Powering Stay Still 2’s Steam Wishlist Conquest with Zealy

By Annika B.

In just two weeks, Stay Still 2, an indie horror adventure game, gained an audience of over 500 gamers and increased their Steam Wishlist growth by +17% - all powered by Zealy.

How it started...

With the success of Stay Still, the indie game developer Galactic Crows set out to create a strong sequel. Just like other indie games, they had a limited budget but hoped to break through the ultra-competitive gaming market.

For the first three months of their pre-launch campaign, Galactic Crows used their social media audience to talk about the game.

• They used X (Twitter) to raise awareness with hashtags, Steam Key giveaways, and calls for content creators to create reviews
• They posted videos on YouTube to tell the chilling tale of the Stay Still Manor and tease designs from the game

But, they still ended up with the same results - low reach, engagement, and conversion. This is where Zealy came in with community-led growth to drive meaningful engagement.

The key issue

Game marketing is costly and intensive. Acquisition costs on traditional social media channels are rising and offer limited user data to optimize campaigns across multiple touchpoints. Secondly, audiences are bored with traditional marketing tactics.

Our objective

Gain awareness and drive gamers to save Stay Still 2 on their Steam Wishlist ahead of launch day.

At Zealy, the gaming community is at the heart of campaigns.

We help drive real business results through meaningful engagement for fans and actionable insights for game developers.

Zealy is a platform for communities to not only engage with users, but also interact with other communities. For indie game devs this is invaluable. Zealy enables games to be discovered by curious gamers, while strengthening their communities with entertaining content. Through questboards and gamified sprints, we reward user discovery and interaction with the game's universe.

Strategy Implementation

Welcome to the world of Stay Still 2.

We created a personalized questboard for Stay Still 2 based on the objectives of increasing awareness and engagement. Community members learned about game lore in an immersive setting, while engaging with the game across multiple touchpoints (Discord, Twitter, Steam).

Some of the quests we made were:

• To create actionable insights for the team, users were asked to leave qualitative comments on YouTube videos of Stay Still 2
• To get the community involved sustainably, users were invited to join the Galactic Crows Discord channel, follow their Twitter, and invite a friend to the Zealy community.
• To lead the lower funnel conversion, users were tasked to save the game on their Steam Wishlist

The Zealy questboard is designed to be an extension of your game. It’s your chance to immerse users in your game’s universe in an exciting and engaging way - with quests about game lore and told in the language of your game. Quests are written with the spirit of the game in mind, because this is what drives strong engagement and retention on our platform.

We had real prizes up for grabs during our Pre-launch Sprint.

To create urgency to join the questboard, we created a Pre-launch Sprint which lasted for two weeks. Community members who joined the questboard were tasked to accomplish as many quests. The top five winners received the following:

• 1 Steam key + 20$
• 1 Steam key + 10$
• 1 Steam key + 5$
• 1 Steam key
• 1 Steam key

Social Media Amplification

We participated in the #WishlistWednesday trend to announce our launch of the Stay Still 2 Questboard to the gaming community. On X, we reached out to our 160,000 followers for the announcement, reaching an audience 17x bigger than the Galactic Crows X account.

Stay Still 2 landed strong results across the funnel.

Increased Awareness and Engagement

Over 500 community members joined the Stay Still 2 questboard in just two weeks. 31% of members participated in the sprint, representing an engagement rate that’s averaging 6x more than Tiktok¹.

The average sprint participant also finished at least three quests, resulting in three different touchpoints with the game.

Pre-launch Steam Wishlist Growth by +17%

“The Haunting Wishlist” quest asked users to save Stay Still 2 on their Steam wishlist, which led to over 127 saves, representing +17% wishlist growth.

Continued Skyrocketing Organic Growth

In just two months, the community has grown to 1,500 members, with new users organically discovering the questboard and joining from other communities on Zealy. 49% of users are still accomplishing quests even without an ongoing sprint. This just goes to show how the questboard is generating sustainable organic traction because gamers are always looking for innovative and immersive ways to discover their next game.

Why was the Stay Still 2 Questboard a big success?

Through our engaging and interactive platform, we drove concrete growth for Stay Still 2's primary conversion metric (Steam Wishlist saves). Personalized gamification for communities at mass scale is the secret behind stickiness and driving meaningful engagement.

If you’re an indie game dev launching your latest game in the next few months, then Zealy is the perfect platform to grow your community, keep them hooked, and lead to instant Steam Wishlist saves. 🚀

To try Zealy for your project, get started by clicking here

References
¹ Cucu, E. (2023, April). [STUDY] Social Media Industry Benchmarks 2023 Reveal How TikTok's Engagement Rate Is Decreasing. Social Insider.