TikTok is a strange and nebulous channel. Since it broke onto the scene nearly ten years ago, it has revolutionised social media, with quick-form immediately accessible video content that has been replicated by many other platforms. Things move quickly on TikTok, and they demand your attention. If you don’t understand the trend, you’re left out. How can an indie game developer begin to approach such a fast moving community? Sharing a weekly tweet was hard enough!
There’s a solution, and it’s much more approachable than you might think. Let’s take Acorn Games’ recent work on Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar as our case study.
Following the Crowd
There’s a definite FOMO (that’s fear of missing out, to anyone out of the loop) on TikTok. Trends come and go at a moment’s notice and the temptation to try and lasso one to launch you towards internet fame is huge. It rarely works out quite that easily though.
Don’t Blindly Follow Trends
A trend video will often be show to those who have already engaged with the trend before. Although this sounds like a good thing, there’s absolutely no guarantee that anyone interested in the trend is interested in your game, and they are therefore more likely to swipe on past your video quickly, hurting its ranking. Worse still, trends can quickly become repetitive and even those who are interested in the game may swipe away from it quickly because they’re sick of seeing the same content.
Unless you’re entirely sure that you’re catching the trend at the very start of its lifecycle - AND that it has some kind of similarity with the themes in your game, save your energy. Trends are high risk, high reward. It’s playing the National Lottery versus pulling names from a hat.
We started working on Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar just a couple of months ago, coming in on a fairly fresh TikTok account. The content that had been shared so far largely followed memes or trends. It was fun content, but the unique animations created to make them took time and wasn’t yielding the right results.
The original content focused more around trends and memes
You Do You
Initially we started our work on the account in earnest, sharing what we felt would capture TikTokers’ attention, the visual appeal. Knowing that TikTok typically skews more towards a female audience in the 18-25 age bracket, it made sense to us to create videos that highlighted the cute cat and goofy animations.
This was a mistake.
Although this content started to perform OK, it was far from the level of traction we required. A change was required.
Content centring on the animations performed better, but still less than the game deserved.
Watch Your Run Time
We were not showing the game’s USP. What made it unique. Why someone should play it. We pivoted towards explaining core gameplay mechanics. No more 15 second videos, instead testing the waters with longer 1 minute+ content on the assumption that if the audience got over halfway through it, this would count more than watching one shorter video 1.5 times and then swiping away.
What Makes Your Game Unique?
By focusing on the gameplay, and what makes it fun moment to moment, we learned a valuable lesson: it’s better to be yourself than to keep trying to please the algorithm. Explaining the game, as you would to a player at a physical event, we were able to share our enthusiasm, illustrate the gameplay — and still show off the cute cat in the process.
Our first video gained over 100k views, netting us around 2k+ wishlists overnight.
The Ideal Format
So let’s break it down. Why was this video a success?
Set Your Premise
We open with a premise and explain clearly what the player’s objective is, setting the stakes. We show off Mittens, so any casual viewer still has a visual hook to grasp onto. We also create a subtle ‘challenge’ explaining this puzzle is for ‘more advanced’ players, subtly leading viewers to want to know what the puzzle may be, and whether they are indeed the ‘advanced’ player they see themselves to be.
Show The Gameplay
As soon as we set up this premise, we show what’s cool about the game - the quantum mechanics. Without any preamble, showing it in a matter-of-fact way, it stands out amongst a culture where even the smallest of interactions is sensationalised. We saw numerous comments that called out this moment as the point where their attention was fixed, and we saw this in the metrics too, with 40% viewers continuing to watch from this point onwards.
Now Explain
From here, we jumped into the mechanics in detail. Explaining plausible and theoretical cats. But we make sure to leave some questions unanswered, such as how the battery can pass through the door, and why Mittens doesn’t simply stroll on over to the receiver once she has it. These glaring questions sparked countless comments and helped justify a case for follow-up content.
Naturally, we want to make people smile, we saw a small spike in likes around the point where we add the small cat meow, giving Mittens some personality.
Set a Call To Action
At the end of the video, we made sure to call out the game on Steam, highlighting how people can wishlist it, so there’s a clear call to action. Despite the game’s somewhat hard to type name ‘Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar’, we saw a heap of direct traffic from searches on Steam after publication.
Lastly, encouraging the viewers to watch the video again or drop a comment encouraged further engagement, and helped send the video over the edge.
Following Up
This content performed very well - but it would have been a mistake to stop there.
Comments Are Key
When we noticed that the video was tracking well, it became our priority to answer back comments as quickly as possible. This shows further viewers we are active, contributes more comments to the video, and encourages others to do the same. Each of these act as indicators to show the TikTok to more people, and it snowballs from there.
Create an Immediate Follow-Up
The next day as views were starting to taper off, we set about creating a follow-up post. Using one of the community comments as a base, we started to explain one of the most discussed game concepts, while introducing a further level of complexity. Viewers of the original post were then delivered the subsequent one, helping boost all of our content and show it to non-followers. This re-ignited the fire and pushed new views to both videos.
Reduce Barriers to Conversion
With the first post tracking well, we quickly converted the profile into a business account and registered to include a link in the bio, further reducing the friction for those even passively curious about the game. Acting quickly is seen as favourable to the TikTok algorithm and as a result, our clicks to Steam accelerated and our wishlist numbers began to climb again.
Wishlist numbers grew a second time in response to creating quick follow-up content after the initial spike.
Best Practice
We also learned a few best practices between our first and second videos.
End on a Smile
Owing to the success of a little added humour in the first video, we included a little joke at the end of the second. As the video loops, the viewer feels positively about what they’ve just seen and are more likely to hit the ‘like’ button, or click through to the profile. From the second video especially, we saw lots more views on our previous content as a result.
Don’t Delete Poor Performing Content
This is why it’s always valuable to keep the older content live. Even though the cute cat animation content hadn’t been performing as well to begin with, once people discovered it as a second interaction with the profile, they were already familiar with the character and had a reason to ‘care’. Slowly, these videos started to gather a nominal amount of views too.
Show Your Key Art
We also found that any attempt to lower barriers to discovering the game were of value. As the name ‘Schrodinger’ was quite hard to spell for commenters, we worried that a percentage of viewers would simply give up if they couldn’t find it immediately on Steam (if they hadn’t already noticed the direct link in the bio). To that end, we began to include the key art in the final frames of the video.
Convert Commentors
Lastly, many commenters were enraptured by the concept and were keen to applaud the game, but we had no guarantee they had watched to the end and wishlisted. Commenting back to these people, and mentioning that the demo was available to play right now was a softer sell than the more direct ‘wishlist now’ option. Demo plays helped boost the game on Steam’s own algorithm and provided us with a second wave of commenters coming back to share their praise for the demo itself.
End on a clear call to action
Recycle Your Ideas
Cracking the code to TikTok has benefits for other platforms too. By delivering universal content that explained the game clearly and in an entertaining manner, we had a blueprint to share similar posts on other channels such as Instagram and Reddit, which further amplified the rush of traffic towards Steam. Other posts that went viral on one channel didn’t do so well on others, so it’s always worth tailoring the content to the appropriate channel — just not becoming so caught up in it that you forget to actually make the content about your game, rather than a trend.
A Final Note
Not every TikTok will do well, and we are all at the bequest of an elusive algorithm. All we can do is to treat our audiences as human beings and produce content that we ourselves would find interesting or of value.
Don’t become emotionally invested in your ideas — try a theory, learn from it and adapt. If it doesn’t play out, try something new.
Some of our subsequent content has not done as well. That’s OK. We continue to try new ways to explain the core concepts and showcase the game through different lenses. Every TikTok video is a lottery ticket, but there are lots of ways to sway the odds. When we learn new tricks, we’ll be more than happy to share them with you too.
If you’d like to work with Acorn to grow your own TikTok following, get in touch with us here and let us know about your game.
George