Omori has been a fun and interesting game to play. It has some unique aspects and a weird winning strategy around streaming that could be useful if applied more in the indie scene.
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Out of a million games, why did we pick Omori as our first game to analyze and play together? Two things were very interesting since the beginning about this game: its concept and development process, and its success on Steam.
Omori was created by OMOCAT, which started as a one-person artist name but has evolved in recent years (actually since Omori development) into a LA-based art studio. Omori, the main character of the game, was initially presented by OMOCAT via her blog. After a while OMOCAT figured out that Omori’s story was good enough to do something bigger and she started writing a graphic novel, but ultimately changed her mind and transformed its concept into a video game. A Kickstarter project was launched in April 2014 with an initial goal of $22,000 to fund the game: the target was reached in less than 30 hours and OMOCAT got a total funding of $203,301 from almost 6,000 people (the only stretched goal that wasn’t reached was a PS Vita version of the game, at $250,000 - funny, right?).
The initial launch was supposed to be in May 2015, but got many delays (and a threat to sue OMOCAT because of lack of communications to her backers) and finally launched in December 2020 via Steam.
Moreover, after my brother (the game designer) proposed to me (the business guy) to play this game, I took a look at Steam data. Omori belongs to a rich genre of story-driven RPGs made with RPG Maker, and there are many examples of games with similar themes (Yume Nikki, Lisa: The Painful, Undertale, Mother 3, and many others), but Omori numbers are WAY better than similar games on the store. Below a chart with the number of daily players on Steam for Omori and some similar games:
For more info about how I picked the competitors and more detailed data analyses, check out the "More Data Analysis" chapter of the article!
Maybe I picked up the wrong competitors? And so I checked Octopath Traveler, just to get an idea of how good a game can be on Steam for the genre:
Damn, more people are playing Omori on Steam compared to Octopath Traveler after almost three years from launch?
I then got really curious: what’s going on with this game? And so our journey with Omori started.
This article shares our ideas on why Omori still gets so much attention after (almost) three years from launch. We discuss both game design and business / marketing topics, landing on the conclusion that it is exactly an interesting mix of game design features and marketing that makes Omori unique.
What’s our take on Omori in a nutshell?
We believe Omori focuses on a personal and relatable story, discussing hard themes, which are told in a great way through art and sound. This is why people love watching Omori on streaming platforms . And this the most interesting thing about Omori. It has been so successful because it is a great game to stream. People love watching other people playing it, and after a while they go and buy it to live the story for themselves.
If we have to draw a process about how Omori reached its success and visibility, it would be something like this:
People get caught by catchy Omori’s art and sound while watching it on streams
People continue watching the streams for how the story is told and for the good mix of hard and light-hearted topics. It is a kinda weird flow for an RPG (which we discuss later), but it is perfect for streamers to jump in and involve the viewers
People go and buy Omori to play it and live the story for themselves
Let’s dive in in more details about these topics. The blog post is designed to convey an holistic view of our ideas by reading it in full, but if you are interested in a specific aspect of the game, jump to the related chapter!
If you don't have a clue about what kind of game Omori is, we have drafted a basic overview of the game in the appendix. Feel free to check that out first!
Art and Sound
So our first point is that people get caught by Omori’s catchy art and sound design. Let’s see why.
First of all, about art. As mentioned in the introduction, Omori has been developed with RPG Maker and usually all the games developed with that tool look the same. OMOCAT managed to give the game a unique style with two main features: hand-drawn elements and variety of the assets.
The hand-drawn elements
Of course, the main style of Omori is due to it being developed in RPG Maker, thus giving to the player the usual “8-bit vibe” that any other game made with the same tool proposes. But hand drawings are used so often and are so intertwined with the 8-bit style that they seem one thing. From the main menu to the tagging system, from the battles to cutscenes: All these aspects of the game are predominantly showcased with hand-drawings. An interesting outcome is for example that if you look for most of the games developed with RPG Maker online for images, you will get mainly the 8-bit vibe given by the engine. But when searching for Omori, the majority of pictures are the hand-drawn ones. OMOCAT was able to create a unique style by combining the most boring and standard engine with her personal touch.
The variety of the assets
To analyze this point we are going to consider mainly the Headspace since it’s the one that better shows this aspect of the game.
During the Headspace section the player can explore 15 different areas. Most of them feel unique and are easily distinguishable thanks to the fact that each area has its own specific assets, used only in that level. Differently from main other games created with RPG Maker, Omori always looks fresh and new, even after playing it for 20+ hours.
Both the hand-drawn elements and the variety of the assets are just two examples of what we started calling “Omori’s dichotomy”. In almost everything, Omori presents a weird mix of opposite things, which are at the base of its unique catchy style. Other than the already mentioned 8-bit style vs the hand-drawings, there are still quite a few artistic applications of this dichotomy.
The most frequent dichotomy happens when disturbing or supposed-to-be scary elements are presented with a happy “mood”, appearance or palette.
It’s an interesting design choice and I would say that generally speaking the player could feel overwhelmed and disoriented due to these weird mix of styles. But for Omori this gap is coherent during the whole game and it actually works really well, helping the game design to be fresh and always new for more than 20 hours.
The same dichotomy can also be found in other areas, such as sound design.
Given my past as a guitarist, I had fun deep-diving into this. Here the dichotomy lies in the keys used for the songs. Most of the songs in Omori are in major keys, which are usually light-hearted and happy, conveying feelings of calmness, love, and caring. This is in sharp contrast with the overall vibes of sadness, uneasiness, and tension transmitted by the story and setting of the game.
Last but not least, as for the assets, there is an incredible variety in the sound design, which adds to the feeling of freshness and discovery in every area of Omori’s world. According to the official Steam page of Omori’s soundtrack, 179 tracks have been composed for the game!
Overall, these characteristics make the game incredibly appealing and catchy in our opinion. These features (from the hand-drawings to the weird assets, to the variety of music) are what the viewers experience at first when watching Omori during a stream and their uniqueness keep the viewer curios and engaged.
Art is a great first impact, but then it's the story that takes the main stage and keeps the player engaged until the end.
Story and narrative
Why is Omori’s story so interesting and how can it keep the player engaged for 20+ hours of (hardly decent) gameplay?
First of all, it is full of mysteries. Many things happen during the game without a clear explanation, which is most of the times given only at the real end of the game. There is an interesting mechanic (the stabbing - spoiler alert) that does not really make sense at the beginning with the information that we have, but the player keeps doing it over and over. We also know that Mari - Omori’s sister - is dead (spoiler alert) since the first few hours of the game, but we have no clue why. And our adventure starts because we have to look for Basil, but without knowing why.
These mystery boxes are cleverly distributed across the whole game, and they make it really fascinating, giving the players more and more reasons to continue playing. We remember discussing why we kept playing Omori even if the turn-based RPG gameplay kinda sucked and many dialogues were a bit annoying: we had to keep going and finish the game to understand what was really going on in Faraway Town. Take a look around Reddit and you will understand that this is a widespread feeling. If someone asks why Omori is worth playing, many comments are about people saying that Omori must be played until the end to make the best out of it, to experience the whole story.
Another great narrative intuition (or has this been involuntary?) of OMOCAT is about the pace of the story. Omori talks about hard and personal issues, and although these are topics surely interesting, they are also heavy to digest. Think for example about Hellblade. It is an incredibly engaging and unique game, but I also expected (and wanted) it to be relatively short, because I could not have continued playing with that pressure and anxiety for more hours (about this, I am really curious about what Ninja Theory will do with Hellblade 2).
Omori is full of funnier and light-hearted discussions, inserted in a depressing and dark world. This really helps ease the burden of the player. Moreover, if the player feels that a given day they do not want to continue the main story (which is usually centered around these depressing topics), there are so many side quests (mostly centered around more light-hearted topics) that the player is free to start at almost any given time. This dichotomy, already discussed in the previous chapter, perfecty applies also to the pace of the story.
As discussed previously, the aesthetics are colorful and happy, many times the dialogues are simple and banal, and the gameplay is not too demanding or challenging, while still enjoyable. All these elements help balancing and “countering” the heaviness of the game making it more digestible and less overwhelming in the long-run.
Finally, I also think that Omori was really lucky (or, to state in a more philosophical way, it was at the right time in the right place) with its launch window. By launching on Steam at the end of 2020, the world was still deeply into the coronavirus crisis. This might have helped for different reasons:
A lot of attention was given to mental health, a topic that is heavily discussed in the game
People felt isolated and lonely, thus could relate even more with the feelings and subjects of the game
This has surely helped Omori having a successful launch, much better than any other similar game, but still it is not enough to justify the great numbers the game has now, three years after release.
An (involuntary) streaming success
So far, our theory is that Omori has some unique characteristics that have helped the game be incredibly successful on streaming platforms.
How did we notice that Omori was having this kind of success?
I was initially thinking that Omori got its success from OMOCAT and her followers, but a Reddit survey seems to confute my hypothesis:
334 votes might not be significant, but OMOCAT’s name doesn’t seem to be the main reason for people buying the game. What I also did not expect to find out is that even more than word-of-mouth (which I expected to be the main marketing strategy for this game), 65% of the voters said they knew about the game via streaming platforms. Digging more into it and looking into other discussions, Reddit users mention three many sources (listed in order of impact):
Streamers (ManlyBadassHero, Johne, Shenpai, Nitro Rad)
Traditional marketing (mostly trailers on YT, but also reviews on minor websites, such as RockPaperShotgun)
Word-of-mouth
Most of the streaming happened after Omori’s launch, given the near-zero investment in marketing from OMOCAT, and probably grew organically from there. For the same reason, the game has probably not been covered by traditional gaming media (take a look around on IGN or any other main online gaming news site, and you’ll see that Omori doesn’t even have a review, and just a couple of articles (mostly written after the release)).
Additionally, Omori was able to gather a lot of interest with its Kickstarter campaign back in 2014, but the delays and the lack of communication from the author did actually reduce the interest until the launch of the game 7 years later (its reveal trailer has more than 7M views on YT - much more than any other Omori’s video on YT, including the launch trailer or the Switch version announcement).
So, what happened?
Apparently, OMOCAT has been able to develop a game that works for streaming platforms without even planning this. This is what the author shared on Twitter more than a year after the game released:
People love watching other people playing Omori and looking at their reactions!
Given this statement, I went and looked at some numbers on streamcharts.com.
Just by looking at the number of channels streaming Omori, you can get a sense of how much streaming has become important for marketing and for the success of a game. During 2023, there has been an average of 19 channels streaming Omori every month, while there are only a couple for Tides of Numenera and three for Pillars of Eternity (for the reasons why I am looking at these games, check the appendix!). It comes as a consequence, but also numbers of viewers and hours spent watching Omori have higher stats. In the table below I summarized some interesting data for the first four months of 2023:
These numbers confirm everything we have discussed since the beginning of the article, saying that streams played and are still playing a major role in making Omori so successful.
Conclusions
We said it all in the previous chapters. Our theory is that Omori has a unique mix of art, sound, and narrative that makes the game incredibly appealing on streaming platform, even though it was not designed for that. People love watching streamers reactions to what happens in Omori and in the end they go and also play the game for themselves. The relationship between streaming platforms and indie, single-player games is much stronger that what we initially thought and shows how much marketing can rely on these platforms to build success in the long-run, even without being another free-to-play or battle royale.
Thanks for reading and we look forward to feedback and questions!
Appendix
Game Overview
For readers that haven’t played the game, we thought a general overview of the game is a must.
Omori is a narrative-driven RPG game developed with the RPG Maker engine.
As any classical RPG, two main mechanics are combat and exploration.
For most of the game, our party is made up of four characters (Omori, Kel, Hero, and Aubrey).
The combats in Omori are pure turn-based fights, so pretty similar to old-style RPGs (think of old Final Fantasy games or Undertale), but with some unique twists. The most unique feature is the so-called Triangle of Emotions.
The idea is pretty similar to elements in Pokemon games.
In Omori you have three emotional statuses: Angry, Sad, and Happy. Each of the emotions is strong against another emotion, but it is also weak against the remaining one. To make an example, Happy is strong against Sad, but it’s weak against Angry. Being strong means that when a character is affected by an emotion and they attack an enemy affected by the related weak emotion, that character’s attack will deal extra damage. Additionally, each emotion affects specific stats in a determined way.
At first the emotion system might seem complicated, but after a bit of practice it gets pretty straightforward.
For the exploration, Omori is heavily influenced by the Pokemon games, especially the old ones developed for the Nintendo GameBoy console. It’s worth mentioning that Omori is set in two different worlds, each with its own unique characteristics and design. The Headspace can be described as an imaginary world created by the mind of the protagonist, while Faraway Town is the real world, where the story in the present time is set.
For each world the importance given to the different aspects of the game changes. During the Headspace sections the player will mostly focus on fighting and exploring, while Faraway Town will be dense with dialogues and cutscenes.
Exploration is a relevant part of Omori’s game. Even though the Headspace area is big, it’s easy to navigate both thanks to the world design and the map provided. The map is not super detailed and does not provide sub-areas, but it’s useful enough to give a sense of orientation to the player.
Even though the map has no marks and doesn’t show directions for the next goal, the feeling of being lost almost never occurs during the game, also thanks to some hints left here and there in the world.
Interestingly, it was easier for us to get lost in Faraway Town, which is the smaller of the two worlds. This is probably due to the fact that while Headspace is big and diversified, Faraway Town is just a collection of houses plus a few more places, so it’s easy to forget where a specific house is located.
If you’re interested in knowing more about the maps and the level design, this is a good place to dive deeper.
Bonus chapter - Player Onboarding
We believe the impact of this feature on the success of the game is smaller compared to the themes discussed so far, but we wanted to mention another great aspect of the game, its onboarding process.
When it comes to efficient player onboarding, I think two general rules should be followed:
Teach the player one mechanic at a time.
Only teach the player the next mechanic when you have validated that they learnt the previous one.
The player onboarding in Omori adheres to these rules, resulting in an efficient and simple player onboarding.
In the first hour, the player learns to (in order):
Move around a small area
Interact with objects and NPCs
Save the game
Fight
More fight mechanics
World transition
After this, the player starts to understand the type of game they are playing and are also on board with the main mechanics and elements that compose the game and are ready to explore them even more.
We thought this approach is pretty interesting given that the vast majority of recent games (from AAA to indie games) usually throws the player in the middle of the action and offer very few tips on how to go around (think of anything from the recent Zeldas and Elden Ring to Hollow Knight and Inside or Limbo).
More Data Analysis!
This chapter focuses more on the business-oriented analyses mentioned at the beginning of the article. If you’re curious about my line of thought and the data I used, keep reading!
An easy number to get a sense of the buzz around a game is the number of daily players on Steam.
In order to design a fair analysis, I had to pick up some “competitors”. I used the following assumptions to find out games comparable to Omori:
Games have to deal with similar themes, specifically psychological horrors, and have to be in the same genre (story-driven RPGs)
Games have to be made with RPG Maker or with a similar “8-bit” vibe
Games have to have a similar price tag (Omori was launched at $19.99 on Steam) and a similar business model (no focus on DLCs, no IAPs (In-App Purchases))
I also excluded from this analysis games that are far too old, like Yume Nikki and Mother 3, although they have heavily inspired Omori and some of its characteristics. Let’s see what I got:
Lisa: The Painful - A dark humor, story-driven RPG mentioned by many Omori fans as a similar game
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass - A horror RPG made with RPG Maker
OneShot - A more puzzle/adventure-focused game but with similar art and vibe to Omori
To the Moon - Often mentioned as one of the best RPGs made with RPG Maker
After a first analysis I also took a look at Octopath Traveler I - An RPG developed and published by Square Enix. Although the game has a different price tag and much more marketing powerhouse, I considered it since it has similar gameplay and art style, especially after having seen that Omori’s numbers are much higher than the previously mentioned competitors.
By looking online there seems to be a whole list of smaller games similar to Omori in vibes and gameplay, but I excluded many of these for the following reasons:
It might have been released for free - examples are OFF and End Roll
It might have a totally different target audience, different price tag ($5 or less), and a much lower impact on daily users on Steam - examples are Milk Inside a Bag Inside a Bag of Milk, Tomorrow Won’t Come for Those Without, and others (N.B.: Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass can fit in this category, but I felt it important to include at least one of this category in order to feel inclusive).
The results are what I shared in the introduction of this article.
Given the impressive numbers, I also started thinking what else could have potentially helped Omori. One unique characteristic of its development process was the Kickstarter campaign. Because of that, I went on and checked some other games which were funded in the same way.
This is a more apple to pear comparison, but in my opinion still gives an idea of Omori’s success.
Even after much better launches for Tides of Numenera and Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Omori has been incredibly successful in the long-run!
I did not include Pillars of Eternity in the same graph because the scale does not help, but without considering the launch (Pillars of Eternity had around 40,000 daily players at launch), this is the outcome of PoE vs Omori:
In our opinion it is impressive if we take into account the budget to develop these two games and who is behind them (Obsidian got $4M of funds from its Kickstarter campaign!!).
Reach out to me if you want to take a look at the raw data I used for the analysis.
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