NMGMS 04 - Marketing

Throughout the day, the little worker at [Game Maker] didn't stop for a second.

As soon as one task was completed, the next task on the list began to be developed, no doubts, no creative blocks, no burnout, just mechanical and extremely efficient development.

And because Alex already knew exactly how he wanted the game to be developed, a game that should have taken a single person months to make was completed in two days.

Unlike the Pixel Art style of the original game, this new version of Undertale was like an anime!

The scenes of the characters talking were perfectly animated, with emotions and facial expressions so beautiful that even he, who had played the game before, was shocked by how much more interesting and immersive this version became.

As Alex tested this version of the game, the striking scenes that took place in the game became so vivid that he began to get excited to see how the Players in this world would react.

'The entity that brought me to this world wanted me to introduce the pleasure of gaming to the people here, so here's my first job!' Alex thought excitedly after testing the game and finally clicking on the [Publish] option.

[What is the name of the company that developed the game?]

This question made Alex pause for a few seconds.

Several names crossed his mind.

He didn't want something trite or generic for the company name, but he was also a little wary of using the name of a company from his previous world.

Not because he didn't like the names, since Blizzard was a great name, or even Eletronic Arts, but considering the burden those names already had on him in this area, it just seemed wrong to take the name of one of those companies for this world.

‘Why not use the name of my game company [Game Maker] from the other world?’ Alex thought excitedly.

He hadn't come up with anything original for it at the time, but he felt that the name really suited what he wanted to bring to this world.

So having made up his mind, [DreamWorks] was born.

As soon as he clicked that button, a new page had appeared on Steam with the name Undertale.

Unlike other games that had to be curated before being approved and published on Steam, this strange new game just appeared.

This world wasn't very developed in the area of games, to the point that the number of people using Steam here was only a fraction of what it was in Alex's original world, but in the niche of people who liked games this store was the most popular.

So although a new game had appeared out of nowhere, this was just a new page among the thousands that already existed there, attracting no particular attention, much to Alex's disappointment.

Even after two hours, no one had even accessed the Undertale page on Steam.

‘Isn't just publishing the game enough?’ Alex wondered a little uncertainly.

In the [Game Maker] of the other world, when he published a game, a minigame about the game's marketing would pop up, where depending on how he did in that minigame, it would boost the game's initial popularity greatly.

Unfortunately that minigame didn't exist in this world, after he published the game, [Game Maker] just made a store page for it and that was it.

'I guess I'll have to do some manual marketing for the game in this world? But how can I do something like that?' Alex wondered.

As far as he could remember, Undertale had seen decent growth in the beginning because the game's creator was already known because of some Fan Hacks he did before creating the game.

He already had a fanbase that followed him and was willing to pay to test his game, so when these people saw the quality of the game and started spreading it by word of mouth, at some point it reached people with big YouTube channels and the game exploded.

‘But nobody knows me or is willing to test an unknown game like mine...’ Alex wondered.

By this point it was the early hours of Sunday into Monday and Alex couldn't sleep, not while he was so worried that he'd made a great game and that no one would test it.

So he just decided to skip college the next day and stay up while he thought of a way to try and get it out to some people.

His method didn't need to go viral right away, since he didn't even know how to do something like that with such a guarantee, but as long as the video got a few hundred views and a few people were interested enough to buy and test the game, word of mouth could start to do the job.

“Wait... if I don't have fans who will follow me and test my game, why not pretend that I am those ‘my fans’ by testing the game and posting on social media to share some interesting things about the game?” Alex realized!

The more he thought about it, the more Alex thought this idea could work.

With [Game Maker]'s ability to make eye-catching artwork, Alex could choose striking scenes to use in the thumbnails that would draw enough attention for a few hundred people to click on the video, and as long as the clip he used in the video was interesting enough, people would take an interest in it and buy the game to try it out!

With that decided, Alex began.

He downloaded a screen recording program like OBS and went back to one of his favorite scenes in the game: the first fight against Toriel.

In the original version, that scene was already impactful. But in this version, with smooth animations, expressions of pain and hesitation on the character's face, and a re-recorded studio-quality soundtrack, the scene took on a much more impactful emotional weight.

Toriel held out her hand with tears in her eyes while the protagonist hesitated to attack.

Soft music filled the silence of the room.

While this gameplay scene was taking place, Alex used an audio clip he had generated with [Game Maker] for a few GPs, making a random person's voice say shocked, “Wait... the Boss doesn't want to attack?”

The clip was only 1 minute and 40 seconds long, something that wouldn't give away anything very important about the game's plot, but which was striking enough to attract people's attention.

At no point in the video did he try to sell the game or make it look like this video came from a marketing campaign.

With the extremely convincing voice acting generated by [Game Maker], no one would suspect that this was something planned.

So with this clip ready and published on a new YouTube channel, Alex set about making the next clip.

This time, he chose the first appearance of Sans and Papyrus.

The soft snow falling on the set, the sound of the snow being trampled underfoot, the playful tone of the conversation... everything was so well animated that the scene looked like it had come out of an anime episode.

Anime existed in this world, although they weren't as popular outside Japan as in his other world, the West also had Disney with great animations, so he imagined that something like this would attract people's attention.

He made a point of focusing on the skeletons' funny expressions, cutting to quick close-ups of Papyrus' silly grin and Sans' lazy gaze.

The thumbnail chosen this time was vibrant, with the two brothers in charismatic poses and a catchy title: Bruh, these guys are funny!

To show that this was done by someone else, Alex generated a completely different voice that just laughed during the appearance of these two characters and didn't say anything else, but the laughter was so sincere and contagious that it seemed completely real.

With this clip ready, Alex quickly created another channel and posted this video.

For the rest of the night, all Alex did was create clips of interesting scenes from the game that might attract players and post them on different channels.

He made scenes of the pacifist route, the genocidal route, but in no video did he specify how to get to those routes, the clips were just random reactions from “real players” who decided to post it on the internet “to show their friends”.

When the sunlight entered the room, Alex was exhausted.

He had made more than 20 different clips and posted them all on YouTube, without bothering to see how they were doing.

Considering that videos usually took a while to be recommended to other users, he thought it would take a few days for the videos to receive the views he was hoping for.

Even more so with a YouTube that wasn't as popular as in his other world, it might take a while for the views to roll in.

So feeling the fatigue hit him, Alex just looked at the [Game Maker] screen and stared at the measly 20 GP he had left, before throwing himself on his bed and passing out.

But unbeknownst to him, the videos he posted were already being viewed by people all over the world.