Well, people were aware of it. For the wrong reason.
Tale of Tales became business partners with Leigh Alexander, the "journalist" behind the Anti-GamerGate article "Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over".
Alexander seems to have been covering PR and promotion of the game. And after you read what they have to say about it, that seems to be the reason for it utterly failing.
It's sad because it looks like an awesome original game! Why didn't I buy a copy? For the same reason a lot of other gamers had. Tale of Tales was mixed up with a highly unethical "journalist" that is an enemy of free speech and expression.
Gamers are fighting back with the most powerful weapon we have. Our wallets!
All I have to say is it's probably not a good idea to hire a person who hates gamers to do PR for your... game.
That's a fairly easy mistake to avoid.
From ToT UPDATES — And the sun sets…:
In the end, we spent more money than we had on the production of Sunset. Because we wanted to make it really good and reach a wider audience. Compared to the ambitions we had for the game, the extra $40,000 seemed like a relatively small sum. “Surely we can make that amount back in the first month of sales!”
We were wrong.
So far a little over 4,000 copies of Sunset have changed hands. That includes the copies for our backers on Kickstarter. That includes the sale. There’s barely enough income to keep our company going while we look for ways to raise the funds to pay back our debts.
It’s hard to deal with this intense feeling of disappointment in a context of glowing reviews and compliments and encouragement from players. A small group of people clearly deeply appreciates what we do and we curse the economic system that doesn’t allow us to be pleased with that.
Being wrong will set you free
We studied successful games and applied our findings to the design of Sunset. And while the inclusion of certain conventions seems to have helped some people enjoy the game, it didn’t affect the size of our audience much.
We spent a lot of money on a PR company who got us plenty of press, took some work and worries off our shoulders, and found us other marketing opportunities. But it didn’t help sales one bit.
We even took out an advertisement on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where we figured the people most interested in Sunset would be gathered. They must all use AdBlock because that had no effect whatsoever.
We worked hard on presenting a gentler Tale of Tales to the public. Which basically meant that Michaël was forbidden to talk in public and Auriea often just smiled at the camera, parroting words whispered in her ears by communication coaches. Didn’t make a difference.
So now we are free. We don’t have to take advice from anybody anymore. We were wrong. Everybody whom we consulted with on Sunset was wrong.
We are happy and proud that we have tried to make a “game for gamers.” We really did our best with Sunset, our very best. And we failed. So that’s one thing we never need to do again. Creativity still burns wildly in our hearts but we don’t think we will be making videogames after this. And if we do, definitely not commercial ones.
— Michaël Samyn & Auriea Harvey.
You can support and encourage us by simply buying our games (for yourself or a friend). Or by supporting Auriea’s Patreon or Michaël’s. Thank you.
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