Crafting a Kingdom: The Strategic Growth of Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall

How an indie team of 8 developers strategically crafted a hit with nearly 150,000 wishlists.

Aug 16, 2024

In the over crowded world of indie games, success stories often seem like lightning in a bottle - rare and almost mythical. Last week, we looked at Tiny Glade a game by 2 devs that garnered over 1 Million wishlists. This week I wanted to pump the breaks a bit and look at Yes, Your Grace Snowfall an indie game with a more modest definition of success. This is not a story of overnight success, but of a dedicated team building a realistic path to greatness.

With nearly 150,000 wishlists already secured, this sequel to the beloved Yes, Your Grace is proving that you don’t need a massive studio or budget to create a hit. Dive in as we explore how this small team of 8 people is crafting a realistic, achievable blueprint for indie success.

All wishlist, follower, and sales data in this article comes from Gamalytic.com

Yes, Your Grace’s Humble Beginnings

In an ideal world I’d have a full breakdown of their first game Yes, Your Grace before making this blog, but I only have so much time and I prefer to focus on games released in the last few years or close to release. So instead of a full blog here’s a few quick facts:

Yes, Your Grace was developed by only 4 people and was partially funded by a successful Kickstarter
Published by No More Robots
According to the devs, they had around 50,000 wishlists at launch (Spoiler Alert: they got that same number only 4 weeks after announcing their sequel!)

Social Media

The reality is that only a very small percentage of indie games take off through social media. It’s best viewed as one tool of many in your indie marketing arsenal. Don’t get me wrong, you absolutely can pop off on social media (see Mortal Rite), but betting on “going viral” is a risky strategy I wouldn’t recommend. Rather than strictly treating social media as a tool to get more eyes on your game, it should be used as a testing ground for targeting and talking to your target audience. It only takes a few consistent comments to identify if your messaging is right or if there’s confusion around your game’s marketing. I went into more detail on this in the Tiny Glade blog if your curious.

While they have a few social media accounts, the only one they’re consistently active on is Twitter. Their twitter content is definitely worth checking out. The content is thematically appropriate for their audience and they utilize it well for important events and announcements. They also garnered a lot of good will with players and other devs by regularly reposting updates from other indie games. This has the added benefit of exposing them to more people in their target audience since they often reposted games with similar art styles and target audiences as theirs. I’ll highlight strategies used on their twitter in the latter sections but the main take away here is that you should absolutely use social media. If that stresses you out, pick the one your the most familiar with and roll with it.

Although it’s not technically social media they did a great job posting regular updates on their Steam page and Discord. It’s worth checking out as well! They also have a simple but top notch website with a fantastic Press Kit.

Events & Festivals

As you can see from their Wishlist spikes, Snowfall’s marketing success primarily revolves around events, festivals, and timely announcements. We’ll work our way through the timeline and see what they did to excel during each spike. While joining events is hardly a groundbreaking marketing strategy, they are getting 6 figure wishlists so they must be doing something different that’s worth looking into.

June 2023: Summer Game Fest

Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall was officially revealed during the Summer Game Fest on June 8, 2023. One month later and they were already at 50,000 wishlists. If at all possible you should always try to announce your game during a gaming showcase (festival, event, etc). If it’s an exclusive event, the reach you can get is insane. Not only do thousands tune into watch the showcase but games press and creators are always eager to make content covering the newest games announced during them. So you instantly get in front of TONS of eyes, which is a lot better than making a simple social media post about your new game and hoping you’ll go viral.

This doesn’t mean you have to wait to market your game until it’s announced. You can do like Tiny Glade and market the game early without an official name, then officially announce it during a showcase! Alternatively you can drop news of your Demo (especially with recent changes to demos on Steam), EA, or full release if your game is already announced. In a perfect world every one of these marketing beats happens as part of a gaming showcase or festival.

How do you get accepted into a relevant gaming showcase? Exclusivity & Relevancy! Offering an exclusive announcement will always help your chances of getting accepted. Some showcases our also very specific, such as Wholesome Direct, by showing how your game is relevant to their target audience you will drastically boost your chances of acceptance.

November 2023: Closed Beta

The first big wishlist spike for Snowfall was their sudden announcement and release of their closed beta. Check out the numbers:

After announcing the beta, their daily wishlists jumped into the triple digits, then onto the thousands after the beta started! As you can see from the numbers it lead to a nice tail as well. To promote it they

Posted on Twitter, Reddit and Discord
Notified Steam Followers (Around 4,000 at that time)
Allowed Streaming and Content Creation
Picked up by a handful of small games press sites

They also excelled at making players feel heard. Every indie game that holds a playtest or beta will say something along the lines of “play an active role in our games development”. There’s nothing wrong with this but the large majority of devs say that then follow up with a simple “thanks for the feedback, you guys rock” and that’s it. Check out what Snowfall did instead:

This a fantastic example of actually getting your players involved in development and making sure they feel heard and appreciated. A nice bonus of this strategy is it leads to engagement from your players as they discuss what they do and don’t agree with on with fellow testers.

Btw believe it or not they actually listened to their players and made the exact changes they asked for such as “bring Audry back” and the “Missing character speech sound”. If you play the demo you’ll immediately recognize why they wanted that sound back, it’s hilariously fun.

Finally its worth pointing out a sneaky marketing tactic around time limited demos or betas inspired by them. Their beta was only supposed to last a single weekend but they extended it to 10 days due to “popular demand”.

This creates FOMO (fear of missing out) and overall gives the impression your game is killing it. It may be a sneaky marketing tactic to internally plan for an “encore” of sorts. Pretend the beta/playtest/demo ends at X date than pleasantly surprise your players that your extending access due to “popular demand” even if in reality the demand was within in expected range. If you try this out let me know how it goes :) . If it backfires, you didn’t read that here.

February 2024: The Storytellers Festival, Debug awards, Yes, Your Grace Mobile Release

This was a smaller spike so I won’t spend too much time here but the following events combined to give a nice spike:

The Storytellers Festival
Debug Indie Game Awards
Yes, Your Grace Mobile Release
- An interesting note here: They basically created a mock demo on mobile by allowing users to download and play the beginning for free, before blocking the full game behind a one-time in-app purchase.

May 2024: Demo Announcement & Release

Following the same rapid announcement and release strategy as their closed beta, the demo was announced May 7th and dropped on May 9th. I’m curious to know if this works better than announcing a month or week in advance. My assumption is that this rapid announce then drop strategy is probably smarter for AAA studios (looking at you Apex Legends 👀), indie studios wish established audiences from previous games, or new games that are already popular. If you don’t fit in that category it may be smarter to take some time teasing and promoting to build more hype.

Similar to the closed beta, wishlists peaked over the weekend but still gave a nice tail even after the spike dropped. As far as I can find (please correct me in the comments) they didn’t drop their demo next to any events or festivals. However, their fans on Discord and social media happily ate up the news!

One really creative thing they did that anyone making a sequel should borrow from is releasing a recap video. This simultaneously refreshes your returning players and catches up new players who won’t bother playing the first game. A very smart choice to drop next to their first public demo.

July 2024: Hosted Pixelated Adventures

In July Brave At Night hosted their own steam event : Pixelated Adventures. This one truly is an OP marketing strategy.

This event resulted in over 20,000 wishlists gained for Shadowfall! Hosting a curated event on Steam not only brings a lot of attention it also gives you a platform to connect and support other games in the same space. This is truly an everyone wins strategy. Each game involved exposes their audience too each other leading to players in your target audience easily discovering you. Btw if your wondering how you can host one of these events, reach out to Steam! I reached out to them regarding hosting an event and they were very helpful in explaining what they look for when accepting new events. The more you can show why it’s good for Steam and their players the more likely it is to get accepted!

Brave at Night handled this event masterfully.

The website was clear with helpful links
They had a notion page early on with helpful info for interested games
They hosted a Reddit AMA, an art contest, and created a Discord just for the event
A mailing list at the bottom captured the huge influx of traffic brought in by this event
Provided a direct line to the organizers for interested creators and journalists

They recruited other indies by posting in the spaces they live in like relevant subreddits and were even shared on the HTMAG Discord!

Finally they had two tactics that anyone can replicate, not just the ones hosting the event. 1. An updated demo 2. UGC

Brave at Night announced an updated demo next to their participation in the Pixelated Festival. This is a great way to bring back returning players (making them more likely to purchase on release) and show that your listening to their feedback! If you know of specific complaints in the last build that you improved in this demo make sure to highlight those in your announcement

UGC stands for User Generated Content. It’s a catch all phrase for anytime your community, customers, players, etc create content about your product. In my last blog I mentioned how the Tiny Glade Twitter account went crazy reposting the creations that their players made in their game. They had over 600 tweets in June! The Brave at Night twitter account did a very similar thing, except since they were hosts of the Pixelated Adventures event, any games posting about the event were essentially UGC for them. They retweeted tons of other studios talking about their participation in the festival leading to even more visibility and garnering lots of good will.

If you read the above chart carefully you’ll notice they actually had 2 days with negative wishlist numbers. August 3rd: -1,214, August 4th: -168. So what gives? Why are they getting negative numbers while killing it during their own event. It actually has nothing to do with the Pixelated Adventures event and everything to do with other large steam sales in August such as the Steam Fighting Games Fest and Tower Defense Fest. During large sales like this players purge their wishlists. It’s a completely normal phenomenon that happens to every game on Steam no matter the quality, so don’t sweat it.

August 2024: Tiny Teams & Delay Announcement

The final spike overlaps with the Tiny Teams festival that is still happening at the time of writing. Other updates in August include:

Offering an exclusive build to games press at Gamescom
- Smart move!
Won the Indie Cup Europe Rising Star Award!
Delayed the release of their game to Q1 2025
- These things happen and they’ve handled it well. The general vibe I can see from their audience was that they were happy to wait if it meant they get a better more complete game.

Target Audience

I recently posted on Reddit asking indie devs what marketing challenges they had and what they wanted to learn about. A common answer was learning how to better identify and target their audience. This is definitely deserving of it’s own post but for now i’ll try to touch on this for each game we cover. So onto Yes Your Grace, Snowfall!

A red flag that you may not know who or how to talk to your target audience is if you aren’t able to sufficiently explain what your game is in one or two sentences. A common strategy for this is to consider your positioning next to other games. In a recent Push to Talk blog post, Ryan highlighted how Aggro Crab described Another Crab’s Treasure as “Dark Souls meets Spongebob Squarepants”. It only takes one peak at their Steam trailer to see how accurate that is. This is a perfect example of understanding your positioning.

Much like how Aggro Crab described Another Crab's Treasure in relatable, clever phrases, Brave at Night consistently described Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall as a blend of rich storytelling and strategic gameplay, deeply rooted in medieval/slavic mythology. This clarity in messaging helped players immediately understand the game’s essence, making it easier for them to know if they’re interested and recommend it to others.

Once you can identify that short descriptor you can use that as your compass on where to find your target audience. Brave at Night knows that their game appeals to fans of narrative-driven, strategy-based games with a medieval theme. Have a browse through their Twitter or Steam page updates to see how they leaned into this niche.

Published to Publisher

Brave At Night started out as a 4 man crew that had their first game partially funded by Kickstarter and published by No More Robots. They have since grown to 8 people and their first game has gone from 1.4 million (USD) in gross revenue in March 2020 to just just shy of 4 million in August 2024. Not bad for an indie team! 🤘

You might be wondering how a tiny indie studio became a publisher? Me too! Thankfully, Game World Observer already asked them:

Game Developer: Ultimately, the game was published by Brave at Night. A lot of devs I talked to say how they always carefully study a publisher’s portfolio before signing with them. Brave at Night had previously published zero games. In fact, they are a development studio, whose only game Yes, Your Grace was published by No More Robots. How did you hook up with them? Were you concerned about the lack of the publishing experience on their part?
We had our demo, and were out looking for a small or medium-sized publisher that wanted to publish a small niche game. We needed money to cover half of the production cost. One day, I retweeted Yes, Your Grace, as I thought it looked like my kind of game, and when I checked my inbox, Brave At Night had contacted me! Their game is similar to Mind Scanners and seeing how well it was received, I thought, hey let’s try this publisher. The good thing about Mind Scanners being their first published title is that we didn’t need to worry about them focusing on other titles and forgetting about us, something I’ve heard can happen with bigger publishers. It turned out to be the best collaboration, and they have done a great job in marketing Mind Scanners at a low cost.

Cross Platform

Yes, Your Grace is available on PC, Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and even mobile. It seems likely Brave At Night will take the same route and release on as many platforms as possible. Its obvious being on more platforms is more potential customers and visibility, but in most cases it does take significant resources that you may not have. Brave at Night managed this by

Focusing on developing for PC, while third parties ported their game to other platforms
Releasing in waves instead of all at once.
1. PC (Steam and GOG): Released on March 2020
2. Xbox One: Released on June 2020
3. Nintendo Switch: Released on June 2020
4. PlayStation 4: Released on January 2021
5. Mobile (iOS and Android): Released on February 2024

This allowed Brave at Night to focus their resources on developing Yes, Your Grace, Snowfall after the release of their first game, while also getting a nice marketing beat during every release increasing sales of their first game and creating more future customers for their sequel.

Final Thoughts

The story of Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall is a refreshing departure from the idea that success in the gaming industry requires a massive budget or viral fame. Brave at Night’s ability to maintain momentum through smart use of festivals, timely announcements, and community involvement highlights the importance of aligning your marketing strategy with your game’s design and audience.

See you next week!