Cultist Simulator mobile: The all-singing, all-dancing data dump

We launched a mobile port of Cultist Simulator on the App Store and Google Play in April 2019. Here’s how it’s gone so far. I hope you like DATA!

TLDR

IN THE BEGINNING WERE TWO NERDS

Weather Factory was a two-person team in 2018. Our studio strategy was to get our name out there as wide and as impressively as possible. We needed to amplify our voice and add to the limited studio credit of a new, small start-up. (All we had was Alexis’s legacy and ~16k Twitter following, from him founding Failbetter Games and making Fallen London and Sunless Sea.)

We were severely restricted by being only two people. We could only realistically focus on one project at a time, but we knew that diversification – of audience, and of revenue streams – was necessary to insulate our indie studio against the unpredictability of game dev.

Gaining as big an audience as we could was more important than maximising revenue. This strategy was the main reason we signed a PC publishing deal with Humble Bundle. It also told us pretty clearly we should find a porting house and publisher to make a mobile version of Cultist Simulator while we focused on post-launch PC development.

ENTER PLAYDIGIOUS

I spoke to a bunch of mobile porting houses (hey, AJ!) before settling on Playdigious, the excellently French porting and publishing house currently working on the Dead Cells mobile game. Playdigious came with a personal recommendation from someone I trust and respect (hey, Tom Bidaux!) but were also the only specifically premium mobile specialist I found.

Playdigious felt right from the start, and now that I’ve worked with them for nearly a year, I can’t recommend Xavier and his team enough. We signed a 50% rev share deal where Playdigious covered the cost of porting and took responsibility for the project, leaving us to stick our noses in as much or as little as we liked. We were free to focus on Cultist‘s PC development and other Weather Factory projects (like, say, BOOK OF HOURS).

The plan was to launch on the App Store and Google Play in Russian and Chinese some time in 2019 for a £6.99 / $6.99 price point. Most of that happened!

PORTING CULTIST SIMULATOR

Here’s our timeline:

It’s all pretty bunched up towards the end, much more so than this producer likes. This is because premium mobile games live or die by features, particularly on the App Store, and plutonium-heavy hints were dropped that releasing at the start of April would definitely be a good time. We settled on the second week of April, only to be told that really, Tuesday 2nd April would definitely be better. This coincided with the start of the 2019 London Games Festival.

Tuesday 2nd April was 2-4 weeks earlier than initially planned, but Playdigious took it in their stride. We would not have been able to make this deadline on our own. It’s another reason I’m glad we signed with a publisher, and struck a deal that made them care about the port as much as we did.

However, there were casualties. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that only Chinese is noted on the timeline, despite us wanting to launch with both Russian and Chinese. Loc is a whole other story, but the short version is Russian translation was dropped in order to ensure we could meet our new, earlier release date. (We’ll release Russian later down the line – I hear if you’re smart you can have a pseudo second launch with a new language on the App Store. Time will tell!)

MARKETING

You don’t normally spend lots of money on a premium mobile game launch. Premium mobile marketing seems to rely on building hype around an upcoming release via pre-registration campaigns and social media, and then doing whatever dark magic you must to give yourself the best chance of a feature on launch.

Featuring is much more of a thing on the App Store, where they have multiple games editors selecting Games of the Day, ‘Games we’re playing now’, top genre lists, top indie picks, top ten games around a particular theme…

The Google Play Store is much more algorithmically driven. As far as I understand, Google Play wants its algorithm to recommend particular games to particular users based on their previous purchase habits. If you’ve played any premium narrative games in the past few weeks, you may see Cultist Simulator appear in your store. But if all you play is Candy Crush, maybe you won’t. Correct me below if I’m wrong!

Playdigious, our mobile experts, spearheaded marketing. They sent through a great marketing strategy which identified strengths (nothing else like it), weaknesses (what the hell is it), opportunities (featuring on stores you might not think of, like Razer) and risks (no China featuring, because it’s all about cults). As mentioned above, the campaign also centred on pre-registration.

Playdigious recommended focusing only on Google Play pre-registrations, as Apple’s pre-order system discounts pre-orders from your launch numbers and so undermines your app’s performance at launch (like the problems moving from Early Access to full launch on Steam). They also recommended pricing Cultist much higher than I’d expected – $6.99 / £6.99 – but offering a 30% discount (ish) for early adopters. This meant anyone pre-registering would get Cultist for $4.99 / £4.99, and to be fair to App Store users, we’d offer the same price point for one week at launch across both stores.

So: we aimed simply to get iOS users to sign up to a mailing list we could then ping when Cultistwas out, and launched a Google Play pre-registration campaign along with a press release and social media fanfare at the end of February. Running roughly a month until full release, we managed to nab 200k pre-registrations by launch and, thanks to the efforts of Playdigious and their good relationship with Google Play, saw significant featuring in Google’s ‘Pre-registration games’ section.