arimia

At the end of the day as a dev, we want people to play our game. We want people to play it and preferably tell us they like it, maybe even recommend it to a friend. But today, more than ever, making a game and releasing it isn’t enough.

Marketing is one of the key aspects of game development, as it is with any product development, but understanding the components of marketing—the building blocks of why we do this—is more important than ever. Today I want to take a step back and talk about the fundamentals of marketing—what does it mean to “market a game”?

While I talk about concepts and ideas for marketing indie games a lot, I rarely see talks on what to use to market indie games. Today I want to briefly go over tools I use weekly for indie game marketing.

There’s also a brief bonus section on additional websites that are cool for social media marketing. Alright, let’s get started!

Yesterday (June 25th) was the 3rd anniversary of my first commercial game, That Which Binds Us, which was a commercial failure. After it released to little fanfare, I realized I was missing something- marketing. Yadda yadda, 3 years later I’m sitting here trying to teach others how to market their visual novels. Over those 3 years, I’ve been asked a lot of questions on marketing VNs. Today I want to answer some of those for future VN devs.

Some of these questions are ones I’ve heard over and over while others are questions I’ve received in my VN marketing channel (feel free to join us and ask any questions or share insights!).