Reflecting on Wandersong
My musical adventure game about a bard facing the apocalypse with song came out 2 years ago today. As a final-final secret in the game we made it possible for the player to visit the creators (myself, Gordon McGladdery who did the music and Em Halberstadt who did all the sound design); we all thanked them for playing and also shared what we were thinking about as we finished the project, not yet knowing what would happen when it came out. I thought it would be fun to come back and share more about how it went and what’s happened since Wandersong’s release.
In 2015, maybe a month or two before making the first prototype of Wandersong, I saw Steven Universe for the first time. It’s a really amazing show in my opinion — well worth a deep and thoughtful watch — but I personally bonded to it right in the 30-second intro song.
A bunch of super-powered crystal gem goddesses who fight to save the world, and a goofy kid who doesn’t fit in but tries his best anyway. Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl………. and Steven! I’ve always felt like “and Steven.” I’ve always seen myself as more of a goofy sidekick. And I never felt that more than when I moved to Vancouver, where all my closest friends and roommates were working on big-name indie game projects like Celeste, Ikenfell, Night in the Woods………… and Wandersong!
For anyone who’s played Wandersong, this should come as little surprise, because the game is totally about this feeling. And trying to explain this game to platform holders and market it to gamers felt like a uphill battle; in an industry of games about combat and murder and tactics I was trying to explain why it was actually really fun to just sing and listen. In a lot of ways Wandersong is, oddly, a game about how it felt to be making Wandersong.
But though I felt my game was so inconsequential compared to what my friends were up to, I also saw myself as among them in quiet wait. Like Steven, who is secretly the most powerful crystal gem of all, it’s just his powers are different and take longer to develop.
And So Wandersong Came Out
To be honest, although I made all efforts to remain positive on social media, things were scary at the start. Before a game comes out, there are some stats you can use to guess how it will sell — wishlist numbers, how similar games have performed, etc. But Wandersong turned out to be quite anomalous… our initial sales were way, way less than we were expecting/hoping for, which was crushing. I was getting close to running out of money, after our porting ended up taking way longer than anticipated (we were using GameMaker’s then-unreleased Switch beta, with all the bugs that entailed, while also wrangling a title that was very technically ambitious). My worries were compounded by the fact that most games expect to make most of their revenue in those crucial first weeks. Game conversation centers on games that are new or famous, so once you’re neither, you can assume it’s pretty much over for you.
Why didn’t Wandersong perform as well as we expected initially? We can only guess. Wandersong isn’t like any other game, definitely like none we could find that came before it (our best comparisons would be stuff like Night in the Woods, an anomalously famous title, and then older titles like Katamari or Aquaria…) I think that made it basically impossible to predict how it would do. It also means for people shopping for games, it was basically impossible to tell if they’d like it or not, because they lacked comparison points. On top of that, we were launching later into the year, at a point when a lot of news had its eyes on the big holiday release titles coming up (I remember Red Dead Redemption 2 had wall-to-wall coverage on many sites we had hoped to get reviews from, even though it was a month from release). I spent a lot of time in those first months wringing my hands trying to read the tea leaves and figure out where we went wrong.
The fact that so many of my friends were so successful weighed on me, too. I feared I was about to lose them all. I feared that everyone kept me around under the pretense that I was like them: talented and imminently famous and successful, but now the cat was out of the bag and it was plain for all to see that Wandersong wasn’t even 5% of what those games were. I didn’t have any more crystal gem powers to reveal; this was the final and ultimate measure of me against them, and I fell pitifully short.
Of course that was wrong, so very wrong, but you think crazy stuff when you release a game. Nobody stopped being my friend. When I felt like garbage, my friends on Celeste were the first people I reached out to and the first people who were there for me to make sure I was okay, and I’ll be forever grateful to Noel and Maddy for that. What I have to acknowledge here too is that there’s always a depression associated with releasing something; whether a game is a runaway success or a runaway failure, creators will always find a reason to feel terrible when their project comes out. It just feels bad. And Wandersong was far from a runaway failure.
I had expected middling reviews because of our unusual game mechanics, but a lot more people connected with the story than I expected and our reviews were very positive. We submitted to a lot of awards and did pretty well — in the 2019 IGF awards we were nominated for excellence in narrative, an honor that meant a huge amount to me. We also were honorably mentioned in the art, audio and grand prize categories (!), honorably mentioned in the even larger Game Awards, shortlisted for a BAFTA, and according to a judge we came pretty close to being nominated for a DICE award too. But while we celebrated those successes, I was sweating over the fact that we had given so many 100s of our keys to judges for those events, they actually outnumbered our sales for a while.
At the end of the year I saw a tweet from an editor at Kotaku, arguably the largest gaming news site online at the time, announcing the sites’ best games of 2018. Wandersong didn’t make the cut, but in a follow-up tweet they mentioned that Wandersong was actually probably their personal Game of the Year, they just hadn’t played it before discussing the list. You can’t blame anyone for that, but that definitely made me feel like I’d messed up. It really highlights just how important messaging and timing and luck are, even more than the quality of your game. Because even if a Kotaku editor decides it’s their GOTY, it makes no difference if they’ve already published the article and the year is already over.
“Fake Game” Controversy
I kept thinking things would turn around if we had just one lucky break. People obviously loved the game deeply, they just needed to find out about it somehow. But after another failed attempt to get a big-name streamer to play it, or something like that, I remember having a difficult conversation with my best friend about whether it was really worth it to keep hoping for anything big to happen for Wandersong. Hoping was painful. Maybe it was time I just let go. I’d already started burying into a new project, which I announced on January 1st almost entirely on a whim, maybe partially to give myself permission to move on to something else.
But I did keep writing little promotions and things for Wandersong. In January 2019 I noticed an odd tag on our game that said it was still “under review,” that Steam wasn’t sure if it was a real game or not. I sent them a bug report and was told it was working as intended, and that the tag would pass at some point. But I couldn’t figure out why we still had it — lots of newer and less-popular games didn’t have the tag anymore, after all. The best guess I could make was that it was due to our abnormally positive reviews, which might have seemed suspect for a game with relatively few sales. So I spun it into joke tweets.
There was an alignment of the stars here I simply did not foresee. The Epic Games Store had just been announced a couple weeks prior, and everyone was in furious conversation about how Steam had become a toxic marketplace for small indie games etc. etc. And tons of writers and journalists who had discovered and loved Wandersong since its release suddenly had an actual press-worthy reason to bring it up again.
Notably this issue had no tangible impact on our game, I really did just think it was funny. But it gave us a little moment in the news again, which we needed. For many people, there was something especially tragic about a friendly game like Wandersong having such a clear “injustice” done to them. Like a cute and harmless sidekick who needed protection from the big bad corporation. We were on the front page of every gaming news site for a day, and almost instantly I got an email from Valve saying they were very sorry and it was actually a bug and it was fixed now.
Bundles and Subscriptions
A few new people discovered Wandersong after that. Predictably there were folks who came to hate-review the game after it got press for its good reviews, but when it came down to it, it seems like many of them couldn’t bring themselves to give it a thumbs down. Our review count went slightly up and remained overwhelmingly positive.
We were in a Humble Monthly bundle, so hundreds of thousands of people essentially got the game for free at one point. People who get a game for free tend to value it less, so they tend to give it less time and review it more critically; one of the expected risks of putting it in a bundle like that is that your reviews will trend downward. But against conventional wisdom, even though the vast majority of Wandersong’s Steam owners now had it for free, our reviews remained overwhelmingly positive. I think they even went up a little bit.
Wandersong came out on PS4 in January 2019, and then later to XBox One in September 2019, launching on their “Game Pass” subscription, so hundreds of thousands more people got it essentially for free. This may have been the single biggest boost to our audience. I recently discovered this video where an XBox gamer describes finding the game while looking for something to earn quick achievements in, and then unexpectedly falling in love with it. And if our DMs are anything to go by this person speaks for many:
A common recurring theme in our Steam reviews is, “I really didn’t expect much from this game, but boy was I wrong.” “I really didn’t expect much” is the part that I think best explains why this game never really took off the way others have, and also best explains how I feel about myself and my work, and also explains how that feeling projects through every fiber of this game’s art and story and marketing. But that’s also fundamental to the second part: “boy was I wrong.” The surprise of a game that exceed your expectations, the surprise of a game that honestly looks like silly stupid crap and yet by the end goes places you couldn’t have expected. Ironically, if Wandersong was the kind of game that projected the confidence that made people want to actually buy it, it probably wouldn’t be nearly so beloved.
Although I mentioned that each of those boosts gave a lot of people the game for free, each one of them also came with a nice paycheck. And even outside those giveaways, our sales went on to be pretty amazing. Not because they shot up, but because they never actually slowed down from the day the game came out.
What seemed like a scary and quiet launch turned out to be the beginning of a slower, different kind of success altogether. Never anywhere near the top of the charts, but, always there, dependable, the goofy sidekick of videogame sales. I guess I’d chalk it up to good word of mouth.
What Really Matters
…to me, anyway, wasn’t really sales. As I wrote in my original message-to-the-player, buried deep in Wandersong, all I really wanted was to find one person who deeply cared about the game. And we definitely, definitely found that.
I’ve never come out and said it, but, it’s just me who runs the Wandersong twitter account. To this day, I read every single tweet that contains the word “wandersong,” and remarkably, on a daily basis I find brand new fan art, writing, videos, music, memes and memories being shared. I used to joke sometimes that going by the proportion of sold copies to fan art, it seems like every single person who purchased a copy of the game also drew a fan art and posted it to twitter. And it’s been like that since the day the game came out.
I put a lot of myself into Wandersong. It’s hard to put into words just how meaningful it’s been to have so many people experience it and then give back in the way they have. To everyone who said the game helped them find new strength, or get through a hard day or week or month or year, or helped them find new friends, or learn more about themselves… I don’t know how to say thank you enough times or in the right way to really communicate how grateful I am for the incredible stories that have been shared with me. I talked about our wins and losses, but when I think about how this game actually resonated with people, and how many people have come together through it, and how many times a fans’ words have made me cry, I feel overwhelmingly lucky. Seeing numbers go up is nice, but I think it matters much more that we made something that spoke to people, that they will hopefully remember and cherish for a long time.
I still really like Wandersong, too. It’s not perfect, and it’s definitely not for everyone, but I’m proud of what we were able to do with it. I still enjoy watching streamers play through the pivotal scenes for the first time. I still think that intermission chapter was a really cool idea. Despite all the stress and worry this game’s release caused me, it still makes me laugh, and it still feels close to my heart. It’s a really weird and special game, not like any other that came before, and I’ll probably never be able to make anything quite like it again.
And honestly, even among our fans’ regular cries of “why don’t more people know about Wandersong??,” I think the perpetual bubble of not-quite-famous we’ve lived in has been the greatest luck of all. Our fandom remained small and kind, my needs are taken care of, I can continue making games the way I want to make them, and I’m also free of the scrutiny and celebrity that more famous creators have to deal with. It suits me better, anyways. I‘m not doing this to be a millionaire, and definitely not to be famous. I just wanted friends, and after sharing something like Wandersong with the world I feel like I have many.
After the end of Wandersong, even though the world is saved, nobody actually knows the bard had anything to do with it, and the bard lives on in relative obscurity. Because unlike Steven, the bard — and I — aren’t secretly the strongest hero, and we never actually do anything that great on our own. The bard’s success is that despite being small and powerless, they communicate, bringing people together to solve bigger problems than themselves. Fighting to making the world a better place in their own small and invisible way. That’s the kind of strength that I’ve come to admire. I’d like to be like that too.
Thanks for playing Wandersong, and thanks for reading. I’m doing OK and I hope you are too. We’ll see how things go when I’m finished making Chicory next.
