How Shogun Showdown Went From Itch.io Prototype To A Multi Platform Indie Hit
Discover the marketing strategies that turned a solo dev project into a multi-platform success
From a side project born during the pandemic to a multi-platform indie hit, Shogun Showdown is the result of one solo dev’s great game combined with strategic marketing moves. In this blog post, we’ll use insights gleaned from my interview with Mirko and other resources to explore how Shogun Showdown came to be, the marketing strategies behind its success, and what working with a publisher is like.
Huge thank you to Mirko, the developer behind Shogun Shodown, for taking some time right before his game’s release to sit down with me and answer my burning questions!
The Story of Shogun Showdown
From Software Developer to Game Dev
During Covid Mirko decided to take his skills he learned as a professional software developer and combine it with his passion for gaming. After spending a few months learning Unity and prototyping a few game ideas he landed on a “generic deck builder game”. Fast forward a year and he had a 1D movement based tile game that would eventually become Shogun Showdown.
His only real goal in the beginning was to get a functioning alpha version of Shogun Showdown onto itch.io to get some feedback. Mirko shared that he was very unsure back in the itch.io days if the game was actually fun or not. It’s very difficult for you or your social circle to look at your game with unbiased eyes because it’s natural to be proud of something that took so much work to create. Mirko’s first sign that he actually had a fun game on his hands was once people started coming to his discord to trade strategies and techniques to further in the game.
Even with some good feedback happening he still only had a relatively small amount of traffic, that is until Retromation picked it up and left a stellar review! As of the time of writing Retromation has made 7 videos on Shogun Showdown garnering a total of 180K views. That’s a ton of free visibility from one happy content creator. After the Retromation video Mirko’s itch page received a huge amount of traffic leading to a snowball of attention coming his way.
Securing a Publisher
While in the middle of deciding what to do next Mirko was contacted by the head of Goblinz publishing who had played the game and loved it. Mirko signed with Goblinz publishing and switched to working on Shogun Showdown part time (versus in his free time) before later transitioning into full time work.
Mirko wasn’t sure how Goblinz discovered his game but I wouldn’t be surprised if publishers stalk channels like Retromation or regular browse itch.io to find hidden gems. I imagine having a popular content creator and his audience pick up and leave great feedback on a game must be a good sign of potential to publishers.
Getting Some Help
Now that Mirko had a publisher he knew he had to turn things up a notch. He used some of the funding he got as part of his publishing deal to enlist the help of two pixel artists: Penusbmic and Camille Unknown. Penusbmic focused on character design and animations while Camille Unknown did the background art. He also reached out to his friend Oscar to make the soundtrack!
There’s a few game dev related notes I want to highlight here. The first is that Mirko actually used premade assets made by Penusbmic in his alpha build before later hiring him to make custom assets. This is absolutely the way to go! Use premade assets to cover the areas your not as skilled in so you can get to the first playable version of your game as quick as possible, then you can worry about swapping them out for custom assets later. The second thing is that I personally really love when friends contact friends to help make their game. Chances are if you work in game dev you have some talented friends. Whether it’s through promotion or payment consider seeing if people in your circle want to work on your game, they will often appreciate the opportunity.
Goblinz Publishing Marketing Strategies
Outside of a handful of reddit posts, Mirko had little involvement in marketing Shogun Showdown. So naturally we’re going to be taking a look at the strategies used by Goblinz publishing to market his game.
Ongoing Marketing Efforts
Social Media
Goblinz regularly posts about all of their games across their social media accounts. I highly recommend checking out their Twitter account for some inspiration on what to post about your own game.
Bundles and Cross promotion
One of the huge advantages of working with a publisher is their ability to put your game in front of fresh eyes through bundles and cross promotions with their other games. This is especially relevant for publishers that focus on a niche genre. Goblinz focuses on publishing simulation and strategy games. By using bundles and cross promotions with other Goblinz’s games, Shogun Showdown was shown directly to gamers who played similar games.
Leading up to Early Access
Itch.io
Shogun Showdown started on itch.io before landing a publisher and getting a Steam page. Hosting your game on itch.io is one of the best ways to get low risk early feedback on your game. Users on itch are very used to playing games in a prototype or alpha stage, where as users on Steam expect a bit more polish regardless of the game being a demo, prologue, playtest, beta, etc. I would encourage most devs to consider putting an alpha version of their game on itch to start collecting early feedback. Alternatively you can use itch.io to host your demo while you continue to improve it before officially releasing your demo on Steam.
The Prologue Strategy
If you’ve never heard of the prologue strategy it’s basically where you take a small slice of your main game and create a brand new steam page for it and market it as the “prologue” for your main game. You then heavily push players from the prologue to wishlist your main game by including a CTA to wishlist in the main menu or other prominent areas. But wait isn’t that just a demo? Not quite. Since a prologue features it’s own steam page it is effectively treated as an entirely new game by Steam. This means it gets all of the algorithm benefits such as potentially getting featured on popular upcoming and a boost upon release. Meanwhile it was impossible for a demo to be featured on the front page of steam in any form.
Okay now forget everything I just said about prologues and demos, because as of a month ago, Steam updated how Demos work making the prologue strategy redundant. Demos can now have their own Steam Page where players can leave reviews and your demo can be featured in popular upcoming on the front page of Steam.
I asked Mirko if he would still do the prologue strategy after the recent demo changes and he stated that he would most likely just stick with a demo as there’s no longer much reason to do a prologue and it’s also a lot more work to put together.
Demo
Shogun Showdown published a demo right before it’s early access release. Interestingly, the demo is still playable now even after the 1.0 release. There’s a long list of great reasons to have a demo, a big one being that many Steam festivals require having a demo for participation. However, how long you should keep up a demo depends on your game and/or marketing strategy. If your demo is designed to leave players wanting more it’s probably a good idea to keep it up, meanwhile if players get their fill during the demo they may be less inclined to purchase. Tiny Glade opened their demo for a very short window during Steam Next for this exact reason. After seeing that players were spending dozens of hours in the demo they knew there was a risk that players could get creatively tapped out and not be as interested in buying the full game when it released.
Enter Publisher #2: Gamera Games
2 publishers!? This is commonly done when it’s hard for you or your current publisher to reach difficult to access markets such as China or Japan. Gamera Games was brought on board to help market Shogun Showdown to Chinese players. Based off the number of reviews from China in the graph below, i’d say they did a decent job!
Steam Next Fest/ Early Access Release
The last major marketing effort made before releasing into EA was Steam Next Fest! Steam Next Fest is the one festival that absolutely every game releasing on Steam should join before their EA or 1.0 release.
Shogun Showdown announced it’s EA date in combination with its Steam Next Fest announcement. This has the nice benefit of new players knowing that the full playable game is coming soon thus increasing the chance they try your demo and wishlist. The marketing push by Goblinz when announcing the EA release date also helped their wishlist velocity ahead of Steam Next Fest! A very important metric in deciding if Steam shows you on the front page of Next Fest. However a potential down side to this release timing is that a lot of games release shortly after Steam Next Fest so you may face more competition than normal in trying to get to get those coveted spots on the front page of Steam.
So what was the marketing push done by Goblinz for the EA announcement? They ran a few ads and posted on social media but the core of their strategy was utilizing content creators (specifically youtubers). Some of the creators were sponsored but many of them were not. Northern lion for example picked it up for free and has since made 4 videos on Shogun Shown! Ideally you can get content creators to cover your game for free by showing why their audience we’ll love it, but doing some sponsored can be a great way to get it on the radar of other creators especially if they see that audiences are responding well to the game.
Pro Tip: Once you have someone like Northern Lion or Retromation pick up your game you can link that video in your out reach email to other creators or even games press as evidence your game is worth checking out! You need to word this right but you get the idea.
Road to 1.0
Roadmap Release
Shortly after the EA release a roadmap for the game was published. Publishing a roadmap alongside your EA release is always a great idea since it will either get players excited for the future or explain what’s missing from the game. A roadmap could change the review of a player who thinks your game has too little content or is missing X.
Turn based Carnival
In November 2023 they participated in the turn based carnival Steam event. I won’t harp on this too much here because it’s fairly obvious but you should be joining as many relevant steam events as possible. They’re a great way to get in front of your target audience.
Released their demo on console
During my interview with Mirko he mentioned that they decided to create a store page on console and release a demo on switch to see if wishlists were worth pursuing on those platforms. While they are of course useful we both agreed that it’s far less common to wishlists on those platforms. Either way the more platforms you can be on the better! It also helps that Shogun Showdown seems like a game that would be great on Switch. Given the limited input needed to play the game I for one plan on getting it on Switch over PC.
1.0 Release
Shogun Showdown officially released into 1.0 on September 5th. Since their release they have sold an additional 19,000 copies and also had a huge jump in wishlists from 186K wishlists on Sep 5 to 266K on September 18th. As of September 18th the estimated gross revenue is just over $1 million and that’s only the sales on Steam!
Multi Platform Release
While early access was only on PC the 1.0 release brought the game to Switch, Xbox, and Playstation. Mirko actually ported the game to switch himself, but worked with a 3rd party for the port to Xbox and PlayStation. An interesting insight Mirko shared during our interview was that once you do a port for one console it becomes much easier to do the rest. Odds are that if he had to do something unique for the switch that same thing needed to be tweaked for Xbox and Playstation.
Working with a Publisher
Mirko’s experience with Goblinz Publishing
Revenue Split
I didn’t ask for details, but Mirko described his split with Goblinz Publishing as the “usual split”. Even with the best publisher in the world the unavoidable con is the loss in revenue that you split with them. However, in Mirko’s words he’d “rather have X percent of a big pie rather than 100 percent of a small pie”. Considering Shogun Showdown has made around 1 Million (USD) in gross revenue on Steam alone, I think it’s safe to say that Mirko is happy with his slice of the pie.
Publisher Involvement
We’ve all heard the horror stories of devs signing with a publisher only for them to pressure or bully them into making various decisions that are not what the developer had in mind. Mirko’s experience with Goblinz Publishing was a refreshing look at what a healthy relationship with a publisher looks like. Mirko was happy to let them take care of everything related to marketing, but even so they made sure to run everything by him and get his opinion on it before continuing.
They also never requested or suggested any game design elements. He was completely independent in that regard. He mentioned that people often had ideas but it was often from the lens of “wouldn’t it be cool if we did x or y”. It was always from the perspective of a fellow gamer and not pressuring him to do something.
Should you work with a publisher?
Here’s a quick and dirty list of the pros and cons, followed by some extra thoughts on if your thinking about getting a publisher.
Pros
You don’t have to deal with marketing and can solely focus on developing your game.
Funding
Publishers often, but not always, come with funding. It’s common for the revenue split in their favor to scale with the amount of upfront funding given.
You can also find an investor if your seeking funding, however investors usually invest in the company while publishers invest in the game.
In most cases you will be going for a publisher especially as a solo dev. Investment usually only makes sense at a small studio level and/or if your working on live service games. A great example of this are former Riot devs turned new studio like Odyssey interactive and Theorycraft games.
Increased visibility (potentially). More on this below
Cons
Split revenue with Publisher.
Potentially predatory contracts and behavior
Unfair revenue share
Heavy pressure to change your game design
My very boring answer on if you should consider a publisher is….it depends. It’s worth looking into if you are in the following situations:
Don’t have time or want to do marketing and are willing to give up revenue for someone else to take care of it.
Ideally you should make marketing a priority and do it yourself. But look i get it. My full time job is doing marketing for the games my studio is developing and I still always feel like i’m not doing enough. However the reality is you really only “need” to hit a few key marketing beats (Steam Festivals, Demo release, Launch, contact press & content creators, etc). Outside of preparing for these key marketing beats, dedicating one day a week to marketing is often enough. However if you absolutely despise marketing for whatever reason, then sure maybe it’s worth the loss in revenue to have a publisher to take it off your hands.
Need funding
Indie games are very often bootstrapped. Besides some minor expenses here and there like setting up a page on Steam, paying for premade assets, and software licenses you really don’t need much money to make a game. Technically speaking the only thing you have to pay for is a $100 fee to publish your game on Steam.
Funding is most relevant for game devs looking to leave their 9-5 and do full time game development or small studios who could use the funding for marketing or hiring for a specific skill set. If your a solo dev or small team who are making their game in their free time while still retaining full time jobs, you probably don’t need funding.
Final Thoughts
Once conclusion I hope you don’t draw is that the secret to success here was “they had a publisher”. Not only can you have a publisher and still completely flop but the large majority of what the publisher does can be done by you.
Look at everything Goblinz did for Shogun Showdown and you’ll discover that it’s all things you could do yourself, given you had the time. The main visibility advantage that a publisher brings that you probably can’t do yourself is quickly accessing a built up and relevant audience. For example any strategy game that signs with hooded horse ( a publisher specializing in strategy games) instantly get’s their games put in front of fans of strategy games.
A huge thank you to Mirko for sitting down with me and having a chat about his game and a massive congrats on a successful 1.0 launch!
See you next week ✌️
Great stuff thank you Jordan! I don't know how I got here but I'm so glad I did!
A good breakdown of a hit game's journey - read this if you are making games!