We had the opportunity to ask a few questions to Antony Christoulakis, creative director of Enshrouded, one of the biggest successes of the first half of the year.
In just a few months, Enshrouded has become one of the games with the most wishlists on Steam. What was your strategy to attract players before the game's release?
Being our own publisher has given us the opportunity to refine our communication, to be more efficient, to specialize around the license Enshrouded and our needs. One of the challenges was bringing Enshrouded to players as the game combines elements of many different games that were their own genres but are now interwoven into the world of Embervale. As such, the game's videos and trailers were carefully crafted, detailing the game's concepts, inspirations, and features to the public over time from the announcement to the release of Early Access. All of this was helpful in giving people time to (re)discover us and get interested in the game. Additionally, before the launch of Early Access, the Steam Neo Fest and the release of the demo were opportunities for players to discover for themselves everything Enshrouded had to offer and its full potential. Overall, many small pieces are coming together to ensure the successful launch of a EAand you also need to surround yourself with the right team and the right partners, it's a team effort.
You are publishing the game yourself. Why did you decide to forgo a traditional publisher? What are the advantages of this approach?
It was a tough decision to self-publish Enshrouded. It was very important for us to control the license and be able to make our own decisions about development. Communicating directly with our community of players and adjusting our internal roadmap accordingly was a key factor. On the other hand, we didn’t have a lot of experience as a publisher when we started and it’s still a small internal team that handles publishing, so going with self-publishing was a risky choice. Fortunately, we’ve had great success with our Early Access so far, so we have all the resources we need to develop and publish Enshrouded for years to come. It’s cool to be independent, but it’s definitely interesting to work with a publisher that obviously has more experience and resources to push a new license and gain the visibility that’s required in today’s crowded market.
Enshrouded's success was partly overshadowed by the surprise successes of Palworld and Helldivers 2. Do you think those two games affected Enshrouded's success?
It's hard to say what an alternate universe would have looked like. Sure, a lot of attention has been paid to those other titles (which are great games and deserve the attention). We still had a very strong launch with Enshrouded. So far, we've reached almost 3 million players and that's after only 6 months in Early Access. Maybe the success of Palworld even helped us, because it probably introduced many new players to the survival genre.
Enshrouded now has just under 10,000 daily players on Steam. Are you happy with that number? Do you have a strategy to encourage players to come back to the game?
This is quite satisfying for us. We think the game has already had some very good content and features, but we plan to expand and refine it in the years to come. It's normal to move on to another game at some point and come back to it later when new content and features have been added, at least that's the experience I've had playing other survival games. We're not a game PvP match-based, where a high number of concurrent players is a much more important indicator. Regardless, we have several features on our roadmap that I hope will help with this, like global events, content sharing, and finding people to play with in-game, for example.
You have launched a platform allowing players to suggest improvements to the game. How has this platform contributed to you?
We have a long list of things we want to change, tweak, or add to the game, but hearing from players has been incredibly important to us. We’re truly grateful for the thousands of suggestions and votes, as they help us align our own plans with what matters most to our community. Thankfully, there are a lot of similarities, but it’s even more important to see the issues we didn’t think about when we launched the game. “Personal Quest Progression” is a good example. We didn’t consider it internally at launch, but we completely understand the thinking behind it and tried to address it in our latest update. We’ll continue to look at all sources of feedback. feedbackthe voting board (because it gives us a very good overview), our discord, reddit and other places, because it is very important to develop and refine the game together, so please, don't stop sharing your feedback with us 🙂
A new biome was added in the last major update. Can you tell us how many more biomes you plan to add before version 1.0 of the game?
Unfortunately, I can't reveal them yet (one is pretty obvious anyway), but we're planning on adding three more major regions to the game. The last update was more of a sub-biome in that sense. We'll also be expanding the map slightly. But for sure, we'll be adding content and features to the game beyond our 1.0.
Overall, what are you planning to add in the upcoming updates to Enshrouded over the next few months? And beyond that?
We have our public roadmap for upcoming features, but it will be updated beyond 2024 at some point. We are currently working on three updates in parallel. Each of them has a different focus, and we will start sharing more information about the next one very soon.