This is a review by a man named Hayden. Hayden worked for a company in a big building where he was employee number…he didn’t know. The company had lost count. Hayden’s job was simple. He sat at his desk and pushed buttons on a keyboard. These buttons made articles. Sometimes, these articles were about video games.

Hayden played many video games. Some he liked. Most he felt ambivalent about. Companies kept releasing games though, so Hayden kept playing them. This is what Hayden did every day of every month of every year, and though others might have considered it a gigantic waste of time, Hayden sometimes enjoyed it.


He pressed the buttons. He moved the mouse. The game, actually thousands of lines of code, reacted to what Hayden did. Sometimes Hayden won the game. Other times the computer outsmarted his weak brain and he lost.

And then one day something very peculiar happened. Something that would forever change Hayden. Something he would never forget. He had been playing a game called the Stanley Parable for nearly half an hour when he realized he could neither win nor lose this game. Hayden had never played a game like this before, and at first it scared him. Some people claimed it was “not a game,” but Hayden found that claim slightly archaic. He relished games with obscure goals, with no guns, with something to say. Not that guns and story are necessarily mutually exclusive but…

Hayden thought about this more. No, not mutually exclusive, but there are only so many messages you can send with a straight face and a gun in your hand.

“That’s neither here nor there,” thought Hayden. What was here and/or there was that The Stanley Parable is quite unique.


Or so Hayden believed. He was, of course, unaware of the quite similar game released by a man actually named Stanley in the Eltox dimension. Unfortunately, Hayden was woefully unable to see outside his own dimension—a condition, dear reader, I’m sure you can agree is a damn shame.

So Hayden played The Stanley Parable, delighted at just how unique the game was—though, as mentioned, unaware of the game it resembled in a parallel universe. “This game is positively inspired,” Hayden thought.

And so as Hayden began writing the eighth paragraph—or was it the ninth?—of this review he thought about…

Nothing. Writer’s block.

But as he began the tenth—or was it the eleventh?—paragraph, he realized he should probably explain what The Stanley Parable is. Its essence. That’s presumably why people read these reviews, though Hayden secretly hoped they read it just to see if he ever mentioned the fantastic song “Left of the Dial” by The Replacements. This hope was slightly absurd, since Hayden had never mentioned this song in any of his articles.

Except this one. Damn. Congratulations, readers. You win a prize. Your prize is waiting on the doorstep now.

Did you find it? Ah, too bad. Your nosy neighbor must have stolen it. I never did trust her. Neither would Hayden, for that matter, had he ever met her.


Hayden stopped writing as sirens went by outside. Despite his clean legal record, he still feared there’d been some huge misunderstanding—that the cops were on their way to him.

The sirens left.

Where was he? “Where Hayden was” was in the middle of his cramped apartment, thinking about The Stanley Parable.

Okay! So we're a few days out from the launch of the Stanley Parable, and I wanted to take a minute to talk about what happened, what went right, what we did, and lessons from this launch that might help others with their own game development and marketing.

First up: The Stanley Parable just crossed 100k units sold! This is a lot more than we were expecting, and the shock of a successful launch may have been one of its biggest challenges. Some of the repercussions of this success is affected by business decisions we made 18-24 months ago, long before we ever thought this was going to make any real money! First and foremost, this taught us a single and invaluable lesson: do not expect success, but be prepared in case it happens.

I'd like to take a look back at specifically some of the things that we did, especially in the last few months of development, to cultivate and prepare for a successful launch:

Trailers
Not much to say here except that we released 5 trailers over the course of the game's development, and not one of them contains any substantial actual footage of the game. This is going to be a running theme throughout this postmortem: if you make the marketing material interesting on its own, it's irrelevant whether it "sells" your game. Our focus was always on creating content that was on its own fun for people to experience and to be a part of, with essentially 0% of the design aimed at trying to get the game to sell.

The Demo
The idea of a demo seemed obvious at the time. Since our game was very difficult to talk about without spoiling, why not simply make an extra piece of game in the spirit of the main game to convey what it's about! Most of the assets in the demo are re-used from the main game, so very little time was spent on content creation. I was writing it in the background for a few months, and William spent about 3 weeks building the version you can play now.

The end result, in my opinion, was very worth it. I don't yet have specific numbers, but we estimate that 150k-200k people have played the demo since it launched. It received its own run of news on most major news sites, the demo alone received video previews and was streamed by many high traffic Let's Players. Copies of the demo were sent to all of these outlets about a week before it launched.

Essentially we got the press equivalent of two video game launches. And we cheated, since we re-purposed most of the assets that we were using for the main game. All that it took was a creative remix of those resources and press outlets, youtubers and people all over social media were eager to talk about it. Plus, because the demo was free, this was essentially the equivalent of an artist putting out free work to gain attention and then monetizing later work once there's an established audience, except we did that whole process in a week. The quick turnaround means that we could channel all of the energy from the demo straight into the main game.

I know that it's easy to ask whether other developers have the time and resources to develop an entire second product while working on the first. To be sure, not everyone will have the ability to do this, nor does this approach work for every style of game. But let me propose: we spent two years making The Stanley Parable. For an extra two months work, we get an entire second game's worth of press. That seems like too good a deal to risk going without.