a bunch of Bibidi.

I was slightly demotivated by Next Fest’s results. I had secretly hoped for an explosion of interest, even though I know that’s not really how it works. But then the interest generated by all those streamers, the influx of new players and the playtime stats all made me super optimistic again!

What Am I Doing?

But then, what are we up to now? What’s next for Bibidi? Well, we’re working on new content. Specifically, a new playable character: the Witch!

Concept art sketch of a annoyed-looking witch with a green hat and vest, a wooden wand and a broom on her back. She holds a little cauldron shoulder bag that has some plants in it. — Jonas’ primary character design concept art.

We’re still experimenting with some gameplay for her, but the lead we’re currently following is that she has a cauldron that eats your cards and destroys them permanently. Naturally, this recontextualizes the whole deckbuilding aspect of the game: you would need a supply of cards to throw away or somehow modify to keep around.

We’ll work on her for a bit more, and announce the re-opening of the public playtest when we launch that update.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

Making short form video material is really exhausting, so I hope I can juggle that, making the game and still have time for this newsletter, but I reckon I might skip some more editions as we’re getting closer to release. Making a game is a lot of work, and doing all the marketing, PR and outreach ourselves is tough.

But hopefully it will all be worth it in the end!