The Pirate Bay Bundle: the gory details
Where to even begin? At the beginning I suppose.
It has been a long time passion (obsession?) of mine to put ignored freeware games in front of new sets of eyes. In the past I have scratched that itch with Underrated Indie Games on youtube and subsequently Oddities on tumblr.
I always get new ideas for media projects to get these videogames out there and I had long wanted to work on something more ambitious.
Here's the original tweet when the idea first came to me.
It took me until the 8th of November (around a month) to work up the courage to shoot off my first e-mail and get the ball rolling. At first I thought it was only going to take three weeks, maybe a month max.
Over an estimated 1,000 e-mails later, I released the trailer on March 10th and by the time I finally released the bundle... almost four months had elapsed. To say that I underestimated this beast would be a understatement.
Within those four months, I spent weekend mornings (and the occasional week night), sending e-mails, waiting for replies, trying to obtain working builds of games that would normally only run in a browser and slowly working on other parts of the bundle such as the trailer, the interviews, the poster, the credits txt file and coming up with a 'plan' to promote it when it was finished.
I assume some folks either weren't interested, ignored me, were too busy, didn't want to be associated with the Pirate Bay, didn't want their games hosted elsewhere or thought it was a scam (when you don't receive replies, the only option you have is to come up with a list of possibilities in your head).
Of all the e-mails I sent, I only got one rejection.
In the thick of those four months, I felt utterly lost. There were many times that I severely doubted reaching the finish line. Even if I did finish, I also had doubts as to whether all the effort would pay off.
Towards the final stretch, I literally had to force myself to work on the bundle because I knew I would use any excuse to become distracted (I played a lot of Escape the Red Giant, which coincidentally is where I obtained the soundtrack for the trailer).
When I finally did release the bundle, it was a huge weight off my shoulders. My expectations were modest.
I expected maybe 100 - 150 retweets (I wanted 200) and some nice comments thrown my way. I wanted the bundle downloaded 1,000 times but certainly had no expectations of breaking this.
The success that was to come to was... unexpected. I was ill prepared.
It went viral on Reddit, got re-tumblr'd by Wil Wheaton, got featured on youtube show Machinima and also received coverage from numerous websites including Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Kotaku, Indiegames.com, Indie Statik, TIGTumblr, Kotaku Australia, Kill Screen, PC Gamer and many others I'm not very familiar with or have never heard of.
In a recent unexpected turn it is being featured prominently on the front page of The Pirate Bay.
The release tweet has to date, kindly been retweeted 194 times and the bundle has been tweeted about hundreds of times outside of this. Folks on youtube have started doing LP's of some of the games from the bundle.
The original tumblr post has 1,425 notes, at a guess largely boosted by Wil Wheaton's reblog.
The trailer is creeping towards 90k views on youtube.
It's all more than a little surreal to me.
I have no idea how many times the bundle has been downloaded. On several occasions, having peaked at the Pirate Bay page, I noticed it was seeded by well over 1,000 folks (1,946 as I'm editing this), so I figure it has been downloaded at least a few thousand times (possibly a lot more?).
I have worked on media projects that have been moderately successful. But nothing like this. Going viral is completely new to me, so for the last week my feet have been hovering above ground level and are only I'm only just now planting them on the ground.
But anyways, the point of this post wasn't just to pat myself on the back.
When I come up with an idea that excites me, I have a bad habit of jumping in at the deep end and not bothering with a written down plan. I vaguely plan things in my head and forget them and by the time I remember them it's too late.
If I had a mapped out plan, I possibly could have shaved a month off the release date (maybe a little more).
Lack of knowledge, regarding torrents.
Before release day, I had never hosted a torrent before. I looked up a guide on how to create a torrent a couple of days before release and only skimmed over it.
I should have done my homework. On release day, after leaving my computer on until 3 in the afternoon, there were 18 seeders. Thinking these 18 folks had the full torrent, I switched my computer off.
An hour or so later, I was receiving twitter notifications on my phone that downloads were stuck at 44%. At first I thought that it might be only a few folks with bad internet connections but after receiving confirmation from others, I realized I had a problem on my hands.
I switched my computer back on and checked Pirate Bay. To my horror, over 1,000 folks were trying to download the torrent. It took a few hours for a some folks to complete their downloads and start seeding. By 10 pm, I figured I was safe (I think there were around 300 seeders).
After a decent number of folks had downloaded the torrent, I started noticing the occasional comment in regards to certain games containing viruses. I had scanned the bundle before release with Avast (with updated definitions) and it came up blank so I thought I was safe. Apparently not.
Some folks had 2 or 3 different virus scanners running and a few of the games reported viruses. A few folks refused to download the torrent based on seeing what others had said. I fear the games that did report viruses also got less plays than the others.
I like to think the reports were false positives but have no way to prove or disprove it.
The Press List and Promotion
The press list I put together was half-hearted. I should have more comprehensively researched what gaming websites existed. I don't feel like I spread my 'net' far enough.
I also felt that the e-mail I sent out to the press was too formal and lacked details.
..on the whole, I feel mostly positive about the complete experience. I feel like its success was earned.
The most important thing for me was to get this in front of as many eyes as possible so that the games within the bundle would be played as many times as possible. My heart swells when I think of how many folks downloaded and possible tried out some of these wonderful little games.
Someone made the comment that they felt this bundle was a gimmick. I have thought a lot about this and haven't decided one way or the other. If it is and it succeeded in getting weird, little videogames in front of many fresh sets of eyes, than that is something I am completely at ease with.
Some folks have asked if I will do another bundle. I am leaning towards yes but don't want to commit to anything just yet. I have a lot of ideas in regards to ways I can change up the format.
There are some other projects I might explore after I have a rest, such as the readme.txt jam and a possible game jam.
I hope you enjoyed The Pirate Bay Bundle.
