LogInStunlock's Jeremy Bearson spoke about the key influences on the game's success citing the game's genre and mechanics as well as the importance of Beta tests.
Stunlock Studios' survival-horror game V Rising was released in Early Access just a couple of weeks ago but it already shows pretty good results becoming one of the top Steam launches of 2022. The game managed to achieve 1 million players just a week after its release, and its player base keeps growing.
In a recent interview with Game Developer, Stunlock's community manager Jeremy Bearson revealed some of the secrets of the game's success. He shared that probably the key influence on the title's results was the mixture of the vampire theme and base-building survival gameplay that features multiplayer (co-op and PvP) experiences.
"Maybe it IS just vampires! I think it’s more likely the survival genre itself, and the way the game is built to appeal to a wide range of survival players," he said. "All the major mechanical systems are built with each other in mind, and it’s easy to find what you like in the game without feeling too imposed by the parts of the game you might be less interested in."
Bearson also noted that the studio formed a strong community prior to the game's launch which also played an important role in the game's success. He stated that before V Rising was even released, its Discord community already had 14,000 members, and now this number accounts for about 62,000. According to Bearson, the company also used several "experimental features and announcement channels" to let people know about the game.
Shortly before the launch, the Stunlock team did several closed Beta tests, as Bearson notes, which were crucial for determining the direction of the game as well as helped the studio fix bugs before the game was open to a wider audience.
"Even in the last seconds leading up to our Early Access launch, we were making changes, ones that I think the game might have been much worse off for if we didn’t feel the urge to make those adjustments. Huge thanks to those players," Bearson said.
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