We completely understand that there is a great deal of pressure on review mags and sites – the economy has been flushed down the toilet, affecting businesses at all levels, ad spends are down, people aren’t buying print magazines anymore, etc etc. The word of mouth generated from this got us off the ground and set us on our way. This started a snowball effect with more and more sites and mags requesting review copies. Without you, there would be no Introversion – Uplink was a success for a number of factors, but a very large factor came down to a handful of journalists who found the game, loved it, then pushed it on their journalist friends. We can’t stress how important it is to us that you review our games in a timely manner. Reading this blog implies you are either an Introversion fan, a general gamer who reads here occasionally, or a journalist. We need your help, and depending on who you are, you can help in different ways. It’s time for us to launch the SAVE MULTIWINIA campaign. So how do we correct this problem? That’s where you come in. This may prove to have been a serious mistake, and the lack of web reviews three weeks after launch may actually be a consequence of the lack of print reviews in the first place.
#Multiwinia review code
We made a decision very late in the process to delay sending review code out to the print magazines for a whole month, and that will give us the first print reviews at the end of October.
#Multiwinia review download
We just can’t seem to capture peoples attention long enough for them to download and try the demo.Īt this point, a concession : It’s our fault the print mags are late with their reviews. Again it underlines what we are seeing – play it and love it, but nobody is playing it. Some bad news : only 16 people have voted, the lowest number of all our games. Some good news : Multiwinia’s metacritic user rating is riding sky high at 9.5 / 10, the highest of all our games. If this is true and is widespread (as we are starting to believe), it has grave repercussions for all indie developers who rely on press reviews as their primary form of publicity.Īnd the most frustrating thing about all of this, is that we know Multiwinia is awesome fun to play, and we know if we get people to try the demo they will love it, and will strongly consider buying. We’ve heard disturbing rumours from more than one source that major games websites are now cutting back on the number of games they review – and it’s games like Multiwinia that are getting dropped because there will always be hundreds of bigger games.
One british games magazine has declined to review Multiwinia at all – ever. Of the reviews we have arranged with websites and magazines, less than 20% of them have been published at this time. By comparison, Defcon had nearly thirty metacritic reviews within a week of launch. It’s been three weeks since we launched Multiwinia, and today Metacritic shows four reviews (the minimum required for a metacritic average) for the first time since game launch. The _only_ way for most gamers to hear about Introversion games and to understand the premise of our games is to read reviews of them, look at the pictures, read the comments, and then try the demo if they are interested. Darwinia and Defcon were reviewed far and wide, exposing hundreds of thousands of gamers to our games in a far more effective manner than any adverts we can ever afford.
In this regard, Introversion has always relied on one primary form of publicity – reviews. There are a number of theories as to why this might be, but we think we already know the answer – very few people have heard about it, or have seen enough reason to try it. Nobody is playing the demo of Multiwinia. Unfortunately, a high percentage of zero is still zero. The kinds of conversion rates we are seeing with Multiwinia are in fact excellent by any standards, and we should be very happy about this. By comparison, Darwinia had a very low conversion rate, at least initially, because we royally messed up the launch demo. We can infer from his high conversion rate that people enjoy our game immediately, and that makes us very happy. This is excellent news, and generally lines up with our belief that Multiwinia is the most accessible of all our collection, the most immediately satisfying, and the most visceral and intense of our games. What this means is that every time somebody plays the demo version, there is a percentage chance that they will go on to buy the game, and that percentage is higher than any of our other games. Multiwinia has the highest conversion rate we’ve ever seen.