Insight
Sivak: Video Games Compete Directly With Netflix, Facebook, and TikTok
“You're competing with everyone. You know, you're competing with Netflix, you're competing with you know, with Facebook and TikTok.”
Disclosure
Proletariat Released Spellbreak Pre-Alpha After Failing to Secure Publishers
“We made the decision to go out in a pre alpha because we were not really getting anywhere with potential partners and publishers. We knew we had to show traction and it was way before any of us were comfortable having players in the game.”
Insight
Sivak: Early-stage game developers should prioritize high-upside viral channels
“The number one thing I think everyone should be doing right now is focusing on their high upside channels.”
Insight
Sivak: Game word-of-mouth happens via social media GIFs, not office chatter
“The water cooler moments that people used to share in the office, where they would say like, hey, you know, I was playing this cool game, or I fought this cool boss, no longer exist. They're all getting shared as animated GIFs now, whether it be through TikTok…”
Opinion
Sivak: Discord Is Far Superior to Email or Social Channels for Community Building
“And we knew that discord was going to be really useful for us because we could engage directly with them and be able to tap in to that audience and much better way than we could through any other social channel that was currently out there or through email.”
Insight
Sivak: Controlling pre-launch information creates content scarcity and drives engagement
“So I think controlling this is, is really important because it allows you to build a lot of interest around anything that you're going to put out, and there's a real scarcity of content that you keep control over, and that becomes really valuable for every pie…”
What-if
Sivak: Spellbreak Community Required Mandatory Playtest Voice Chats to Form
“And I think without us really pushing these play tests, I don't think it would have actually happened because I think that that sort of loose social connection of just being in text chat or whatever is not the same as like forcing you to play with the same gro…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sivak: Unrestricted Community Discord Meme Channels Drove Top Spellbreak Marketing
“We made the meme channel accessible to everyone, not just testers. And I think that was really important because it meant that tons of people that didn't have a key yet could still be making memes. And the people that did have that did have a key, the testers …”
Insight
Sivak: Game studios should use existing community platforms over proprietary forums
“And more and more, I think you're better off choosing an existing platform than running your own forums.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sivak: Spellbreak community TikTok adoption jumped to 60% in six months
“We ask like, you know, what social networks do you use? And I think it's grown from like only 12 or 14% of our community to like 60% of our community are now on TikTok or just over the last six months.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sivak: Spellbreak accumulated nearly 1.8 million pre-launch signups
“We're up to about 1.7 or 1.8 million people that have signed up during the course of like all the pre alpha, the alpha and the beta.”
Disclosure
Proletariat raised around $30M in total venture capital funding
“We've raised about thirty million in total venture capital over a couple of rounds of funding.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sivak: Publishing Spellbreak Dev Blog on Imgur Drove Tens of Thousands of Signups
“So what we did instead is we actually took our development blog and we put it on imager. And so by doing that, we were actually able to generate, you know, you can see that thing has 200,000 views. And that, that would drive tens of thousands of email signups …”
Assertion Supported
Proletariat avoided direct download links in early Spellbreak posts
“One of the things that we did for all of our posts is we did not actually, because they were set up to be dev blogs, we did not actually say, Hey, download this game right now or sign up. Instead, what we did is we'd wait for basically the first comment to act…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sivak: Referrals accounted for 60% to 70% of Spellbreak signups
“At one point during the summer, we were getting like 60 to 70% of our signups that were all referrals.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Spellbreak reached nearly 200,000 players during its beta phase
“Even when we were up to about at one point, like at the very end of the beta, we had almost 200,000 players.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Only one-third of Spellbreak's early Discord members were playtesters
“At any given time, only about like a third of the people in the discord were actually testers.”
Assertion Supported
Spellbreak playtesters dropped video backlogs on day one NDA lifted
“When we actually went fully live into the closed alpha, when we lifted the NDA, we actually saw that like so many of these people have this whole library of videos. They just dropped on day one.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Spellbreak Discord server doubled from 30k to 60k members in four days
“And our Discord server doubled in size in four days. We went from 30,000 to 60,000 people in the course of four days.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sivak: Top 1% of Spellbreak playtesters logged 40 hours weekly
“Like we did a calculation on the top one percent of spell break players and they basically play 40 hours a week and they have since the summer of 2018.”
