There are a lot of things that go into a game for it to become popular. And the first thing is how to make more people willing to try. The vast majority of indie game manufacturers don't have enough budget to attract attention, which makes it even more difficult to succeed.
But the solution was all figured out, and Landfall, the Swedish game developer, chose a path that no one had imagined: let the game be open for free for 24 hours when it was first launched on Steam.
On April 1st, the co-op multiplayer horror game Content Warning made its Steam debut in this way. As a result, the game received 6.2 million copies in a single day! Fortunately, this marketing strategy did not cost developer Landfall money. After switching to a paid game, Content Warning sold 70w copies.
Considering the volume of indie games, 700,000 copies can already pay off. Every copy sold next means a little more budget for the next work. There's no doubt that Landfall is taking a big gamble that its game is high enough to make players pay. Thankfully, they got it right, and the game has already rushed to No. 11 on Steam's best-selling charts.
The background of Content Warning is unique, and the player takes on the role of an UP master who needs to travel to a "different world" through a diving bell, and shoot monsters and upload videos through the camera to achieve the purpose of increasing fans. Earn money through videos, buy better equipment, and go deeper into the region to find more terrifying monsters......
The overall look and feel of the game is a bit like last year's hit Deadly Company. It's also a simple picture, with multiplayer cooperation as the core, and going to different areas to encounter monsters, but the setting of the shooting video of "Content Warning" can give players a deeper sense of substitution.
"Content Warning" is very reminiscent of the American movie "Nightcrawler", in which the male protagonist played by Jake Gyllenhaal is the first to arrive at the scene of the accident to shoot videos and sell them to TV stations to make money, and the more tragic the picture, the higher the income. In Content Warning, the number and type of monsters captured are also linked to the final reward.
In order to create a strong sense of contrast, there is a clear tonal difference between the real world of "Content Warning" and the world where the monsters live. In reality, it's a vibrant, warm, contrasting color theme, and the monster world is black, white, and gray. However, these two scenes are not the "surface and inner world" like "Silent Hill", but the relationship between the upper and lower levels.
It seems that because the human world in the future has suffered some kind of great change, the survivors have lived in the sky through the elevated, and the world where the monsters live is the original human continent....... Of course, for such a work, the plot background doesn't matter, and the vast majority of players regard it as a "UP simulator".
Content Warning is now becoming another streamer game, and its popularity is actually inseparable from various slices on the Internet. In fact, most of the players who paid for this game came to them after watching various anchor videos. Since the price is not high (33 yuan in China), players don't care about the fact that it was a free game before.
However, if the game itself is not entertaining, even if it is given away for free, not many players will be interested. As the popularity of Content Warning continues to rise, it is not surprising that you can see Content Warning again on the Steam weekly sales chart next week.
If you and your friends are in the middle of a game drought, you might as well try this special "UP Simulator" game.