🌷May diary: Zoom Japan & The Doll Shop🌷

This month, we had the pleasure to illustrate the cover of the new issue of ZOOM Japon. It is a newspaper dedicated to Japanese society, distributed for free in France, Switzerland and Belgium. The theme of this new issue is “dagashiya”. Dagashiya are small neighborhood candy shops that used to be found everywhere in Japan. Their number has decreased considerably in recent years, but their retro charm makes us feel a touch of nostalgia when we come across one.

Recently, we’ve been working a lot on the marketing of our upcoming game The Doll Shop. VeuillezPLP and Factornews published 2 great articles about the game, Indie Games Hub on YouTube featured the trailer and we’ve been selected by the BIG Festival in Brazil, in the BIG Highlight category! Yay! We’re so happy about it! But what does it really mean? Let’s talk about our goals concerning the communication.

Because the game will be launched on Steam store, we mainly focus on our Steam page. People who are interested in the game can add it to their whishlist. The more wishlists we have, the more likely we are to sell the game when it is released. Even if the percentage of real buyers will be lower, of course. But also, the more engagements on the wishlists, the more Steam will highlight the game on the site and give us visibility. So our goal is to get as many wishlists as possible before the game is released.

We go from time to time to visit our friends from the indie game studio Nova-Box. The other day, Antonio, their communication manager, told us that we had to reach at least 7000 wishlists for our game to be considered a “real game” by the Steam platform. As you can see on the picture below, 4099 people have already wishlisted The Doll Shop, 286 people have removed it, making us a total of 3813. We are still far from 7000! XD

The Steam platform allows us to analyze the sources of wishlists. The biggest peak in graphics was our participation in NextFest on Steam, a demo festival that took place last October. Since then, we have had very few new players. The last 2 small peaks correspond to our selection at the BIG Festival where our game was presented for a whole weekend (in Brazil), and to the broadcast of our trailer on the YouTube channel Indie Games Hub. We’ll soon release the demo. Let’s hope it will help to increase the wishlists number!

Above, we talked about the French indie studio Nova-Box. They help us a lot with the communication. We’ve been following their work since many years and have always been huge fans of their games. They are currently developing After the Wane, a beautiful interactive graphic novel with breathtaking hand-drawn danse sceneries. We invite you to head over to their page and add the game to your wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2742720/After_the_Wane/

We will be at BD Pyrénées, a comic book festival on June 13th and 14th at Billère, next to Pau to sign our books. We will bring our new merch (washi tape, pin’s, papercut, stickers…).

Talking about merch, our washi tape is now available at Tanuki no Mori, shop in Bordeaux, with other goodies like pin’s and postcards. It’s the only place in the world where you can find our merch, haha! That’s because we can easily bring it to the shop when we go to see our family in Bordeaux.

Thanks for reading and see you soon! ♥