The Finals Crossed The Streams
A blend of traditional and community-oriented marketing led to a million wishlists.
Embark Studios’ The Finals is setting the world on fire. Its Steam Playtest peaked at 267,000 consecutive players and is still breaking 200,000 players every Steam primetime since its open beta started on October 26. It has the most wishlists on Steam. But how they got there is more community-oriented than you might expect.
Sure, they threw their financial weight around. But they also did some smart things that you should start doing right now.
We won’t go too far back, but some brief history: Embark was founded in 2018 and garnered some press in early 2019 with a stunning environmental tech demo.
They would go on to share that they had multiple projects in development and announce ARC Raiders, as their first game, in late 2021 at the Game Awards. In August of 2022, they delayed ARC Raiders in order to focus on bringing The Finals, nee Project Discovery, to market in 2023.
Two weeks after making ARC’s delay public, The Finals enjoyed its public debut, also at the Game Awards.
Pretty traditional so far, right? Spend a lot of time and money on a very established genre. Throw six figures at Geoff Keighley’s empire of hype. Show nothing that’s not manicured and approved by seven different brand managers. No FPS franchise with a $100+MM budget has ever failed to make $1b in its lifetime. Snore. I’d forgive you for turning away at this point.
But since then, they’ve given us a masterclass in blending the powers of traditional and community-first marketing.
Here’s what I mean:
They recognized the power of early feedback at a time when the game was still highly fungible. They began a private playtest program in March of 2022, a full six months ahead of announcing The Finals. Their goal? “See how people who aren’t part of our development teams interact with our games, and get honest outside feedback.”
They’ve developed in the open. They let people stream the Closed Beta launch. And that was just the start.
If you check out The Finals’ twitter, their content gets incredible during Closed Beta. They’re showing gameplay. They’re sharing patch note snippets. They’re celebrating the beta community publicly. Is it over-produced and beautiful? Yes. Is it infrequent and a little broadcasty? Yes. But they’re showing their work and bringing everyone along for the ride.
Some other stuff that may read as table stakes to us, but is still pretty savvy:
They gave people stuff to do. They announced on August 22. The Steam page was up and ready for wishlisting the same day. They went into closed alpha a month later and kept talking.
They didn’t create their own platform. Their website is two pages, and one exists to point you to Steam or the PlayStation and Xbox stores.
They’ve probably normalized the Steam Playtest feature. I’ve personally seen the confusion Steam’s UX can cause, especially since signing up for a playtest requires a customer to click a green button underneath another green button.
Pushing this many interested players into a wonky flow is good for everyone else, and it’s good for Embark, too. That other green button I mentioned? That’s the “Add to Wishlist” button. Guess which game is sitting at well over a million wishlists?