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Joewintergreen

Marketing an indie video game

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So, I started a company, and we made a video game. It's basically done, and we're going to need to start selling it, and now we need to somehow insert it into people's brains, a process that I'm told is called Marketing.

It turns out this shit is hard, and it's hard to tell if you're going about it totally wrong or not, and (especially with a game that isn't out yet) it's hard to quantify the results. I was chattin' with TimeGentleman a few weeks ago and he suggested I make a thread on here on the subject. I know some of you have had to do this stuff, so maybe some insights can be had here.

 

What I'm doing so far is basically sending the game, and news about the game, to every gaming news site I'm aware of, and a bunch I'd never heard of until recently, and popular Youtubers, and posting on forums and doing all the facebooky/twittery stuff, trying to get exposure and Greenlight votes. Inconveniently, I basically don't read any gaming news at all except twitter the occasional Rock Paper Shotgun, so I'm probably less in the know than most about what publications like to cover what. There's been some positive previews and articles written about the game, and some pretty sweet

, but I think I've reached a point where I have not much idea what to do to spread the word about this thing much more than I have already, and Greenlight statistics exist as an indicator that I clearly haven't done enough. I don't really want to repeatedly shout "LOOK AT MY GAME" into people's internet faces, but maybe that's just what you do? Possibly I've reached the most people I can without actually having the game available to buy yet (here's why I don't)? Am I actually doing fuckin' great and just don't know it?

 

What even is marketing you guys.

 

also these are my steam stats from a few days ago. probably of interest to people!

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It's really, really easy for press releases to just disappear into a black hole with the hundreds of others that get sent around every day. Also, exposing people to a thing once is usually nowhere near enough to lodge it in their brain. In terms of releases, it can be extremely hard to dredge up a story that will be of interest to press or fans (I suspect a lot of things that would get column inches are things the developers don't even think to talk about). A lot of "New features in game!" or "Game will be at event!" type releases are mind piss, of interest to very few people and do nothing to stick out of said hundreds.

 

I am not a good person to ask for any advice on writing them beyond the above; I'm terrible at it.

 

The thing I've seen work well is for developers to go to events, meet journalists at them, build relationships with those journalists, and show them their game in private sessions where they can have a good long chat. Personal connections go a long way.

 

Shows and expos can be really worth submitting to. If you get in, you'll meet journalists, make fans, and also get to watch people play your game cold. Just be aware that even if you end up on a showfloor with 50,000 people on it, that won't push things over some kind of tipping point after which your game markets itself (A whole bunch of indies who approach me seem to believe it will). In five years of curating indie shows, Joe Danger is the only game I've ever seen do that, and it did so on a foundation of them showing it to journalists for months before any kind of public reveal.

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My 2 cents. You need a kick ass green light trailer!

Is this your latest trailer? I can't watch the ones on green light at the mo as I'm on iPad. I'll elaborate more when I've actually seen what you've got

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It's really, really easy for press releases to just disappear into a black hole with the hundreds of others that get sent around every day. Also, exposing people to a thing once is usually nowhere near enough to lodge it in their brain. In terms of releases, it can be extremely hard to dredge up a story that will be of interest to press or fans (I suspect a lot of things that would get column inches are things the developers don't even think to talk about). A lot of "New features in game!" or "Game will be at event!" type releases are mind piss, of interest to very few people and do nothing to stick out of said hundreds.

 

I am not a good person to ask for any advice on writing them beyond the above; I'm terrible at it.

 

The thing I've seen work well is for developers to go to events, meet journalists at them, build relationships with those journalists, and show them their game in private sessions where they can have a good long chat. Personal connections go a long way.

 

Shows and expos can be really worth submitting to. If you get in, you'll meet journalists, make fans, and also get to watch people play your game cold. Just be aware that even if you end up on a showfloor with 50,000 people on it, that won't push things over some kind of tipping point after which your game markets itself (A whole bunch of indies who approach me seem to believe it will). In five years of curating indie shows, Joe Danger is the only game I've ever seen do that, and it did so on a foundation of them showing it to journalists for months before any kind of public reveal.

 

Yeah, I got a lot out of E3 last year and Pax 2011 before that, and I expect Pax Aus in July to be super valuable, especially if I get into the Indie Showcase which I have obviously submitted to. What shows do you curate? 

I try to keep my press emails pretty succinct, sometimes even point form - Destructoid got an email from me that was just four dot points with a link to the greenlight and another to a playable build and went "SWEET WE'LL PLAY IT ON THE STREAM THIS WEEK" within ten minutes. I figure if I was a press dude I'd want to have to read as little as possible to figure out if I wanted to write about the thing.

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Nah, that's suuuuuuuuuper old. The greenlight has two on it:

 

 

 

Hmm. How do you embed videos here?

 

ooooo they're nice (i have actually seen them in the past)

 

i embed video thus:

 

 

just paste the link in and it just converts into an embed for me :/

 

Could you make one that's spliced with peoples testimonials and praise of the game like... "Marble Madness for the Dubstep generation" - Mington

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What shows do you curate?

I do the Leftfield bit for Rezzed and the Indie Games Arcade at the Eurogamer Expo, with input from Eurogamer and RPS. Submissions for Rezzed are open until May 17th, you can put stuff in here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?&formkey=dFcwNVBBTWNtcG85Q2Y1TFhTdFNCUEE6MQ

This is also a mailing list used solely for notifications relating to submissions opening or closing for either of those shows. And probably more, if I end up curating any, but it's not used for anything else and emails aren't passed on to anyone.

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Dustforce dev Hitbox Team posted a sales and revenue breakdown last week, and in the postscript made this comment on marketing:

How did you market the game?
Our friend Mary, from IndieViddy, helped us market Dustforce by sending review copies of the game to numerous reviewers and bloggers. She also created and sent out press releases, as well as helped make Youtube videos for us. Her help allowed us to focus purely on the game at a time when we were most busy.

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I don't know where I got this link from, but it's in my bookmarks so I will share it with you in case you haven't stumbled across...which seems unlikely, considering it seems to be a prominent Google result, but anyway. =P

 

http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-indie-game-marketing/

 

One time, I made a flash game (basically an Age of Kings knockoff with tiny pixel art =P) and sent it through the MochiAds distribution channels and it did moderately alright...and then suddenly started getting thousands of views per day from Brazil. Now it's up to more than 400,000 views mostly from that country. Its hour of glory has dwindled and it usually gets a handful of views each day now, but sometimes it will spike up to 1,000 views over a Saturday or something. I don't speak Portuguese and therefore have no idea why this happened or why it keeps happening.

 

The moral of this story is just that I too am bad at marketing, to the point where when I do obtain a small amount of success I do not even understand it.

 

Good luck! :-P

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Have you contacted Electron Dance?

 

He is a relatively small blogger in terms of size but he gets quite a bit of traffic. Worth sending him a version of the game and if he likes he will write about it.

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 I was chattin' with TimeGentleman a few weeks ago and he suggested I make a thread on here on the subject.

 

That's me!

 

Do you have a transcript of the conversation, Lacabra? It'd be interesting to see what I said. (Cut out all the bits where I'm slagging other forumites off.)

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I cut those parts out, and now I don't have a transcript anymore!

Jay kay, I never had one

 

Have you contacted Electron Dance?

 

He is a relatively small blogger in terms of size but he gets quite a bit of traffic. Worth sending him a version of the game and if he likes he will write about it.

I have not, and totally will. Seems cool. Thanks.

 

I don't know where I got this link from, but it's in my bookmarks so I will share it with you in case you haven't stumbled across...which seems unlikely, considering it seems to be a prominent Google result, but anyway. =P

 

http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-indie-game-marketing/

 

One time, I made a flash game (basically an Age of Kings knockoff with tiny pixel art =P) and sent it through the MochiAds distribution channels and it did moderately alright...and then suddenly started getting thousands of views per day from Brazil. Now it's up to more than 400,000 views mostly from that country. Its hour of glory has dwindled and it usually gets a handful of views each day now, but sometimes it will spike up to 1,000 views over a Saturday or something. I don't speak Portuguese and therefore have no idea why this happened or why it keeps happening.

 

The moral of this story is just that I too am bad at marketing, to the point where when I do obtain a small amount of success I do not even understand it.

 

Good luck! :-P

Yeah I saw that link. I had a similarly weird thing with my iOS game Vroom! at one point where ten thousand people in Russia suddenly downloaded it. No idea why. It wasn't even localised into anything other than English

 

Dustforce dev Hitbox Team posted a sales and revenue breakdown last week, and in the postscript made this comment on marketing:

Hmm, I missed that part. The sales info was super interesting though. I don't currently have any dough to pay somebody to do my marketing for me, unfortunately (also i've heard some bad things lately from devs who have done that, though obv not a reflection on indieviddy). 

 

Hmm, sudden headache. End post.

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From my very short time on the receiving end of these emails, I can tell you that just spending 5 extra minutes to actually include the name and website of the journalist/whatever in your email helps a lot. When a press release is written to be mass-blasted, it shows, and it makes me less interested than if I feel the developer have sought me out (which you have). Also, the smaller the site/blog/youtuber, the less of these requests the get, the more likely it is they will bite.

 

 

It's very basic advice, but it's all I got.

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iirc, my advice, which was essentially what I've learnt from Dan (and a lot of which has been said here already), is that it's a full-time 8-hours a day job to promote a game. You need to send it out to everyone, and make it as easy as possible for them to 1) play the game and 2) write about it.

 

2) entails stuff like catering it to the individual sites/journos, dishing out exclusives, writing an interview with yourself and sending it to them ready to go. When you've been round every site and managed to get one or two small ones to write about it, go back to the bigger sites with links to those articles to show you're gathering heat. Then keep repeating that until you've got enough under your belt that the biggest sites will want to report on you. Have a good, easy to navigate site and make sure you have clear links to that and your contact details in your correspondence.

 

I seem to remember you having problems with 1), which is a bit of a problem. If you absolutely can't have any gameplay available to journos, then the videos should be front and centre. But obviously it would be much better for them to be able to read your email and be playing the game (or even a minute-long demo or something) within a few clicks.

 

Be on Twitter, making entertaining tweets, interacting with journos and other devs. Have an interesting blog that people might link to. Put on promotions, competitions, giveaways, even if they're just fake comedy ones. Offer to write articles, dev diaries and the like for other sites. Go to all the IRL pub meet-ups, shows etc you can and be a friendly, charming person who happens to have made a game. Don't spam people, but be consistently putting out stuff that they will want to see.

 

DISCLAIMER: I have never personally released a game, only worked on them.

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writing an interview with yourself 

Oh shit, that sounds like the worst thing to do.

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Thanks. Yeah, I try to do that. Have I sent The Gaming Vault a build? All names with "gaming" in them are now familiar.

Don't think so, but that site is about to go up in flames, unfortunately. I can send you a message once the new one is of the ground.

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I don't really want to repeatedly shout "LOOK AT MY GAME" into people's internet faces, but maybe that's just what you do? Possibly I've reached the most people I can without actually having the game available to buy yet (here's why I don't)?

 

I think it boils down to doing two things:

1. Repeatedly shout "look at my game" into people's internet faces.

2. Start doing that as early as you can.

 

Your game exists, and it takes a significant amount of time for that fact to seep into people's brains. Start talking about your game early in development and slowly build up an audience. By "early in development," I mean: you have things moving on the monitor. It's a long uphill marathon of weekly/daily updates that, as mentioned above, demands a lot of time.

 

For my game Atom Zombie Smasher I made the mistake of following the AAA model of starting publicity some months before release. When the game was released, awareness of the game was pretty awful. It took about one year afterward for the game to get any real traction. Learning from that, I started talking about my current project early in its development, and awareness of it has already overshadowed my previous games.

 

It's impossible to reach some sort of audience saturation point. As Chris Hecker says, "You can’t overhype your game, you can only under-deliver." It's a big world out there, and there will always be people who've never heard of you or your work. Keep talking about your game, keep sending out builds, and keep poking the shoulder of every website that exists.

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iirc, my advice, which was essentially what I've learnt from Dan (and a lot of which has been said here already), is that it's a full-time 8-hours a day job to promote a game. You need to send it out to everyone, and make it as easy as possible for them to 1) play the game and 2) write about it.

 

2) entails stuff like catering it to the individual sites/journos, dishing out exclusives, writing an interview with yourself and sending it to them ready to go. When you've been round every site and managed to get one or two small ones to write about it, go back to the bigger sites with links to those articles to show you're gathering heat. Then keep repeating that until you've got enough under your belt that the biggest sites will want to report on you. Have a good, easy to navigate site and make sure you have clear links to that and your contact details in your correspondence.

 

I seem to remember you having problems with 1), which is a bit of a problem. If you absolutely can't have any gameplay available to journos, then the videos should be front and centre. But obviously it would be much better for them to be able to read your email and be playing the game (or even a minute-long demo or something) within a few clicks.

 

Be on Twitter, making entertaining tweets, interacting with journos and other devs. Have an interesting blog that people might link to. Put on promotions, competitions, giveaways, even if they're just fake comedy ones. Offer to write articles, dev diaries and the like for other sites. Go to all the IRL pub meet-ups, shows etc you can and be a friendly, charming person who happens to have made a game. Don't spam people, but be consistently putting out stuff that they will want to see.

 

DISCLAIMER: I have never personally released a game, only worked on them.

Thanks for writing this up. I sent it over to a couple of people who are approaching this stage or need help with it.

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For my game Atom Zombie Smasher I made the mistake of following the AAA model of starting publicity some months before release. When the game was released, awareness of the game was pretty awful. It took about one year afterward for the game to get any real traction. Learning from that, I started talking about my current project early in its development, and awareness of it has already overshadowed my previous games.

Notice how Brendon, a certified Game Pro, is marketing his games while talking about marketing his games. Watch and learn.

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Oh, sweet, Synth!

 

Brendon's point of starting as soon as you can is something I forgot - Dan thought it'd be clever to suddenly unleash BTDT on the world nearly finished, but it went the same way for him as it did for Brendon with AZS, ie slowly! For TGP, Dan was doing "suggest a character" competitions ("StrangeVisitor" won with his suggestion of  Sex Education Clown, and the final character's face was based on him) and all sorts early on.

 

Hermie posted as I was finishing off this post, and LOOK! I was marketing my games too!

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I think it boils down to doing two things:

1. Repeatedly shout "look at my game" into people's internet faces.

2. Start doing that as early as you can.

 

Your game exists, and it takes a significant amount of time for that fact to seep into people's brains. Start talking about your game early in development and slowly build up an audience. By "early in development," I mean: you have things moving on the monitor. It's a long uphill marathon of weekly/daily updates that, as mentioned above, demands a lot of time.

 

For my game Atom Zombie Smasher I made the mistake of following the AAA model of starting publicity some months before release. When the game was released, awareness of the game was pretty awful. It took about one year afterward for the game to get any real traction. Learning from that, I started talking about my current project early in its development, and awareness of it has already overshadowed my previous games.

 

It's impossible to reach some sort of audience saturation point. As Chris Hecker says, "You can’t overhype your game, you can only under-deliver." It's a big world out there, and there will always be people who've never heard of you or your work. Keep talking about your game, keep sending out builds, and keep poking the shoulder of every website that exists.

Thanks, this is mega helpful. Although number 2 will have to be something I learn from and do next time, I guess :P. I've also been reading your blog a bit, which has been awesome, thanks for doing it.

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iirc, my advice, which was essentially what I've learnt from Dan (and a lot of which has been said here already), is that it's a full-time 8-hours a day job to promote a game. You need to send it out to everyone, and make it as easy as possible for them to 1) play the game and 2) write about it.

 

2) entails stuff like catering it to the individual sites/journos, dishing out exclusives, writing an interview with yourself and sending it to them ready to go. When you've been round every site and managed to get one or two small ones to write about it, go back to the bigger sites with links to those articles to show you're gathering heat. Then keep repeating that until you've got enough under your belt that the biggest sites will want to report on you. Have a good, easy to navigate site and make sure you have clear links to that and your contact details in your correspondence.

 

I seem to remember you having problems with 1), which is a bit of a problem. If you absolutely can't have any gameplay available to journos, then the videos should be front and centre. But obviously it would be much better for them to be able to read your email and be playing the game (or even a minute-long demo or something) within a few clicks.

 

Be on Twitter, making entertaining tweets, interacting with journos and other devs. Have an interesting blog that people might link to. Put on promotions, competitions, giveaways, even if they're just fake comedy ones. Offer to write articles, dev diaries and the like for other sites. Go to all the IRL pub meet-ups, shows etc you can and be a friendly, charming person who happens to have made a game. Don't spam people, but be consistently putting out stuff that they will want to see.

 

DISCLAIMER: I have never personally released a game, only worked on them.

Re 1) being a problem for me, not sure why it would have been at the time, but now, at least, I have been sending the entire game to press people all over the place. Some dudes were like "bro you don't want your game to leak just send them a demo" but I think I probably don't give many shits if my game leaks... worst case scenario somebody plays it, right?

2) is shit I need to work on. 

This thread is more helpful than I even expected. Thank you gentlemen

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Sending emails from a corporate web domain seems to trip most/all spam filters~ you can test by sending emails to your own personal addresses.  Maybe try short/personal messages from a well-known domain like gmail.

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