Tag: Editorial

Articles

Tagging Visual Novels on itch.io

arimia

Today I thought I’d write up a little case study on tagging games on itch.io with some examples, namely Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea.

CWES is a Victorian-esque vampire visual novel that has always been an odd spot for me to market. CWES has a gay romance, but only between one of the protags and his adult counterpart and isn’t the focus; it’s a fully linear visual novel with no choices; it’s got hints of mystery, drama, and action, but at 2~ hours long it isn’t fully any of those; etc. It has received all positive reviews on Steam & itch.io but getting people to try it has been a challenge to say the least!

Compared to my previous games, CWES’ engagement on itch.io has been abysmal- but we’re not going to fully dissect that here today. Instead, we’re here to look at store pages!

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Articles

Marketing Visual Novels on TikTok

arimia

Social media platforms come and go, and with them audiences shift from one to another. After the Tumblr exodus a few years ago, long-form posting became sparse again and Twitter became the haven—or hell, depending on your outlook—for those users. After Vine closed down, YouTube took in the new-found celebrities of short form comedy.

With the emergence of any new social media, marketers will flock to it to find any way to monetize it. But for the past few years, TikTok has flown under the radar of game dev marketers.

Not any longer.

Today I want to talk about how marketing indie games on TikTok is a lot easier than you might think and why you should give it a shot—it might be life-changing, as you’ll see.

This article will not go over privacy concerns with TikTok and how much of your data it tracks, nor prior reports of LGBT+ content suppression. Please do your own research into the companies and policies for social media apps before diving in, especially ones as large as TikTok.

Before we get started, if you’re new here then hi, I’m Arimia! I own Crystal Game Works, a visual novel studio focused on chuuni LGBT+ games, and I’m the marketing force behind Studio Élan, a visual novel studio making sapphic games. I use Tiktok to promote both of these studios.

Now let’s get started ♥

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Articles

making game development backup plans

arimia

When we decide to make a project, we typically don’t assume that the project will fail, that members will ghost us, that we’ll be hit by real life problems. But these things do happen, and quite frequently.

Whether you’re working solo or with a team, it’s important to sit down and make backup plans. Why and how? Let’s look at that today.

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Articles

Spoiling Content while Marketing

arimia

Marketing is how you communicate to people what your game is about. Naturally, this means “spoiling” some of the meat of the game.

But how much is too much spoiling? How do you know what will hook the player and how much is too much information?

Today I want to look at why spoiling some of your game is a good thing and how to avoid spoiling too much.

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Articles

Marketing Fundamentals for indie game developers

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”?

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