How Backpack Battles sold 650k copies in its first month

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

We’re back for the middle of the week, folks. And we’re super excited that our main story for today’s GameDiscoverCo newsletter is about Backpack Battles, a game we covered for our Plus members when it debuted last month.

Why so? Well, in our Plus back end for ‘top new Steam games in March 2024 by units’, Backpack Battles is #2 of the 1,100 new titles (!) we’re tracking, sandwiched between Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Horizon: Forbidden West. So let’s take a look at just how…

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How Backpack Battles sold 650k units in a month

Firstly, what exactly is Backpack Battles? As we said to our Plus readers: “The game has semi-similar conceptual design to Backpack Hero, a single-player, turn-based sizeable indie hit. The clever ‘hook’ on these games is fitting weapons and items into your backpack to fight [and upgrade] with.

But Backpack Battles changes the subgenre to autobattler, and adds ‘player vs. player’. And the other clever thing here is that PvP is asychronous. You are battling other players’ builds, but there’s no time pressure or worries about interacting directly with them.”

BTW, the game was developed by German indie dev couple PlayWithFurcifer, aka Doro and Mario, and published by Shenzhen, China-based company IndieArk. And starting out, let’s get some official Steam sales stats for the game, from the team:

As IndieArk told us: “The game was released on Steam Early Access on March 8th. As of April 8th - one month later - the total global sales units reached 640,000, with China accounting for 48%, followed by Japan with 11% and the United States with 10%.”

They also revealed the wishlists for the game directly before release. These are interesting because they show Japan as the most-wishlisted country (very rare!), followed by Germany, the U.S. and then China - a different order to sales:

So yep, these are some incredibly impressive overall numbers. But how did it happen?

A clever mash-up of killer game loop with asynchronous PvP

Firstly, the underlying gameplay loop & idea is so strong. We asked PlayWithFurcifer how much they were inspired by Backpack Hero vs. other games, and they said:

“Backpack Hero absolutely was one of our inspirations, it brought the whole inventory management thing back on the radar, which is amazing! Overall, I think our biggest inspiration from the start was Super Auto Pets (the world needs more asynchronous auto battlers!).

Then, during development we integrated different inspirations for the visuals (Potion Craft, Hearthstone), the inventory management (Backpack Hero, Diablo, Resident Evil), and the combining mechanic (DOTA).”

In today’s market, you get far when people can’t stop playing your game. And that’s exactly what Backpack Battles managed.

A continually updated demo - that still made people buy the full game

Backpack Battles has had a demo live since June 2023, and demo players maxed out at an almost unheard of - for micro-indies - 18,960 CCU (concurrent users) 5 months ago. We were surprised about both the update cadence and longevity for the game’s demo.

According to PlayWithFurcifer: “We made one content patch every week since we uploaded the demo. I think it was 38 patches in total. Typically, there were multiple hotfix patches in between. As you can imagine, this was extremely taxing for us as a 2-developer team. But it allowed us to progress on the game very fast, and keep the players engaged.”

The other thing we asked the Backpack Battles devs? Were they worried people would get their 'fill' of the game from just the demo, given how complex and heavily played it was? (Some players have thousands of hours just in the demo version!)

They replied: “The basic idea behind this approach was to build a community early. Getting players to see, try, and wishlist your game is not easy for indies. Very importantly, having active players extremely early in development also lets us find out what works and what doesn't….

And at the end of the day, players pay money for games because they want to. We often heard that players upgraded to the full version because they got enough fun and playtime out of the demo, and felt like they already got a gameplay experience worth the $13 we were asking for the game.”

Timely localization and Asian promotion massively helped

The next few points are direct from the game’s publisher IndieArk. First: “Localization of games is crucial in the Asian market! The dev had planned to add new content to the demo every Sunday. Accordingly, we began the localization work for the demo right from the start. This laid the foundation for the exceptional results the game achieved in Asia.

After Backpack Battles supported Japanese, it attracted many Japanese media and influencers. Members of the world's largest VTuber group "hololive" also played Backpack Battles during their live streams.” (The video above is from an English-language VTuber, but helps with context?)

Chinese New Year-themed promos further boosted local interest

IndieArk notes: “Before the Chinese New Year, we collected suggestions from players in the community for special New Year-themed items. The dev then created items like the Dancing Dragon based on that and added them to the game during the holiday.

We believed that game content incorporating elements of local culture would be well received by players, especially Chinese players. Therefore, during the New Year period (which coincided with the Feb. 2024 Steam Next Fest), we contacted many influencers.” And it helped, too.

Steam cross-promotion with other big, high-quality indie titles…

Here’s another major point: “Several months before the game's release, we started contacting devs of deckbuilders or autobattlers for cross-promotion opportunities with Backpack Battles. Ultimately, we successfully bundled with Slay the Spire and Brotato (once again, thanks to Mega Crit & Blobfish, they are so kind and supportive!)

With a loyal and huge player base in Asia especially China for these two amazing titles, both bundles sold wildly accounting for about 35% of the total sales of Backpack Battles. The later cross promotion with Balatro in accordance with the Deckbuilder Fest event has then successfully extended the launch heat thanks to LocalThunk & Playstack.”

GameDiscoverCo’s only meta-comment on this is that these bundles are set up as ‘complete the set’. So it’s more ‘owners of one buying the other at an extra discount’ than a bundle purchase, mainly. But: who cares? What a great opportunity to upsell!

And that’s not all…

The IndieArk team also listed a few other very pertinent things they did to improve the discoverability of Backpack Battles leading up to launch:

• Use an influencer-first strategy focused on gameplay: since the game’s “visuals are not necessarily its strong suit in marketing”, they noted: “Our main goal was to collaborate with influencers, asking them to play the demo, introduce and explain the game's mechanics.”

• Created some ultracute new key art for the Steam capsule: “New key art we made was well received by Asian players, especially for those in Japan. Asian players place great emphasis on whether a game's art style matches their taste.”

• Make sure most influencers are embargoed to the game’s release date:“Two months before the game's release, we began sending keys to influencers & content creators, and made several official collaborations with them. At the same time, we confirmed with streamers & YouTubers that the embargo time of the new content should be when the game released.”

When to release your game to influencers is a tricky one. Recently, Manor Lords did a ‘two weeks before release’ streamer embargo, for example. We reckon this will work out, but IndieArk did note - not specifically about Manor Lords: “While streamers can livestream or release videos early, players can’t purchase and play the game right away. This sometimes leads to a PR crisis… if they feel being treated unfairly.”

On the other hand, as IndieArk says, if you can “drive the player to purchase the game in the store immediately when they felt the ‘hype’”, that can work really well. According to them, when they did that: “just on one of China's major streaming & video sites Bilibili, there are over 2000 game-related videos in total, just 2 weeks within the release.”

So overall, some impressive results - and Backpack Battles still has a great ‘long tail’, with a 9,000 CCU daily peak on Steam today (and an all-time high of 36,500 CCU, just after launch.) Incredible numbers for a micro-indie release, right? Congrats all round.

The game discovery & platform news round-up…

That was a lot! Finishing up the free newsletters for this week, let’s take a close look at game platform and discovery news, of which there is, well, quite a lot:

• Steam has a new feature called Advanced Access, basically legitimizing these often AAA-created ‘deluxe’ versions of games where “pre-purchase versions of their game will include access to the game prior to its official release date”. You can see a version here for TopSpin 2K25 with upsell icons (above), and hours played in Advanced Access now count towards the Steam refund period.

• Continuing the ‘modern-day keiretsus don’t mention games’ trend, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s 2023 letter to shareholders says absolutely nothing about video games. (TV/movies do get called out, since the company has been “introducing ads into Prime Video shows and movies” - 200 million MAUs, apparently.)

• We appreciate UK dev Flaming Fowl’s honesty on how tricky it’s been to get dev deals, after it laid off people & put the demo of the game it was pitching on Steam for free: “Budget wise, we were originally pitching at around £5 million, but it just seemed like there was very little opportunity in that ballpark. People were either looking to sign stuff for a few hundred grand, or up to the £20-40 million range.”

• Even U.S. public radio types NPR are covering GaaS (games as a service) titles nowadays, interviewing Digital Extremes about Warframe. Notable stat: “In Warframe's case, only about 10% of [their] players pay anything at all.” Oh, and in a now-deleted Tweet, Del Walker said, as a UGC creator, that he had “now made almost $50k with 2 skin mods for Warframe.” (Guess they do have paid UGC.)

• Microlinks: why collector’s editions have become a backdoor for AAA publishers to charge for early access (see above, lol); a good discussion on when - or when not - to label your game Early Access; rumors say that Apple now expects to sell only around 400,000 to 450,000 Vision Pro units in 2024, compared to.. a “market consensus” of 700,000 to 800,000.

• A new Game Developer Collective survey leads with ‘70 percent of devs unsure of live-service games sustainability’, a spicy headline. But what it really appears to be saying is that devs are unsure if their particular live-service game will be a hit or not - with high competition cited as a worry for 62% of those respondents.

• The Guardian has an interview with Apple Arcade’s Alex Rofman, partly to rebut that MobileGamer.biz article on AA dev discontent. His response: your payout goes up with engagement, but “not every game in a catalogue of more than 200 titles is going to grow its player base month over month.” (True, but meh.) What’s left unsaid: Apple is up-front commissioning exponentially less games than ‘the early years’.

• Event news: there’s some more info on June’s IGN Live in LA, which “will be at the Magic Box at The Reef… between June 7th and 9th”, including companies like Amazon, Atari, Netflix and Square Enix; the UK’s EGX consumer games event is trying to bulk up by co-locating with sister event MCM Comic-Con this October.

• Piper Sandler’s latest U.S. ‘Taking Stock With Teens’ survey does cover games - in the form of Roblox - in the overview: “Roblox active usage improved to ~34% in spring ’24 from ~31% in fall ’23. ~22% of teens have never played Roblox, down from ~24% in fall ’23.” (Impressive. This is 6,020 teens averaging 16.1 years old, btw.)

• Other media links: what we learned about the book industry from Penguin vs. U.S. DOJ (it’s topheavy!); if the music industry is undermonetizing superfans, are games too?; the drivers of fragmentation of attention across all media; the key factors for high TAM (Total Addressable Market) for a hit YouTube video.

Finally, Will McGugan asked on Twitter, “Developers over 40. What advice would you give to developers just starting their career?”, and game designer & illustrator Folmer Kelly has an all-timer reply, which we feel compelled to print in full:

He does add: “just helping out young hopefuls by sharing my wisdom and experience! this is what i did in 2012 and it worked for me, just do the same and you’ll be fine.” We’re looking for our time machine as we speak. Toodles…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]