Indie Game Marketing
A brief reflection on our initial marketing attempts
By Justin Perri, developer and co-founder at Games with Geebs.
Picture this: You’ve been working tirelessly on your game for months and it’s starting to look like an actual game. The slick new mechanic you designed looks badass. A lightbulb goes off in your head. “I should post a gif of it on social media!”, you think to yourself. Adrenaline kicks in at the thought of how awestruck people will be when they see your insane mechanic. You screen record the mechanic in action, create a gif from it, and slap that puppy on social media with every hashtag known to man. With your eyes glued to the screen, you wait…and wait…
You get one like… That’s it. One. Like. Knowing that all of your friends and family who saw your post didn’t even like it infuriates you. Nerd rage ensues!
Expectations vs Reality
As an indie game developer with little to no experience in marketing, you might have the expectation that your game will be a hit right off the bat. It makes sense. After all, you’re probably highly passionate about what you’re doing, otherwise you wouldn’t have spent countless hours of your free time bringing your ideas to life. The reality, though, is that the market for video games is saturated and it takes a lot of time and effort to make your game stand out — even if it’s objectively a great game. If you want to make your game seen (without paying for professional marketing or hiring a community manager), you’re going to need to put in the work (a lot of work) and be patient (because there’s only so much you can do on your own).
Leveling up
My wife and I started our game studio, Games with Geebs, with the goal of turning our quirky ideas into games for others to enjoy. Growing a community so that we could interact and share with those who enjoyed (or didn’t) our games is a core part of that vision. In order to achieve our goals without hiring a publisher or marketing service, we knew we’d have to level up our marketing skills.
Early on, we began to carve out time for researching common marketing practices. My wife, being the podcast junkie she is, found a fantastic podcast called Future Friends Games. It’s handy for general video game marketing and covers most of the juicy stuff any indie dev would want to know (such as launching a game on Steam, community building, crowdfunding, and talking to publishers). For more general marketing and developing a marketing mindset, we found Seth Godin’s podcast, Akimbo, to be informative and enjoyable. Though I have not quite finished the book yet, The 1-Page Marketing Plan has unveiled some must-know marketing nuggets as well.
One of the key takeaways we had going in was that having a thoughtful and consistent social media presence can be extremely beneficial for your game’s success. Through leveling up early on in the process and understanding we would need to keep a growth mindset, we felt more than ready to tackle marketing when it became time.
Our first stab
Our first game, The 2020 Trail, really started taking form last month and we felt it was time to start sharing. We spent a lot of time curating each post and were extremely organized about it. There were spreadsheets containing images, hashtags, content, and which platforms we were going to post on. In hindsight, it was a bit overkill.
Coming up with an idea and actually creating the content would take us anywhere from an hour to a day. It was fun at first, but we started to put too much of our energy into this single area. We recognize marketing is one of the most important aspects of having a successful game, however, we were acting like a bigger studio that had a dedicated person to handle marketing. We didn’t (and still don’t) have the bandwidth to sustain this approach, but we tried anyway.
Our first post was simply a game announcement. It was a poster style image that had a murder hornet front and center with our game logo across the top. On the bottom, it mentioned that the game will be here in early 2021. We put up the image on all of our platforms. My wife and I were content with the amount of attention this first post received.
However, each post that followed fell mostly flat. We’d receive a few likes and on the rare occasion, we would get an additional follower after a post. We experimented with different types of posts, but we couldn’t seem to gain much traction.
Given how long it took to come up with these posts and how hard we have worked on the game for the last few months, we were both getting bummed out. To make matters worse, we got caught up in that short-lived high of getting likes and follows. Casually checking notifications turned into obsessively going from one platform to the next, refreshing the page to see if we had any new notifications. From time to time we’d yell to each other across the apartment, “We got a new follower!”…yeah.
Going in, we knew this was something we would have to manage, but we still failed to do so. The crushing part was that the lack of attention led us to believe that maybe our game was just uninteresting. It made us doubt our skills and worst of all, it temporarily led us away from our goal of building a community. We don’t really care about the likes and follows. Okay, of course those are great, but not getting them shouldn’t ruin our day. We care about the work, the artistry, the fun. Social media just fogged our glasses there for a hot minute.
On a brighter note
Another platform we were looking to gain a following on was Reddit. Several resources we looked at, including the book GAMEDEV (highly recommend), mentioned how posting on Reddit could be worthwhile. Though we never used the platform before, we figured we’d give it a try. After building up some karma and finding a few subreddit communities that matched the niche of our target audience, I began to post about our game. Each post was essentially the same image or video from our social media posts but with a message more tailored to that specific community.
To our surprise, the responses received from these communities was much more in line with what we initially hoped for. Individuals expressed their interest and excitement for our game. Small pats on the backs were given to my wife and I for the work we’ve done so far. A few individuals reached out to me and would say kind things such as “It’s so cool you and your wife can make games together.” or “I can’t wait to play your game. Please let me know when I can wishlist it.” It was friggin’ awesome.
Even if you hate to admit it, affirmation is something we all desire. It helps keep wind in the sails and your head up during the difficult times. I don’t know about you, but when I pour my heart and time into something, I don’t want it to go unnoticed, I want people to genuinely dig it. Sharing with the Reddit community gave us the affirmation we needed. It reminded us that the work we’re doing is awesome and that we should be proud of it regardless of how many likes we get on social media.
Reorienting
Taking a step back and looking at our behavior, I find it quite comedic. It reminds me of when I used to post shirtless gym selfies on social media…except back then I couldn’t see I was just trying to get attention and had no other motives.
Our initial attempts at marketing may not have yielded all the results we desired, but we learned a lot. We’ve taken the time to reorient ourselves and refocus on what matters to us. Being the small team that we are, we must create more focused posts when using social media and time box the amount of time and attention we give to each platform. By redirecting most of our marketing energy into a smaller and more intimate audience, such as subreddits and newsletters, we can grow our community in a way that’s better aligned with who we are as a studio.
Note: Shameless plug, but if you have not heard, our Steam page for The 2020 Trail is officially live. It’s planned for release in April for free! Check it out and be sure to hit that wishlist button. If you want fun updates about what our studio is up to, head on over to our website and subscribe to our newsletter.
