Here is what I love about Steam and why I write so much about this platform – you can be a completely unknown dev (a twitter following of just over 3000), working on your first game, but if you target a long forgotten video game niche, you can quietly make $600,000 in a week. 

The developers of 90s-style hockey game meets roguelike, Tape To Tape, found a special niche and had an amazing launch last week. Here is their story.

The funny thing is their launch violated many of the most common “no no’s” that most people swear by:

Today I want to talk about how Tape To Tape did this and what this means about Steam. 

TL;DR how did Tape To Tape (TTT) do this?

  • Totally nailed the genre, the controls, and a lot of depth.
  • A long coming soon campaign that involved Kickstarter, participating in events, and a bit of TikTok.
  • Incredible support from streamers
  • Refining the demo based on early player feedback and playtime data.
  • Strategic use of ads.

Stats on Tape To Tape (as of 5/14)

  • Development team: Excellent Rectangle
  • Publisher: Null Games
  • Release date: May 3rd, 2023
  • Unit sales after 8 days: 34,020
  • Returns: 8%
  • Gross Revenue (pre Steam cut): $635,674
  • Followers at Launch: 3670 
  • Wishlist to Follower ratio: 14:1
  • Wishlists gained after Launch: 58,000 (total is now 111,000)
  • Sales to review ratio: 41
  • Coming Soon page: 1 year and 222 days
  • Release type: Early Access
  • Development time: 2.5 years.
  • Previous games: NONE

Benchmarks:

Team:

  • 1 Artist (Hugo Julien)
  • 1 Programmer (Jean-Nicolas Fortin)
  • 1 Audio / Music guy (Mathieu Fortin)
  • Country: Canada (this is important).

What is Tape To Tape

Tape To Tape is a roguelike Hockey game. It is basically Slay the Spire Meets NHL 94

Look at this map screen which confidently shows UI. This is how the UI shows depth and genre. It clearly communicates Slay The Spire vibes.

Here is NHL 94. The developer describes this as “North to South, fast-paced gameplay.” What he means by that is it is top down, and you play by going up and down the ice. Other hockey games played east to west or using a 3D camera. Tape to Tape perfectly captures this specific vibe of hockey game.

Why NHL 94?

I asked Jean-Nicolas Fortin why NHL 94 was specifically the design target:

NHL 94 is really a timeless classic for both hockey and sports video game fans. Even the story on how it was made is legendary (The making of NHL ‘94 an oral history). The game was fast-paced with simple gameplay, anyone could play it. It introduced one-timers (shooting the puck when receiving a pass) for the first time and had such a great attention to details. There were dozens of hockey songs, you could break the glass with a hard shot, etc… Most people will agree NHL 93 was less complex gameplay wise and NHL 95-6 had way more options outside the rink (season mode, records, create a player etc…) but NHL 94 struck the perfect gameplay balance which is so hard to achieve in a sports game. 

Jean-Nicolas Fortin

What about this game design made this game take off?

The game itself determines your success more than any other marketing tactic I can write about. It’s all about the game. So why did this game take off?

Sports games made by indies are tough because of a number of factors:

  • There is no way small developers are getting a license to the big sports franchises to use official teams and players – fans want to play as their favorite team with their favorite players.
  • I don’t have stats on this but anecdotally, sports fans don’t play a lot of other games. They just pick the AAA produced sports game and pretty much play only that until the next one releases 1 year later.

Even though there have been a number of well produced indie sports games, they haven’t risen to the same heights as TTT. For instance look at the following indie sports games:

So why did TTT do so well when the other indie sports games failed? I think there are 3 main factors

  1. Video game hockey is very very popular in Canada, and just popular enough in the US.
  2. NHL 94 is a perfect type of hockey game. Easy to pick up and play, fun, but still deep. The fact that NHL 94 is almost 30 years old has left a hole in the market. There aren’t enough games that fit this  specific overlap.
  3. TTT is DEEP. The rogue-like meta game adds deep systems that encourage long play sessions. There haven’t been any deep hockey games. Although Super Blood Hockey is a very well designed game and a very clever concept, I don’t think it tickled the hard core hockey fans. I went back and watched Northern Lion playing Super Blood Hockey (link) and he uses terms like “it is feature barren,” “It isn’t a robust game really,” “for what you pay, it is worth it” 

So in short, NHL 94 is a fan favorite game but nobody is making it anymore, Canadians love hockey, people love Roguelikes, and Steam players love DEEP DEEP gameplay. Seriously, your game probably isn’t deep and complex enough for Steam. Steam players don’t like casual games, they want complex games. Add depth!

In my opinion, indie sports games are often too arcade and most people will consider them shallow before even trying them. It might be different for home consoles, but on Steam there seems to be a craving for a deeper sports experience.

Sports games have so many moving parts. Compared to some games where adjusting the Hit points of an enemy can make the game easier or harder, sports games are all about the pacing and the AI (we do change the attributes of the players but it’s once the core gameplay is really satisfying) which takes a lot of time and adjustments. 

Jean-Nicolas Fortin

The marketing campaign

May / June 2021 Early Social Media and validation

In Spring 2021, we began posting on different social medias (Twitter, TikTok, Reddit) and already began raising some (reasonable) interest. People were really curious about the art style and the high-level concept, mixing Hockey and Roguelite. TikTok helped a lot in the beginning. It helped us get a lot of playtesters to help with development.

Jean-Nicolas Fortin

Here is one of their better performing Tiks which got nearly 100K views.

@tapetotapegame

Small little goal compilation 🏒 #hockey #game #gamedev #gaming

♬ Spin Back X Collide Mashup – Kuya Magik

If you watch, the content they post focuses on gameplay and features. They aren’t too cute, they aren’t trying to create out of context jokes. Gameplay takes center stage. 

August 2021 Steam Coming Soon page launch

Steam page is live. Very little traction at this time. Wishlist rate is low.

February 2022 Games From Quebec

This festival is HUGE. The developers in and around the Montreal area are very organized and work with Valve every year to put together a festival for games from Studios in that region.

To get in, you have to be from Quebec, but there is an application and you submit your games. Our community tracks all upcoming festivals, and I post them in the Newsletter and on the Discord.

If you live in a region that has several games that have made over a million dollars it might be worth organizing them together and pitching the Steam business team. Valve wants to see at least a couple tentpole games that can earn enough money and interest to make this kind of featuring worth it for them.

May 2022 Kickstarter

The Kickstarter was a success and they earned $46,711 CAD, which was twice their initial goal was ($20,000 CAD)

I feel like kickstarter isn’t talked enough for bringing wishlists and visibility. It seems to work so well.

Jean-Nicolas Fortin

The Kickstarter also earned them 7,373 wishlists. 

They also launched an early build demo of the game. It helped with the campaign but the game wasn’t ready for full primetime yet:

We had a lot of performance issues with the build and we massively underestimated the number of players that would play with a keyboard while our build lacked the support.

Jean-Nicolas Fortin

As part of the campaign they also had successful reddit posts

We were really surprised at how many non-hockey gamers were legitimately interested in the concept for the first time! (which was our initial goal but were really unsure)

Jean-Nicolas Fortin

February 2023 Steam Next Fest

Steam Next Fest. They deployed the new version of the Demo now with roguelike elements implemented. 

Steam Next Fest was a huge success for them yielding over 27,000 wishlists.

This is perfect and why I recommend always doing the last Next Fest before your launch. Your demo has been thoroughly tested, you have the most wishlists leading into it, and your marketing message is well vetted. 

A big factor was this great Northern Lion Let’s Play:

The team was also running ads at this time to help increase wishlist velocity and gett better placement on the Steam page.

The team also used Steam Next Fest as an excuse to pay one high-profile streamer to play TTT. But it didn’t go well. 

He (the streamer) really didn’t seem to enjoy the game that much. We felt like it was such a waste of money. The streamer didn’t know hockey much and wasn’t properly introduced to the concept of the game before playing. We decided to spend our marketing money on classic ads for the actual EA release.

Jean-Nicolas Fortin

April 2023 Launch

In the 2 weeks before launch the TTT team started paid ads. 

“We didn’t get a great return on those ads. The momentum from having a great Next Fest and good social media postings really did most of the heavy lifting. “

If you look at the TTT concurrent player counts (CCUs), you can see that it rose over time. Note that the absolute peak CCU was 1668 and that occurred 4 days after the launch of the game. 

How can a game have more sales after the launch? My hunch is Northern Lion. The guy has played the game 6 times since the launch. Northern Lion is Canadian so he loves hockey AND the game is deep so he has reasons to go back and play it over and over again. You can get just about any streamer to play a game once but the true path to success is to make a game so good a streamer will want to play it multiple times. That is the true magic. I think this is the main reason the game has done so well despite launching with *only* 50K wishlists. I have seen other games that launched with similar wishlists but didn’t reach the same number of units sold. This streamer attention is the reason why.

Steam Popup

Another big reason for the increase in CCUs after launch was Tape To Tape got the Steam Popup. This is the giant modal advertising new and updated Steam games. This is an invite only chance to have your game shown to millions of shoppers. It is huge. 

Here is how it works and how to get one. First if you are nearing launch with tens of thousands of wishlists, you are on Valves radar. However, if you are a new studio or a new game (like Excellent Rectangle) Valve wants to make sure first that these wishlists are actually going to convert. They know that games can gather “low quality” wishlists, games can be buggy, they can look good in screenshots and video but are not actually fun when played. So Valve waits and watches your numbers. If your conversions are good (you make a bunch of money) and your reviews are good, Valve puts your game in the popup. Valve contacted the Tape To Tape team about finalizing the popup 4 hours after their game went live. That is all the data Valve needs to make sure the game will be a hit.

Steam is curated, but only after you prove you can actually produce.

Demo design

The tricky part of demo design is figuring out where to cut the demo so that you give enough to encourage players a taste of the actual game without giving away so much they are satisfied and don’t buy the full thing. 

Here are some tips the team provided on designing the TTT demo:

  • They scaled back the standard difficulty level, recognizing that an overly challenging demo could deter potential players due to frustration.
  • The configured the hard difficulty setting to unlock upon demo completion to incentivize those seeking a greater challenge.
  • The demo presented one act, akin to the format used in games like Slay the Spire, out of a total of three. This structure was sufficient to provide a sense of progression and offer a glimpse into the game’s full potential. 
  • They incorporated approximately 20% of power-ups that would be available at launch into the demo. They wanted to offer enough variability to keep multiple playthroughs engaging, yet not overwhelming enough to make the gameplay feel repetitive.
  • They finished the demo on a teaser by showing the second map.
  • They kept refining the demo. The early Kickstarter demo was simple and didn’t have any rogue-like elements. The lack of depth at this point was reflected in their relatively low median playtime: 16 minutes. 
  • The developers also listened to complaints that there was not keyboard and mouse support and added that.

The demo play times:

  • Average time played 1 hour 26 minutes
  • Median time played 33 minutes

Other smart things

They didn’t quit their job until they found success:

Mathieu and I kept our day job but Hugo started working full time on TTT in October 2020. The plan was to keep our development cost as low as possible to minimize the risk for our investor.

Jean-Nicolas Fortin

Indie Sunday

They posted to Indie Sunday and got 300 wishlists. If you haven’t been doing this, it is a great way to get early wishlists when you aren’t getting much traffic.

Here is their post

Finding a genre hole

Living in Canada, hockey is definitely part of our daily life here. We understood from the get-go that the market for a PC hockey game was wide-open. There are some hockey games but they do not answer the craving for a deeper hockey experience. An all-time favorite is NHL 94 with its North to South, fast-paced gameplay. We all grew up playing it day and night and there is no spiritual successor of any kind. Even though it frequently finds its way into these top 20 sports games of all-time rankings haha.  We wanted to make a hockey game that would please a wider crowd without being super ‘arcady’. We decided to drop from the start some of the staples of simulation hockey games (pokechecks, offside, etc…) but we worked a lot on realistic goaltenders and AI.

Jean-Nicolas Fortin

Final thoughts

So is hockey and sports games a new hot genre? Maybe. I think the TTT found one of those underserved niches. Tape To Tape is kind of like the Stardew Valley of Sports. Basically, there was a very specific pocket of support for a game that was super potent (NHL ’94) but not being developed any more.

If this post has you thinking that sports games might be the next big opportunity, consider focusing on specific games that had this cult like following and really try to recreate their game feel. Perhaps NBA Jam or NFL Blitz. But heed the warning of Jean-Nicolas: indie developers tend to make these games too arcade-like. The game design from 30 years ago is typically too simple. It was a brilliant design choice by the TTT team to add the rogue-like trappings on top of the game because that gives it the additional depth that Steam fans expect.

There were early indications that their design choices were on the right track. They were getting early interest from TikTok but also if you look at the benchmarks above, they were consistently meeting gold-level numbers. At first their demo was not immediately attractive though: early players of the Kickstarter build wanted to see the roguelike elements and keyboard/mouse support. Once the team added them in a later versions, their median playtime was much higher. Show your work, get early feedback, and adjust.