The Great Old One ordered us to release our game for free - here's our experience so far

Hi Imgur!

We're an indie duo from Poland, passionate about creating narrative games, experimenting with the medium, and not starving to death.

We've made a decision to release our first game for free - below we're sharing the reasons behind it and our experience so far.

ABOUT BIT GOLEM
After years of working mainly for publishers, we’re switching our focus to our own gamedev endeavours which, despite belonging to different genres, will have a strong common thread - the focus on story.

We’ve decided to start with short (30-60min) experiences for busy people, based on the works of weird fiction authors we enjoy: H. P. Lovecraft, E. A. Poe, and Stefan Grabinski (a largely unknown author often described as the “Polish Poe” or the “Polish Lovecraft”).

DAGON - OUR FIRST PROJECT
Our first adaptation is based on Dagon, a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. We wanted it to appeal to both Lovecraft cultists and people who never had the chance/time to delve into his works.

Dagon is 100% faithful to the original, fully voiced, and lets you experience the whole story during a lunch break - in about 30 minutes (nothing better than some cosmic horror to accompany your meal). It’s also filled with interesting trivia about the author, the process of creating the original story, and its historical background.

Most of the game’s models, textures and audio come from various asset stores (both paid and free), as we currently can’t afford to hire graphics artists and modellers, but that’s certainly our plan for the future + we really strive to make the style coherent and atmospheric (and we’ve already received a lot of positive feedback regarding it).

We also couldn’t spend years on development, so we focused on creating a faithful, atmospheric adaptation, without difficult choices, inventory etc. - our goal was to present the story we love in multimedia form and see how players will react to a short, linear game. We hope to introduce many people to the Cthulhu Mythos this way.

WHY WE’RE RELEASING THE GAME FOR FREE

Since we’re quite often asked why we decided to release the full game for free, here’s a short summary of our goals:

*Gauging interest*
We wanted to see if players are interested in short and simple narrative games before we sail out to open seas with a more costly and ambitious project.

*Learning*
1) We wanted to create and release the game by ourselves, without the help of publishers, a marketing budget etc., and see what we could learn in the process.

2) We wish to test whether we can survive as a studio focused mostly on small passion projects (cut to a graveyard stone, cue sad music).

*Building a fan base*
It is also our way of gaining some initial exposure and building a fan base. We plan to release additional paid (but very cheap) DLCs with extra content that players can buy, if they decide they like our first game and would like to support our future projects.

If you'd like to know how it’s going so far, read on.

FAILURES

*Translations*
We’ve asked the community for feedback and received many requests for different language versions of the Dagon demo. We’ve decided to oblige the players, but it turned out to be harder and less rewarding than we anticipated. Firstly, as anybody who has ever read Lovecraft knows, localising his works is not easy and hence a bit on the expensive side. Secondly, adding 10 additional languages to the game didn’t really translate (bad pun intended) into a noticeable increase in the number of wishlists.

We consider it a partial/temporary failure at the moment, as we still hope that more people will appreciate the game being available in their native language once we release the full version (we’re even planning to add more languages before the launch).

*Release date*
We initially planned to release the game on 20th August (Lovecraft’s 131st birthday). Unfortunately, due to some hindrances in our private lives and commitments stemming from previous projects, we couldn’t devote as much time to Dagon as we wanted to. We didn’t like the idea of frantically patching an unfinished game after release, so we decided to move the launch to the second part of September.

SUCCESSES

*Skyrim Grandma likes Dagon*
Firstly, the legendary Skyrim Grandma (whom we're fans of), otherwise known as Shirley Curry, has played and liked the demo!

*General response*
Secondly, on a more serious note, the general response has been very positive and Dagon remains in the top 5 of the Upcoming Lovecraftian Games list on Steam. The players have been praising the Lovecraftian atmosphere, the voice-over and the in-game trivia.

*Wishlists*
Our first goal was to hit 5,000 wishlists by participating in Steam Next Fest with our demo, which we did. Currently, we’re at around 11,000 (we started promoting the game - no ads or other paid promotion, at least so far - on 1st June).

THAT'S ALL, FOLKS
So that's our journey so far!

Edit: Thank you for the amazing response!

If you’d like to see if Dagon is your cup of cosmic dread, you can wishlist it/play the demo on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1481400/Dagon_by_H_P_Lovecraft/

We don't have a definite release date yet, so it's best to follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/bit_golem

and Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/bitgolem

to stay up to date.

We’ll be happy to bring you some more stats once the game releases!