Deep Dive: How we got one million players to give a dam about Timberborn
Mechanistry comms manager Michal Amielanczyk reveals the marketing strategy that helped Timberborn's popularity soar with only two years in early access.
Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.
Earlier installments cover topics such as creating a game manual that accommodates multiple learning styles with director of The Banished Vault Nic Tringali, how Mimimi games crafted the save scum-friendly save system in Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, and the technical work and creative nuances behind Slime Rancher 2's new weather system and the experiential impact that developers Monomi Park designed for players.
In this edition, Mechanistry comms manager Michal Amielanczyk reveals the marketing strategy that helped Timberborn's popularity soar with only two years in early access.
My name is Michal Amielanczyk, and I’m the comms manager at Mechanistry, the studio behind the beaver city builder Timberborn. Last year, I joined our game’s co-director, Kamil Dawidow, to tell you how we designed Timberborn’s water physics system. Today, I’m here to discuss the marketing strategy that helped us reach one million sales within two years and hit the highest post-launch player peak with our most recent content patch.
And here’s the game’s trailer so that you have a better understanding of how beavers and city-building mix in the game.
Getting the world to hear about Timberborn for the first time
We went public with the game (and with the studio, since it’s Mechanistry’s first project) in October 2019 by launching the Steam page, social media channels, and opening the game’s Discord server to the public. Timberborn went into open alpha, and armed with a GIF and several bullet points, we pitched it to several content creators. Not long after, the indie devs’ messiah Splattercat picked the game up, marking the beginning of our marketing’s core effort—reaching the influencers.
It all began in a rather humble fashion as seen in this 2019 shot from Timberborn’s alpha version.
In the first year, the game went through a full redesign, received new visuals, and the open alpha was replaced with a closed beta. It was invitation-only, and the main way to grab a key was through contests held on our Discord, or through the newsletter. To help grow the Discord community, we also ran what we called “beaver brainstorms” —discussions focused on a single topic such as “What should be the next beaver faction?” As devs, we’ve always been active on Discord, and this continues to this day, with our server approaching 40.000 members.
We also started testing the waters with ads, beginning with Facebook. Sadly, while they worked well back then, we no longer consider them to be very cost-effective, with their main remaining advantage being the ability to precisely target the audience.
Okay, the game doesn’t support RTX but visual updates in Timberborn’s closed beta (2020) almost felt like it. Images via Mechanistry.
That first year proved to us that listening to the players’ feedback—such as making the vertical architecture much more important than originally planned—was a good idea. We also saw that content creators liked the game’s premise even in the early stage, and there was potential in the ads. What we were missing, however, was the real press coverage or the viral social posts all indie devs dream of. We ended the first year with about 17,000 wishlists.
Building the wishlist base in the final pre-launch period
In October 2020, we went for a game and branding update. The first iteration of the water physics system was added as the final missing unique selling point. The game also finally received its first real trailer, and that lovely key art where everyone saw a beaver-y Donald Trump (not our intention).
The OG Timberborn key art (2020). Images via Mechanistry.
With the press kit rounded up, we reached out to the press and pitched Timberborn as if it was the first time we contacted them ; it looked and played so much differently, after all. We also started a wider organic influencer reach out. Both initiatives resulted in some coverage, and we also finally landed viral-ish posts on Reddit (800+ upvotes on /indiegames, 500+ on /indiegaming). We even reached the front page of a Polish Reddit-lookalike Wykop.
To respond to the amplified interest, we also started a more organized distribution of Steam keys for the beta, using Keymailer and Woovit. We also tried the next ad channels, Reddit and Twitter, but the results were middling at best compared to then-successful Facebook ads.
The demo’s success
The above led up to Timberborn