The Stanley Parable sold over 100K copies in three days

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First-person storytelling satire The Stanley Parable shifted over 100K digital copies in a scant three days, developer Davey Wreden announced.
Wreden explained in a postmortem that he owes much of its success to its bizarre marketing campaign that showed nothing of the final game. "We released five trailers over the course of the game's development, and not one of them contains any substantial actual footage of the game," he said. "If you make the marketing material interesting on its own, it's irrelevant whether it 'sells' your game. Our focus was always on creating content that was on its own fun for people to experience and to be a part of, with essentially zero per cent of the design aimed at trying to get the game to sell."
He noted that his studio, Galactic Cafe, took this same approach to the game's peculiar demo, which like the trailers, contained no content from the actual game. "Since our game was very difficult to talk about without spoiling, why not simply make an extra piece of game in the spirit of the main game to convey what it's about?" he wrote. "Most of the assets in the demo are re-used from the main game, so very little time was spent on content creation. I was writing it in the background for a few months, and William [Pugh, level designer] spent about three weeks building the version you can play now."
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