Tag: Marketing

Hi, I’m Arimia. I’ve been learning digital marketing ever since my first commercial game, That Which Binds Us, didn’t sell as well as I expected. Nowadays I do social media management at Studio Élan as well as my own studio Crystal Game Works. I get asked a lot how new devs can promote their indie game and the short answer is “post interesting images consistently” but the long answer is, well, much longer. When does a new dev start posting? Where do they post? How do they post?

This series will be long. Treat it as a guide book. An advice list. Take some parts as solid rules and others as ideas you can mold into your own style. Figure out what works best for you and your game as you learn. Let’s get started.

A few days ago I had to clean up our storage unit. One of the boxes I took home was part of my manga collection. As a new rule of thumb I don’t work on weekends (but I’m writing this on Saturday- whoops!) so I spent the day rereading some of then. Since I’m a shounen junkie, a lot of them are from Shounen Jump. As I finished a couple of them, I noticed that at the end of every manga they had a straight-forward marketing strategy…

Let’s take a look at the end of a handful of mangas to see what I mean. I’ll list out a few different mangas to give examples of different advertisement strategies and then see how we can relate this to video games.

This summer Steam introduced their games festivals, tri-annual events on Steam where users could try out demos for upcoming games. Anyone who’s a Steam publisher can enter them and the demos are featured on Steam. For indies, it’s a win-win.

However, with the second Steam Game Festival now coming to a close, it’s clear this isn’t the marketing goldmine we’ve all been looking for. Today I’m going to quickly go over my experiences with both game festivals and what I hope to see in the future.