Poll: Femdemic PR (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

The Alpha release of v0.5.5 is done and I'm currently working on bugfixes, while this is happening something else has come up. Before you continue reading, I want to assure you that my main focus right now is on BMO TV. The Femdemic release is a test-case for a future release of that, but I want to really focus on BMO TV development next.

I still have a very difficult decision to make and wanted to hear your input. For the past month I've been looking for a PR agency to represent Femdemic upon Steam launch. This is common practice in the professional games industry, if you don't have a publisher that takes over that job. Most agencies weren't interested, though, possibly because of the NSFW nature of the game. I finally got back the response of an agency that looked promising. The downside is that they want about $12,000. That is both this and next month's development fund combined (after taxes), which of course is a lot to ask.

The question here of course is, how big of a gamble is this to maybe get a bigger return on Steam sales because of their service. They did seem to know what they're talking about, but then again the budget doesn't even contain any ad spending yet. That'd be extra.

Honestly, I have no idea if these numbers are competitive, but they are promising a lot of services. For reference, the last time I did this with my old indie company, we spend about half of what they're asking, but that company was completely new and then failed miserably. If the result of this company is similarly bad, at least I'd know to never trust these businesses ever again.

For the money, they're going to Play the game and do quality control checks, Send out two press releases, Handle all media relations with follow-ups etc, analyze the launch, write up a "strategies & tactics domument" whatever that means, for six weeks after launch they'll handle social media, do community management, community outreach, and handle the advertisements (spending on ads not included).

Needless to say, that sounds like a lot of work, and I've been through this before. It really is such a big workload, but then again, my previous game had won awards and stuff. I think Femdemic turned out great for an idle game, I really do, but it's a lot smaller in scale than my previous steam game. Can they really get a better result for this than somebody else did with an already critically acclaimed game? Then again, small scale is not necessarily a bad thing. It still offers a lot of hours of content and the gameplay loop here is a lot easier to understand. I think the hook for this game is good enough, but it's also not the best thing I've ever made, right? Is it worth that much money to spend on?
The Femdemic release is supposed to be mainly a test-case for a future BMO TV release, so I‘m really trying to find out as much as I can on how to handle the BMO TV release at some point. I think this is one of the most important reasons to do it.

There's another factor, that I'm considering. How positive will the press look upon our little bubble of tfgames? If they are going to cover it, are they actually going to be positive, or are they just going to make fun of us? Femdemic is a bit goofy, isn't it? But it's also more sex-positive than BMO TV, I guess, so it's more likely to get a less harsh reception. Still... Do I even want to be the one that brings the press here? Then again, my biggest goal with Rel.Pink is to help destigmatizing fetishes, so... this could either be a step towards that, or not, but it could also be one of those cases where I'll keep wondering what would have been if I had done it for the rest of my life.

It'd be possible to spend this month's and next month's money on the release, so the funds do exist. I actually have already paid for most graphics that are needed for the next two releases, but I guess I'd need to stretch things by another week or so during this time. Then again, if I were to handle the release all by myself, I'd have to put a lot of my efforts into the services that they'd be handling otherwise. It's completely impossible to know how much time that'd be, but I really really want to keep my full focus on BMO TV for the next months, and this would help me with that.

One thing you can do to help with the release right now is to wishlist the game on Steam. Steam has a very weird system of popularity threshholds where a game can only gain visibility on their page if it has a certain amount of popularity already, completely disregarding the quality of the game on the way. It's the free enterprise economy at it's finest, and also total bullshit, but the only way to make the game visible is to gain about four thousand more wishlists before release. Yeah, as if, but we can try, so please consider helping towards that goal:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2195390/Femdemic__An_Idle_World_Feminization_Game/

So... What do you think? I've given you almost all of the information and thoughts I have on the matter. I'm not going to follow the result of the poll strictly, but I want to see the general community feeling about this. I consider this a really really difficult decision, so I want to do it together with you all.

Best,
Rel

Update: One more thing I forgot to mention is that the Femdemic release is supposed to be mainly a test-case for a future BMO TV release, so I added that above. Can't believe I forgot that, since it's the main reason I'm doing this.