Ghost of The SEA 2024 - Post-mortem
A look back behind horror showacse powered by SEAGamethetic, VirtualSEA, and HorrorVisuals.
After the release of Southeast Asia Games Onward 2023, I actually have a thought to collaborate with the popular gimmick account I mean content creator Hurc or HorrorVisuals. I first approach him on February and see if he is interested. The rest is history.
The Origins
The name Ghost of The SEA was started because I wanted to put the name that correlates with SEA as in Southeast Asia. The first pick is just normal name that goes “Horrors of The SEA” but I feel like it doesn’t have those spices. Then I remember “Ghost of Sparda” title from God of War…”how about Ghost of The SEA?” then a lightbulb just came out.
Ghost of The SEA has been in my mind since January 2024. But I didn’t start quickly as at that time I was invited to collaborate and help Daybloom Project in promoting and finding SEA RPG Maker game developers for Southeast Asia RPG Maker Showcase 2024. The coincidence part is they actually inspired by Southeast Asia Games Onward 2023. They said if we have a general showcase for SEA, why don’t we try showcasing games from Southeast Asia that exclusive for RPG Maker creators only? well that’s another story to tell. Anyways back to Ghost of The SEA again, on 21st February 2024 SEAGamethetic along with HorroVisuals and VirtualSEA agreed to collaborate in Ghost of The SEA.
Long story short, on 23th March 2024 I announced the submission for for Ghost of The SEA. At the end, 46 games from Southeast Asia participated Ghost of The SEA. This showcase isn’t heavily curated much like Southeast Asia Games Onward. Why? because there’s only few horror games released in each year. Six months later, we released steam page of Ghost of The SEA - more specifically on 2nd Augusts 2024. Next, the broadcast video of Ghost of The SEA 2024 premiered on 23th Augusts 2024. The showcase managed to gain 500+ viewers.
The artwork of Ghost of The SEA comes from Rotibasie. We exchange contact when I made a tweet for looking for artist in SEA that can draw horror theme (it was on 7th February). What I forgot is twitter infested with scammers so I had to make the tweet ambigious so the scammers can’t tell between SEA this or sea that. That’s when the “Horror SEA” comes in, sure enough a lot of them doesn’t even share anything remotely Southeast Asia horror theme at all. Long story short - I wanted the artwork similiar to that particluar scene from Thailand horror film called Shutter (2004). However, the character is switched with pontianak or Kuntilanak or White Lady.
Analytics For Nerds
First, let’s take a look at the initial announcement through my tweet. The initial tweet managed to gain 88 likes and 36 reposts, with the overall post views comfortably sitting at 12.9k. The drawback I faced with this tweet was the lack of a more aggressive promotional push. Even so, I kept pushing until what I called miracle happens. On 2nd August 2024, I announced the Steam Page Sale for Ghost of The SEA.
The second tweet about the Steam Sale announcement reached 30.2k views with 278 likes and 170 reposts. That number of likes could already be considered impressive. But then, Josuiji Shinri from Holostars EN repost the tweet. Thanks to his repost, the Steam Page for Ghost of The SEA increase 5x in views, jumping from just 250,000 to 2,726,091 views. I was absolutely shocked to see these numbers, and I'm sure some game developers also managed to gain a boost from this massive visibility.
Josuiji Shinri and his fans played a significant role in showcasing Ghost of The SEA. After the showcase video aired, many people approached us, saying they were fans of Josuiji Shinri and praised the showcase, saying it was excellent. From a retrospective, this support was incredibly helpful. Even the backing from the HoloStars community, the Horror Games Community, VirtualSEA, and SEA game developers was extremely meaningful in ensuring this showcase gained traction.