Friday the 13th: The Game‘s co-creator Wes Keltner recently sat down with gamesindustry.biz to talk about this incredible game that, despite all of the technical issues at launch, has managed to take off. Keltner revealed that Friday the 13th has managed to sell over 1.8 million copies since launch, which is no small feat for a game developed by a team of 30 people. Don’t be fooled by all of the bitter comments you read online; this game is a hit, and it’s going to keep selling.
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So what happened at launch? When the game came out and fans were eager to hop online and start slashing their friends, everything just sputtered and stopped. Servers crashed, and no one was able to play the game that they had just paid for. Everyone was pretty pissed, and Keltner completely owned up to his team’s mistakes. They simply weren’t prepared for the number of players who all dove in at the same time.
“We looked at our player numbers from the beta, along with pre-orders and then added a 30% cushion,” he said. “That’s how we set up our servers and database for launch. We were soooo wrong. 100,000 players hit us in the first 20 minutes, and our servers melted. Our first weekend was chaos. The entire team slept at their desks trying to keep up with demand. It’s an experience I’ll never forget. With our small budget, we couldn’t afford a large scale QA effort. We did a PC beta, and gleaned a lot of great data from that. But again, we weren’t ready for the tidal wave of players.”
The disastrous launch led to several bad reviews from the press, but interestingly, those negative reviews didn’t seem to affect sales. Why is that?
How did Friday the 13th: The Game Rise Above its Negative Reviews?
Keltner believes that a number of factors poured into this game’s shocking success. The industry culture is changing, and consumers are more willing to make their buying decisions based on gameplay streams from their favorite Twitch channel than on a metacritic score.
“I think it’s less about a mismatch and more about a complete upheaval of how consumers research and ultimately decide on purchasing a game. Metacritic scores used to be the lifeblood of games. For today’s consumer, it’s not as relevant,” Keltner says.
“As for reviews and feedback, many of the low scores and negative impressions were based on performance and server issues, and not gameplay. At the end of the day it’s difficult to rate a game highly if it isn’t functioning as intended. So from a design perspective, it is great to know we succeeded. Looking at every single one of those reviews; it becomes obvious that people like the game, they enjoy playing.
“We can hold our head up high knowing that we created a fun game. The challenge now becomes a technical one. Once the technical issues get ironed out, we feel like consumers will get to experience our full vision. There’s also a rise in ‘Community Multiplayer Games’ which only a handful of games are focusing on right now and they are proving to be a success and a shift in the industry.”
Keltner also gave a really intimate look into what it’s like pitching to investors, and how game publishers don’t always know what’s right.
What’s Next for Friday the 13th?
Keltner says that they’re still working hard on this game for you. “Our number one priority right now is stability and squashing bugs,” he says. “That’s what all of our engineers are focusing on. We’ve also nearly doubled our team size to help with this issue. But our content/art teams are free to work on new content, and that’s what we’ve been doing. Players can expect new maps, characters, Easter eggs and other great updates in the near future. I think fans are really going to enjoy what we have planned, as some of this content comes directly from player feedback/requests, while some others are surprises we’ve had up our sleeves for several months now.”
So what do you think about Friday the 13th: The Game? Have you been having fun, or do you regret your purchase? Have you been telling your friends about this one? Weigh in on the poll below and show the game some love.
