“For indies, we have to do this” Here’s what Promise Mascot Agency’s devs are hoping Steam Next Fest will do for a game that sort-of defies explanation

VG247 and some other sites that probably swear a little less in their copy are running an editorial event called Wishlisted this week. It’s all about checking out just some of the cool demos different studios release of their upcoming indie or niche games, and this time around, Promise Mascot Agency is one of those.

I played PMA’s Next Fest demo a couple of weeks ago, for a preview you can read here, and during a recent interview that also touched on how ex-PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida and Kazuma Kiryu’s voice actor came to star in the game, I asked its devs what went into their decision to take part in this Next Fest.

“Next Fest, the first couple I think were very successful for the ones who were in it, and these days, there’s what? 14 [or] 15,000 demos in there? So, it’s absolutely wild and we know that a few will float to the top,” Kaizen Game Works’ technical director Phil Crabtree told me.

“But I think what’s important for us is that we mentioned before that it’s been quite hard to communicate exactly what [Promise Mascot Agency] is through just clips and trying to explain it in words,” he continued. “We want to let people try it out, and if they get to play it, then they understand what the heart of the game is.

“So for us, I think it’s gonna be a really important marketing beat, because it lets players see what it is they’re in for, get a little slice of what it is, just properly understand what the game is, and I can’t see how that’s a bad thing, really. It’s obviously a lot of work to get a demo ready, but for us, I’m hoping it’s going to be one of our bigger beats.”

“For indies, we have to do this, because the landscape of gaming news and opinion has changed so much [and] so rapidly, over the years,” game director Oli Clarke Smith explained. “People are relying on word of mouth a lot, and social media buzz.”

“Outlets are dying so rapidly,” he added. “It’s scary, it’s horrible, and we need sites like yours to stay around, inform people and talk to people. But as indies, we need to be able to just communicate what our game is to so many people, because there are so many games. For Next Fest, the thing that we heard is that with anything with Steam it’s all about gaming the numbers, and so you need to have a demo in there and get some traction on it. So, we’ve got to work out how to get those numbers up and try to create some buzz around it, we’ll see whether Next Fest helps with that or not.”

“It’s weird as well, because [with] Paradise Killer, we didn’t really have any numbers before it released,” art director Rachel Noy said. “You kind of assumed you’d make it, and then you’d go back to working in [an established] studio, but we were one of those rare cases – we spoke to a lot of people in the industry, and they said it’s really rare to have what we had, which was flat on launch, no one knew about it, and then the graph kind of went up [from there] over time, as people got to know the game. So, there’s like a little part of us that’s kind of hoping that might happen again.”

Here’s hoping that the multitude of Next Fest demos we’ll be covering as part of Wishlisted can help their developers attract the attention that they need, even if it’s a daunting task to try and break through the mass of noise, even if you’re something as unique and striking as Promise Mascot Agency.

If you fancy giving Promise Mascot Agency’s Steam Next Fest demo a go, you can find it here.