Conduit Letter Relaunch: Tokyo Game Show Highlights and Techstars
Highlights from Japan's biggest video game conference, and Conduit's Techstars acceptance in our relaunched newsletter.
Letter: Relaunched
Welcome friends old and new to the relaunched Conduit Letter! It’s been months since you last heard from our Substack; we’re back every Monday covering three things:
Game industry highlights and insights
What Conduit did and learned last week
What we’re planning for next week
The newsletter will be punchy, punctual, and pertinent. If you want to better understand game developers, the game industry, and why we exist, this is the place.
We’re in Techstars!
If you’re in NYC, shoot me an email, and happy to make intros to the other founders.
Tokyo Game Show Highlights
Steam wishlists convert worse than ever: Wishlists on the popular PC game store Steam (136MM MAU) are the industry standard for pre-launch sales forecasts. However at TGS some developers quoted as low as 3% conversion from wishlist to sales of indie games. That means even with 100K wishlists (very hard to accomplish for an indie), the developer would sell 3,000 units, which at an average price of $19.99 is $60,000 for several years of work - before platform fees (30%) and publisher revenue share (sometimes > 50%). That. Is. Brutal... Is there a better way?
Japan’s game is still the big company: Dozens of universities attended Tokyo Game Show with large booths, and students showcasing games they’d developed. At first glance you’d think they were promoting the indie dream and looking for publishers, but they’re actually hoping a large company recruiter comes by and gives them a card. Japan’s game industry is still dominated by the large companies, and the Japanese indie scene is growing but nascent.
“Give me a black box that spits out marketing content”: We talked with 15 indie developers on the show floor. Those without a publisher do their marketing themselves taking away from dev time, or are paying $5-15K/month for an agency or contractor to manage it. When asked how they’d hope a marketing tool would work: “I just want drop off video, choose the tone, and get back what I need for my new trailer or Twitter post”. Target acquired!
What Conduit Did Last Week
Launched the Conduit ChatGPT Plugin, making game trailers and videos directly in chat. Type in a game, and get a finished video in 5-10 minutes. Testing ChatGPT organic discovery in the coming weeks.
Launched PRessy - automated gaming press kits and outreach queuing for developers. 80% of game teams fill out the form if we email them a link. Monitoring first-time usage and repeat requests to see if useful.
Automated Complete sub sign-up no longer requiring a demo call to pay and receive directions, and dropped Premium sub price to $39.99 from $99.99 to increase usage and go for volume over profitability in the near-term.
What’s Next
Tokyo Game Show Follow Ups: revised proposals for the several AAA game publishers, platforms, and media companies we met with at the show, and follow ups with the indie developers to maintain open communication as we design products.
Embedding in more Game Communities: Conduit team will spend more time in online game developer and game enthusiast community groups on X, Reddit, Discord, and YouTube to monitor upcoming trends and turn those into 1:1 customer discovery relationships.
Automated Customer Feedback: Conduit is building a way to automatically ask for feedback within 24 hours after users try the tool for the first time - an upgrade from doing it manually!
Until next week -
Kai Boyd
Co-Founder and CEO