How SULFUR sold over 80k copies with the help of content creators
RESULTS
80k copies sold
Perfect Random's debut title SULFUR sold over 80k copies on Steam
1,3M+ video views
Coverage from hundreds of unique creators on YouTube worldwide
455k+ hours watched
Over 1,8k Twitch creators streamed SULFUR since EA launch
Company overview
A small indie studio making heartful, goofy, and pretentious interactive entertainment. The studio's debut title is , a single-player FPS taking inspiration from old-school and modern classic shooters.
Game overview
SULFUR is a modern old-school action-adventure: Outsmart enemies, find treasure, improve weapons, harness powers. Delve deeper, find answers, make it end.
Products used
Marketing Insights, Paid Quests, Key Campaigns
The Challenge:
Perfect Random is a small indie studio from Sweden with just four developers behind their debut title, SULFUR, a single-player FPS taking inspiration from our favorite old-school and modern classic shooters.
Being a small indie team, Perfect Random had to face a massive challenge as both their studio and their game are brand new. This meant not only SULFUR needed visibility in an extremely competitive market, but also maintain any gained player interest over a long time. This is extra hard when you operate with a very tight budget, as is the nature of indie games, and when you also have to build trust with your potential player base.
While the team is made up of experienced and passionate developers, that's rarely ever enough for a success story like SULFUR. This is why they opted to use Lurkit quite early on their marketing and promotional efforts.
I don't know how we would have reached as many people without Lurkit. When I check the store page traffic, the majority of traffic is within Steam of course, that's just how Steam works, but to get over the threshold algorithmically you need outside traffic to trigger it. Lurkit was great for triggering Steam algorithms."
Anton Albiin, Business Developer, Marketing and Design @Perfect Random
The Solution:
Early testing period was a huge success for the studio. They gained valuable feedback from experienced creators and were able to better identify what's working and what not for SULFUR. Being passionate gamers and even better developers themselves, they iterated and created a new build for Steam Next Fest - October Edition. Anton launched a paid campaign and combined it with a key campaign to boost visibility of SULFUR during the Next Fest.
While organic coverage via free keys (Lurkit's tech allows sending out demos as performance trackable keys) often outperforms what you earn form paid activations, having the say in and when and where and for how long the content will be makes a huge difference in triggering algorithmic boosts, whether they be on Steam, Twitch or YouTube. Combining these two powerful activations together, the game wrapped up the festival becoming a Top 50 most played demo.
If I have to focus on something for marketing games as an indie developer, it would definitely be streamers. It's the most measurable outcome and that's where I'd put my money. And without Lurkit's platform, this would have been hard, to get a hold of all these content creators and booking them."
Later on, the studio used Lurkit to scale their operation and find more ideal content creators for SULFUR across Twitch and YouTube. The game has a uniquely stylistic and goofy art style which is combined with detailed and satisfying combat, and they found thousands of creators who love games that are similar to SULFUR's core pillars and art style. Lurkit having over 100k+ verified content creators played a big part in creating buzz around SULFUR's early access release and coverage.
The Results
455k
Hours watched on Twitch since Early Access launch
1,32M
Views on YouTube since Early Access launch
80k+
Copies sold on Steam since Early Access launch
SULFUR launched with over 160k wishlists on Steam and sold over 80k copies by the time holiday season arrived. The game is currently in early access, but believe us when we say it, it's got quite a lot of fun content to burn through. Given the game's extraction looter pillar, you'll find yourself doing reruns very often, yet still enjoying every run as you have quite a number of weapons, modifications, upgrades and armors to experience and multiple stages. Plus, Perfect Random regularly drop more new content for the game. SULFUR is already building a very dedicated a "congregation".
SULFUR generated over 455k hours watched on Twitch and over 1,3M views on YouTube since its early access launch. While these numbers aren't mega hit levels, they're more than enough to show that SULFUR was discovered by a decent number of players through content creators and there's genuine interest toward the game.
There's also a healthy amount of creator coverage around the game even months after its release, and we see spikes whenever there's new content coming. Needless to say, Lurkit expects a big spike in visibility again when the game fully releases and reaches new audiences when it hits other platforms.
The game peaked at 2,793 concurrent players, two days after its early access launch and player numbers linger around 300 to 350 nowadays. However, small content drops from Perfect Random managed to get the number go up above 1,000 twice, meaning players are eager to return whenever there's something new to try out.
Whoever told me about Lurkit was absolutely right about it. Lurkit has been great and I think, the best way for us to do influencer marketing efficiently. I tell everybody to just use Lurkit."
If you are not a PC gamer, worry not, for SULFUR will arrive on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Nintendo Switch in 2025. Lurkit will be a proud partner of Perfect Random when the game releases across these platforms.
