Go-To-Market Breakdown: Another Crab's Treasure
push to talk #31 // what can video game marketers learn from aggro crab's GTM approach?
Game marketing is an incestuous business. There are only so many studios and marketing teams. So we all steal ideas from each other.
But it’s easy to only focus on what the big-name games are doing. It’s like: Did you hear how much they paid Shroud to stream that? or: Wow, they really added the Pope to Multiversus? I didn’t know Roman Catholicism is a Warner Bros. IP!
Meanwhile, smaller indie studios are reaching millions of players with savvy marketing moves that go unnoticed by the broader games industry. What could we learn from the scrappy underdogs, if we pay closer attention?
Let’s find out.
Today we’re talking about the Seattle-based Aggro Crab, makers of breakout indie hit Another Crab’s Treasure.
Admittedly, ACT isn’t huge by AAA studio standards. The game retails for $29.99 and has probably sold a little north of 500k units1 since it launched on PC and consoles this April.
But Aggro Crab self-published,2 and the studio is lean: only 11 full-time employees made up the core team on ACT. So… do the math: If you’re grossing over $1 million per full-time dev, that’s a hit game. But that’s not why I think Another Crab’s Treasure is worth talking about. There’s a lot going on with this game, particularly from a marketing lens.
There are a few points I’ll dig into below. But the TL;DR is:
Rock-Solid Positioning: Another Crab’s Treasure is an amazingly polished and well-positioned take on the Dark Souls / Elden Ring formula. It’s also funny, which is otherwise unheard of in the soulslike genre.
Marketing-Conscious Design: The game was “designed for marketing” from the very beginning, with a design philosophy that focuses on accessibility in a way that dramatically differentiates it from other soulslikes.
TikTok Mastery: ACT community manager Paige Wilson put in serious reps on TikTok and X (social media managers should definitely check out this part).
I really believe this is a brilliant, top-tier dev team. And their approach to Another Crab’s Treasure holds lessons for the rest of us.
So let’s dive in.
Building Confidence by Going Under the Waves
Aggro Crab’s first title was Going Under (2020), a dungeon crawler where you play as an unpaid marketing intern at a carbonated meal replacement startup. The video above does a better job of summarizing it than I could. The game is really good! And cool!
But it wasn’t a breakout hit. The Aggro Crab team calls it a “modest” success, and the fact that the game has a couple thousand reviews on Steam suggests it probably paid for its dev costs. Caelan Pollock, creative director on Another Crab’s Treasure, told Push to Talk that “Although Going Under didn't make anyone rich, it absolutely paved the way in terms of our understanding of what an Aggro Crab game generally represent.”
Importantly, Pollock says, Aggro Crab’s experience with the game gave them a strong signal that helped the studio understand its audience.
“We generally make T-rated games,” Pollock says. “We're not super interested in excessive blood and gore, but we don't hold back on mature themes or dirty jokes. And there's obviously a strong social commentary in both Going Under and Another Crab's Treasure. It taught us first and foremost that there's a market for the general vibe of our games.”
It was, in other words, a confidence-building exercise. Says Pollock: “We really didn't pull any punches on the development and marketing of ACT because we already knew these were elements that fans reacted really strongly to and had a lot of fun rallying around.”
The first way that well-earned confidence manifested was in the game’s positioning and thematic, which the Aggro Crab team has unironically described as “Darkbob Soulspants.”
1) He Lives in a Plastic Bag Under the Sea (Positioning)
Every game dev wants to make something special. Almost nobody is happy pumping out pale imitations of better games that came before. And so a lot of devs fall into a trap of making games that they themselves have trouble describing.
This is the first place that many go-to-market plans fail, because you need a simple way to describe your game, and you probably need to be able to reference existing genres or IPs in order for it to make sense to players. If you do manage to nail a clear positioning, players will get it—which is great for word-of-mouth growth because it makes it easier for them to advocate for the game and sell it to their friends.
The Aggro Crab team understands this deeply, and they got very good at describing Another Crab’s Treasure in super crisp, clever phrases. They told one interviewer that ACT is like Dark Souls meets Spongebob Squarepants, or, alternatively, it’s their vision of what it would be like if Nintendo made a Souls game.3
The latter pitch in particular was super sticky for players that heard it:
This is what it looks like when you’ve nailed your positioning. It doesn’t mean you’re going to sell 10 million copies, but it means your chosen audience gets it, which is a non-negotiable prerequisite for selling lots of anything.
But it’s not just that the Aggro Crab team was good at talking about this game. They also built the game itself specifically to be marketable.
2) Marketing-Conscious Design
“I think an underrated part of what has made Aggro Crab's games successful so far is the fact that we design for marketing,” says Caelan Pollock.
In practice, that means the Aggro Crab team thinks about the GTM plan early on the in the dev cycle.
“We're beginning to form that plan in the very earliest stages of brainstorming and pitching,” says Pollock. “Of course, we're making art that we're proud of, but the ideas that end up making it to production are the ones that we feel confident are going to find an audience. We tend to gravitate towards pitches with a really catchy one-sentence hook, ‘Dark Souls but you're a crab’ being an obvious example.”
For ACT, the team had an insight that they felt would give them an edge: soulslikes are… kinda complicated.
“I think Nintendo’s inspiration has a lot to do with the simplicity of the game's design,” Pollock says. “Well, the game isn't that simple. But at least, compared to a FromSoftware title. Part of that's due to scope issues—we simply didn't have the bandwidth to implement a huge variety of consumable items or weapons. But we were also deliberate about this. Soulslikes are notoriously hard for new players to break into, not just because of their difficulty and oppressive atmosphere, but because of the complexity of their systems.”
The Aggro Crab team explicitly didn’t want ACT players to need knowledge of Soulslikes to enjoy or understand the game, “so every time we had an opportunity to hack off a complex system entirely, we took it.”
The “marketing conscious” approach the Aggro Crab team took extends far beyond the “accessibility” angle. The game’s dialogue, character design, voice acting, and even its “shell” powerups are all goofy and—for lack of a better word—memey in a way that begs you to share the game.
Which is part of the reason this game bangs on TikTok.
3) TikTok Mastery
This part is less of an analysis piece and more of a homework assignment.
For anyone that wants to get better at social media marketing: You need to go look at what Paige Wilson and the rest of the Aggro Crab team did on TikTok.
Literarily go watch like 200 videos. They made hundreds, starting around two years before Another Crab’s Treasure released. Some of them got tens of thousands of views, some got hundreds of thousands, and some got millions. But every single one of them was valuable because they weren’t just spamming random memes. Wilson and co used the platform to establish a real dialogue with their audience.
Some of the posts are just Wilson responding to questions from the comments, and sometimes they’re introducing a new feature in direct response to a community member. At its best, the Aggro Crab team used TikTok to tease people with feature ideas so silly that no game developer would really ship it.
Except then they do it.
Aggro Crab’s Paige Wilson says her favorite content types to make are the behind-the-scenes gag videos where the team teases ridiculous or funny features like these.
“Our biggest marketing W's had to be anything that gave the community a look behind the curtain into development,” Wilson says. “Involving them in the process gave them something to root for. Whether it was asking their thoughts on adding a gun to the game, or how we thought it was funny to add Anor Londo into the game for an April Fools joke—the community always felt like they were right along side us the whole way.”
Wilson says the process for generating these content ideas was designed to not take time away from dev cycles. “The secret to a lot of those gags are that we often already had the asset in the game, so they made a great narrative for content without drawing too much brainpower from the rest of the team,” she says.
Wilson says TikTok and Twitter in particular were good platforms for Aggro Crab because the studio’s “unprofessional” brand voice matched those audiences better. And the value generated by the team’s investment in those channels is long-lasting.
“It’s not just about getting eyeballs on Another Crab's Treasure, but also for a solid community post-launch,” she says. “Having the platform we built made it easier to keep in touch with players for roadmaps, updates and general news about what we at Aggro Crab have going on.”
Caelan Pollock says that the Another Crab’s Treasure team is now hard at work on the next Aggro Crab “super secret” game.
It’s going to be one to watch.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go try to convince my coworkers we need to add one-shot glocks to our next game. I’m just saying! It worked for Goldeneye.
See you next Friday.
When I reached out to the Aggro Crab team for this story, they told me they’ll publish updated sales figures soon.
The development of ACT was funded at least in part by Kowloon Nights.
This is still not as funny as the positioning for Lies of P, which as best I can tell is “Hey like Dark Souls? Here’s another one of those but it’s about Pinocchio.”
bookmarked Aggro Crab TikTok for future reference