Selling a game we couldn't advertise

Polyarmory: High Calibre Love is a free FPS and dating sim about a prepper who takes a pill and starts flirting with his guns. Underneath the premise, it is a satire about gun culture, isolated men and the pipelines that find them.

It began as a seven-day game jam entry and became fourteen months of work by a team scattered across several time zones. I ran PR for the launch.

We had no budget, few places willing to promote the game and a release date that kept moving. It still reached 20,000 downloads in ten days.

The constraints

There was no campaign budget. The whole thing ran on our time and a Notion board.

The team’s previous game, OnlyCans: Thirst Date, was age- and region-restricted on Steam. Polyarmory’s first itch.io listing was removed for being too erotic. Paid social and most storefront promotion were therefore unavailable before we had finished planning the campaign.

The game was free on purpose. That gave it the widest possible reach, avoided arguments about how a five-person team should divide the income, and left nothing for a payment processor to withhold.

The release moved more than once. A game about a man being radicalised by talk radio should not launch in the week of a shooting, so we delayed it when real events made the timing wrong.

What we could sell

The absurd premise had real thematic weight underneath it. Colt is right about the problems he can see and wrong about their causes. The in-game radio escalates in the way a real radicalisation pipeline does. The antagonists were written to occupy the role usually filled by antisemitic conspiracy tropes without reproducing them.

We also had useful evidence that the team could deliver. The game ran for about eight hours, which suited a YouTube series. The Stupendium had written and performed an original theme song. At the time we pitched, OnlyCans still had 96% positive reviews on Steam from 3,489 players.

There were no AI-generated assets in the shipped game.

Four pitches, not one

We built four versions of the story:

• A performance angle for outlets led by traffic and launch numbers.
• A cultural angle about radicalisation, masculinity and gun culture for features desks.
• An absurdist angle built around details such as the options menu.
• A collaboration angle around The Stupendium and his audience.

Nobody received a generic pitch with their name changed. Each version was built around what that writer covered and what their readers came to them for.

The release date helped. We launched on the eve of Valentine’s Day, giving editors a timely peg for a free dating sim about romancing guns.

Games coverage had also contracted, with publications closing sections and writers moving beats. We checked every outlet and byline immediately before pitching. We used Bluesky more than X because that was where many of the journalists we wanted to reach were active.

Why we targeted mid-sized creators

We concentrated on creators with roughly 50,000 to 500,000 subscribers.

Pitching the largest channels without sponsorship money was a lottery. For a mid-sized creator, a free eight-hour game with a strange premise could be useful material rather than another demand on their inbox.

The creator kit included GIFs, useful timestamps and an offer to interview Colt Michigan in character. Nobody had to search the game for a clip or invent a collaboration format from scratch.

What happened

The game had more than 6,500 wishlists before launch. It reached number two on Steam’s upcoming releases page in the hour before release, then passed 7,500 downloads in its first eight hours and 20,000 within ten days.

PC Gamer featured it on 19 February and described getting a game this good for free as “daylight robbery”. The publication later included it in a list of the best free games, and Steam still displays that recognition on the store page.

The Second Wind Games Showcase selected it for its Spring 2026 WATCHEXP programme following a submission I drafted. Game Rant covered it three days after PC Gamer, Yarn Spinner added it to its engine showcase, and ResetEra had a thread running before launch.

At the time of writing, Steam showed 96% positive reviews from 565 players. Recent reviews were 97% positive.

What I would change

I initially wanted to lead with the strangest individual details and had to be talked out of it. The absurdity opened the door, but the substance had to arrive in the same pitch. Without it, the game looked like a novelty and was easy to file as one.

I also set the wrong review target. I wanted 1,000 reviews within 90 days, based on results from games people had paid for. Free games are reviewed at a lower rate. The downloads arrived, but the reviews were always going to accumulate more slowly. I should have modelled those separately.

Next time, I would also build the creator kit before the press kit. Creators moved faster and needed less from us.

What was repeatable

The campaign did not succeed because we found a secret free channel. We worked with a game that was unusually easy to describe, had something serious underneath the joke and gave creators enough material for several hours of video.

The repeatable part was narrower: match the angle to the recipient, remove work from the creator and give journalists a reason to cover the game that week.

That was enough to turn no budget and very limited paid promotion into a PC Gamer feature, a showcase selection and 20,000 downloads in ten days.