Author: arimia

​Designing an indie game to be unique while also having a defined aesthetic is growing increasingly more important as time goes on, as the indie game market (and game market in general) is constantly expanding at a seemingly exponential rate. It has become more necessary than ever to create eye-catching games, games that instantly attract eyes (and hopefully the eyes of buyers) towards your product. Your product is unique, and you must like it- why else would you be spending so much time to make it if not? Then, it stands to reason that you should want more and more people to notice your game. While maybe not immediately recognizable, good game design has striking correlations to good marketing- another essential piece of game dev that is sadly overlooked too often. According to Polygon, 2,964 games were released on Steam in 2015. That number increased to 4,207 games that were released in 2016. That number again jumped to 7,672 games being released in 2017 just for Steam. Each year it seems the number is almost doubling, meaning it is absolutely becoming harder and harder for consumers to find your game and it is absolutely necessary to make that first impression count- and if it doesn’t, then you need to rely on good, heavy marketing to make sure you get more than just one impression from people.

Indie games typically fail at marketing for a number of reasons, ranging from “somewhat avoidable through research” to “do you even know what game dev means?”:

• Not targeting the right audience
• Not reaching enough eyes
• Not marketing long enough before and after release
• Failing to market before release (the common “my game is releasing tomorrow and I forgot to market it!”)

Now, let’s go over briefly some of these.

Not targeting the right audience- you just can’t market enough to sell decently if you’re not marketing to the right audience. If you’re making a mobile mystery point and click game, then your main audience is going to be middle aged women. If you’re making a side swiping action game like Temple Run, then your main audience is going to be bored middle and high school students. Marketing outside of these ranges can work, but you should already be seeing the vast differences in some gaming genres. With the addition of mobile gaming to the market, more and more “non traditional gamers” are now adding money to the market, meaning the market is expanding even in these ways.

Not reaching enough eyes- posting a couple tweets every few weeks and maybe tagging them isn’t going to suffice even if you’re Ubisoft or EA. Some surveys have said that it takes three impressions before consumers build an idea and recognize a brand– this means that effective marketing consists of posting frequently and posting in multiple places. It is for this very reason that more prolific indie game companies hire people just for marketing, as it truly is a full-time job. Those emails don’t send themselves, and a lot of times people don’t have a good grasp on what effective marketing consists of.

Not marketing long enough before and after release- this point is a bit more controversial, as some people will have differing opinions on this. Some will say you should start posting and announcing your game the moment you have any shred of assets to show off, whether it be an extreme prototype screenshot or a concept art sketch. Some will say you should wait until you have a good collection of assets ready to share, such as a trailer or even a demo. Personally, I believe there is a nice middle ground that can be found that changes for each game. As an artist, I always start with the art, so I can make art assets as needed. However, for companies such as those run by friends who are programmers and writers instead of artists, they have to depend more on their artists for when they can announce their projects and might lean more towards mock screenshots. Whenever you feel comfortable that you have enough assets and a good idea of what your game is, start marketing.
But what does this have to do with marketing enough after release? Well, let’s say you magically get your game out there. Congrats, you gave all your personal info to Valve and now it’s on Steam. Do you just go to your next game? Do you move on? …Somewhat. You should definitely move on, yes, but you should also try to not drop the game and run. There will be bugs. That’s inevitable, no matter how much proofreading, beta testing, and sleepless nights. There will always be people in your genre who don’t know about your game. Tweetdeck is a great tool for post-release marketing, as you just schedule tweets and leave. Try to check social media accounts frequently though, as people like being replied to.

Failing to market before release- whenever someone says “my game is releasing tomorrow and I forgot to market it”, a marketer dies on the inside. As previously said, marketing should be viewed as a natural and necessary step in the game development and publishing process, so it is absolutely mind boggling to hear of people who release a game and then decide to dip their toes into marketing, despite the fact that they should already be waist deep into marketing by the time of release, if not neck high. If you want to even try to make your deposit back on your game, you must begin marketing months before release. Most games won’t make their budget back, let alone get in the green money-wise, but that’s another story.
​

​That’s a good question we’d all like to know! …But let’s go over some basics.Be active on social media- if you make a social media account for your company and/or game, try to keep it up to date. There are plenty of scheduling websites that can help you queue posts so you don’t have to remember to post daily. As well as being active on social media, you should also aim to make sure you’re using the websites to your full advantage, as each site functions a bit differently.

Start marketing as soon as you have enough to show and keep at it- start marketing once you have a fair amount to show and know what your game is. Graphics are the best way to catch people’s eyes, of course.

Contacting reviewers- game news sites and blogs are a great way to further reach people who are potentially interested. Don’t worry about being declined- 9/10 they’ll ignore/not reply to your email instead of sending one back saying why they don’t want to review it. Of course, don’t target sites that review only android games in the hopes that they’ll review your Steam release- don’t waste your time like that. Try to find as many sites as you can to email that allow devs to email them, as for the most part you won’t get responses back. These sites get a lot of emails every day, and they have to pick what to and what not to cover.

​
In an essence, marketing is getting people who want to buy your game to know about your game. You definitely want to hone in on your audience and make sure they know what your game is, but in general the goal of marketing is spreading the word about your game. 

Sometimes when people are sad that a game didn’t do well, they mention “it was marketed well”, yet it didn’t do good. The sad truth is, more often than not if a game doesn’t do well, it actually wasn’t marketed well. Marketing frequently is a good start- but if you don’t know who to market to, then you’ll force yourself to do way more marketing just to make up.​So, who do you market to? How do you figure out your audience that will buy your game?
​

This is a seemingly basic question but is actually a difficult and precise question, and in order to market efficiently, you must answer it as best you can. The answer shouldn’t be something generic such as “teenagers” or “visual novel fans”- instead, it should be rather detailed so you know where best to spend your time marketing. Because this answer varies wildly per game, let’s go over some examples with made-up games as well as some of mine own towards the end.

Sherlock Holmes – Finding the Clues
Description: A woman finds herself in London on a work trip when she uncovers the beginnings of a mystery. This is a point and click hidden objects game, with semi-realistic art.

So, in our first example we have a point and click hidden objects game. Let’s think about the typical playerbase for these types of games- they’re usually middle aged women. A female protagonist, semi-realistic art, all of these are further bonus points for this playerbase as that’s what the typical game type that this playerbase plays has.

Rocket Rapid Relay
Description: A multiplayer fast-paced action racing game with a stylized art style.

For our second example we have a racing game with an interesting style, but with a catch- it’s multiplayer. On this fact alone, your fanbase will consist of mostly multiplayer fans of racing games. The mood will help narrow down the age group- if it’s more corny with low realistic violence, kids can be the target market; if it’s more crude, adult humor with higher amounts of realistic violence, adults can be the target market.

With made-up game examples we can only get so far, so now I’ll delve into two of my own games and how I figured out the audience for each.

That Which Binds Us
Description: A young woman down on her luck meets a man who can change it all. It’s a romance & modern fantasy visual novel with an anime semi-realistic art style.

At first, I thought my target audience was otome fans and called it a day. That was easy! …No, it’s not that easy, because my audience wasn’t otome fans. Otome fans are used to anime styled dating sims with multiple love interests- that wasn’t my game. Mine only has one love interest and isn’t fully anime style, so just targeting otome fans wasn’t the approach I should have taken. Instead, I should have targeted visual novel fans who like GxB romance with a solid story. This shifts my audience into more of a ven diagram- some otome fans are still targeted but now I’m targeting many other people.

I Saw Him Today
Description: A short kinetic novel (a visual novel without choices) about dealing with the after affects of suicide.

With this game I was able to get creative with my marketing (and I would have been able to get much more creative had I put in choices, but I did not as a narrative design choice). I didn’t tell the story in a typical VN format as there’s no sprites and only CGs, so I could mask it as a “”full game”” easier (and again, I would have had an even easier time doing so if there were choices in it). I marketed it more as an “emotional experience” which suddenly sounds more interesting to a lot of more typical gamers than “sad visual novel”.
​

Alright, let’s say you read through those examples above but you still don’t understand how to find your target market. Never fear, this editorial isn’t done yet! There are a couple more ways to figure out who to market to.

1. Find games similar to yours.
This is probably one of the easier ways to find a market for your game- find games similar to yours and see who’s playing them. For That Which Binds Us, I looked around for people who played more indie otomes rather than just Japanese otomes, as most JP otomes have multiple love interests and thus wouldn’t quite be my target market. This is also a great research tool for finding reviewers for your games- find people who have played and liked games similar to yours and bam.

2. Look around in your genre.
Hopefully if you’re far enough into development that you’re ready to start fully marketing you’re also in a few dev circles for your genre- in that case, ask and look around. This is similar to the above step but less detailed and works if you really can’t figure out any games similar to yours.

And that’s about it! Marketing to the right audience helps relieve a lot of stress caused by throwing a lot of marketing out there and hoping it stick, since the more niche your game is the less effective that will be. However, finding your right niche fanbase will not only help your current game but will help your games in the future and make marketing easier.

Tweetdeck is sort of an official extension of Twitter which gives users more content feeds to shift through, the ability to manage multiple accounts at once, and the ability to schedule tweets. The last two are the most important parts of this, as it allows you to schedule tweets for any time in the future for multiple accounts. This comes extremely in handy when weekly date-based events on Twitter happen so that you never forget to post. Let’s look at some of those below.
​

As some of you might already know, Twitter has many small, weekly game dev events such as #screenshotsaturday and #wipwednesday where you post a tweet with relevant content on a specific day and use the specific tag. Any exposure you can get is vital, so try to post during these. Here’s a small list of events to schedule tweets for, and what’s best to post:
​

1. #screenshotsaturday – Post an ingame screenshot on Saturday. Gifs that show ingame playing tend to do better.
2. #wipwednesday – Post a WIP on Wednesday.
3. #indiedevhour – The most specific of all the tags, indie dev hour is on Wednesdays from 1PM CST to 2PM CST. Post anything about your game or ask game dev questions during this time.
4. #cutiesaturday – A newer tag not fully related to game dev, Cutie Saturday is an event run by Arin Hanson (Egoraptor from the Game Grumps) where you post your drawings of cute girls on Saturday. If you have art of cute girls from your game, this tag can help exponentially.

When on Twitter, you only have a second or two of people’s attention- sometimes, not even that. In order to keep their attention, you need to have something that they want to see. The best way to do this is to post something visually stunning, or at the very least, interesting. We don’t all have AAA budgets- if we did, nobody would be reading this. So, what counts as “good”, eye-catching content?

1. Concept art – People like to see the origins, where it all began.
2. Progression shots – Show how the game has evolved over time. Artists do this all the time with redraws and such, and it’s a part of game dev I wish more people would show off, how the game’s first prototypes looked versus how they have ended up being. Again, people like to see the origins of things.
3. Key visuals – Show off those stunning cover arts or key visuals. If you’re fairly though development, you should have at least one done- if not, show the sketches for it.
4. Screenshots – Be ready to show people what they’re supporting. It’s hard to maintain a fanbase that doesn’t know what they’re fans of, so try to get good screenshots out as early as you can.
5. Gifs – Last but certainly not least, gifs are one of the best and easiest eye-catchers to post on Twitter. We like seeing things move. It’s a lot more interesting than still drawings. The easiest thing to gif is naturally ingame play- this not only shows people what they’re supporting but also draws their attention because, hey, stuffs moving!

A lot of times I’ll see people tag their tweets but use extremely out there tags that nobody would look up. The idea behind tagging something is that you want to use the tags people most look up and would search for– using tags of random words that somewhat relate to your game does not help you. So, how can you find tags people are searching?By using RiteTag, you can easily find what tags are most popular and which ones people are actually using. At the time of writing this, this is what it shows me are the stats for when I searched “gamedev”:

The first column on the right with the numbers is the amount of tweets in the past hour using each tag; the second column shows how many RTs have occurred in the past hour with each tag; and the last column shows how many views tweets with each tag got in the past hour. Using this site you can easily find out which tags are worth using and which are a waste of your time.
​

Alright, so now you have a good amount of tags that are relevant to your tweet that has a gif, a screenshot, just something nice in it. How many tags are you going to use?It’s a fact that tweets that use upwards of 13+ tags look bad. I don’t even have to cite that. Just look at them. It’s also a fact that some bots will not RT tweets that have more than a certain amount of tags– some give you 10 tags before they won’t RT you, some give you 7. Now, when I say “bots retweeting you”, don’t take this a bad way. You want some bots to RT your content, as there are a fair amount of game dev bots out there that push your content out to more people, they just happen to be automatized. So, let’s pick out about 5 tags to use at first (though some studies say that using more than 2-3 decreases your visibility- your mileage may and will vary, so I advise to use between 1 and 5 tags and see what works best for you). Here’s a good list of general game dev tags:
​

1. ​#gamedev
2. #indiedev
3. #indiegames
4. #indiegamedev

​
Some bots only RT certain tags or a combination of certain tags- for instance, my friend’s bot Lemon-chan retweets visual novel tweets that have a combination of #visualnovel + #gamedev (along with many other combinations that include #visualnovel) or by simply using #vndev .

Twitter is a social media service. Duh. But, because of that, that means there are times when more users are on than others, and there are dead times when much fewer people are on. Posting in these peak times is a great way to get your tweet noticed much easier.Different sites say different things, but the median time seems to be around lunch time to 3PM for the US, so around 11AM-3PM CST. If you noticed, that’s also right in the middle of #indiedevhour . Make sure to schedule your tweets for during these times.
​

Marketing is an art. Like with any art, we can learn through practice and through others, but sometimes things just work and we can’t really figure out why they work versus something very similar. You will find that some of the tweets you’ve painstakingly crafted for maximum exposure only get some attention while others that don’t look as nice will get 3x as much. Just keep trying, and figure out what works best for you. For me, these steps above have worked best, so use them as a guild line and tweak as necessary.For this last bullet, I’ll show some of my tweets and go through how I make them.

This was the announcement tweet for my first commercial game, That Which Binds Us, being released on Steam and Itch.io. Let’s go through each line and I’ll explain my reasoning for each part.On the first line, we have a simple but easily understandable declaration- the game is now available for purchase on two websites and has a discounted launch price. There’s not a lot of text surrounding it so you can quickly read what it says.

On the second line, there’s a short logline for the game that entices people. Well, what would you do? It’s short but effective.

On the third and fourth lines I have an emoji, the website name, and then the website link. The emojis are my own personal touch of flair- it makes it so the entire tweet isn’t words and adds some color to it. For tweets about That Which Binds Us, I use three emojis that are represented in the game- the heart with a bow on it, a ribbon, and a knife. You don’t have to go nearly as indepth with this thinking as I do, but it’s a good idea to consider. The links are not shortened URLs so the user is able to easily see that they lead to the correct websites.

On the last line I have, again, a relevant emoji and 5 tags. Emojis count for 2 characters so by the last ribbon I had used every single character Twitter allows for this tweet (talk about a close one). I used tags relevant to my tweet, ones that I knew were most prevalent.

Lastly, the media I posted on this tweet was a screenshot. For the release tweet I wouldn’t advise this- you should use the most eye-catching media you have such as the key visual or a gif of ingame play. Still, it worked out pretty good for me with just the screenshot.
​

I’ll go through one more tweet before ending this- this is a much quicker but still effective tweet, one that I sent out for #indiedevhour (I find that posting my sprites gets me the most mileage for #indiedevhour , so I save my screenshots for #screenshotsaturday – of course, your mileage may vary).First line I state what it’s for- #indiedevhour . Naturally. I enter after this so as to not have a big block of words.

Second line says what the art is for- it’s for my RPG. The next sentence gives a small bit of info about her, how she’s a bit of a mystery. The art should entice people to stop for a second or two, long enough to read the short sentences.

Lastly of course I have emojis and tags. I could have added a link to something in this tweet inbetween the info and the tags, such as a link to our Discord or more information about the game, but I didn’t for this one. As you’ll see, there’s not too many blatantly wrong ways to market on Twitter unless you’re spamming tags and trying to get every single bot on the website to RT you. It’s all about finding your own way to post content that most entices users to stop, and this is my method. I hope some of you are able to learn from this method and tweak it some to make it your own!