Promotion period: The games have coming-soon-pages for YEARS before they are finally released so we know a game’s success isn’t because of some freak “lucky-break” such as they announced or launched at the right time.(In a separate future blog post I will be taking a look at how they do it). ![]() Promotion and marketing tactics: All games are run by the same company with the same marketing team so that variable is controlled.Art Style: mostly the same across all games, so that variable is controlled.Think about it, PlayWay games are an almost perfect lab-grown experiment that will allow us to examine how well certain genres and themes do: It is clean looking, there are nice reflective textures on the equipment, it is realistic, gets the job done, doesn’t get in the way or call attention to itself. Or here is another PlayWay game Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together. This screenshot is from Used Car Simulator (one of PlayWay’s fastest growing titles). If you need to understand PlayWay games, look at this: It is basically a mannequin ready to perform a financial transaction with you with the least dialogue possible. This is the most typical PlayWay screenshot I could find. They are servisible games with basic, functional art and don’t draw attention to themselves. These games don’t look like a concept artist or an environment artist had full creative control. The environments are basic and don’t really stand out. Similarly the UI is minimalistic and usually looks like they use Asset Store icons. People are realistically proportioned, they are basically “Sims-esque” mannequins. It is just realistic without anything flashy. Most of PlayWay’s games have a similar art style, which basically, is no art style. ![]() I wondered… if PlayWay is spamming out a bunch of games to see which genres and themes work, what ACTUALLY is working? A good scientific experiment For the purposes of this blog I am focusing only on the games published by the PlayWay proper. Side note: PlayWay actually has more subsidiaries also using this technique. There have been accusations of plagiarism, spamming store pages, and Simon Carless did a great Job here outlining the overarching problem with them. Now other aspects of PlayWay’s business practices are less-than-ideal. Stef Rappeneau created this great chart showing that the publisher with the most wishlists is not cool guys like Devolver or edgy Raw Fury, nope it is boring, old, slightly cringe, PlayWay! They have 29 games in the top 1000 wishlisted games list.Īnd the games that do go viral and get developed do incredibly well.Ĭar Mechanic Simulator 2021 has over 21,000 reviews. Yes they are spamming Steam pages but they are creating ideas that can go viral. They have no pretension, they don’t claim to have secret knowledge, they just put themselves out there and see what connects. The one thing I really respect about this approach is they are honest about the fact that they don’t know what makes a hit game. Then they only spend resources developing the ones that get enough of a response. Polish publisher and developer PlayWay wisely realized that nobody actually knows which game is going to be a best seller or why, so, their business model is centered on quickly creating a bunch of Steam pages for half-baked game concepts.
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