You have a great idea for an indie game, but you don't have a big budget or a huge team to market it. How can you reach your target audience and generate some buzz without breaking the bank? In this article, you will learn some tips and tricks to market your indie game with limited resources, based on the experience of successful indie developers and mentors.
The first step to market your indie game is to define your niche. What makes your game unique, appealing, and different from the rest? Who are your ideal players, and what are their preferences, motivations, and pain points? By answering these questions, you can craft a clear and compelling message that resonates with your niche and sets you apart from the competition.
Start by identifying your target audience. Understand their preferences, interests, and demographics to tailor your marketing efforts. Next, focus on highlighting the unique selling points and features of your game that sets it apart from others in the industry. Utilize free or low-cost marketing channels, such as social media, email marketing, and content creation, to promote your game to your niche audience. Engage with your community through forums, online communities, and influencers to spread the word about your game. Lastly, prioritize building a strong brand presence and leveraging positive reviews and word-of-mouth referrals to maximize your limited resources.
Why are you trying to create the indie game? For a side project, passion art project, make money or a combination of all three? That will drive where and how you market. Finding like-minded communities online such as Facebook groups, subReddits or Discord channels will help you find potential gamers. Follow gaming companies (or studios/publishers) with similar characteristics to your game. A handy trick, is that after following them, you'll start to get ads shown to you to purchase similar games. Use the big ad companies AI to serve you similar games!
Before you start to compile a great strategy for your game even if it is for platforms like: VR,mobile,or PC,you need to define this,and you'll find your niche audience: -Who -What -Where -When -Why -How
Faire un jeu sur un genre que vous ma?trisez et tentez de le rendre unique à votre fa?on. Ne visez pas trop gros, car le projet grandira quoi qu'il arrive si vous êtes un passionné. Dès que vous avez un début de jeu avec des systèmes en place, tentez de créer une communauté autour de votre projet, car il sera très important pour votre futur succès. Respectez vos joueurs, car ils seront vos fans et c'est grace à eux que vous avancez. Reposez-vous car ce travail peut être captivant tout en épuisant toute votre énergie.
The second step to market your indie game is to build a community around it. A community is a group of fans, supporters, and influencers who are interested in your game, and who can help you spread the word, provide feedback, and create user-generated content. You can build a community by engaging with your potential players on social media, forums, blogs, podcasts, and events. You can also create a landing page, a newsletter, a demo, or a beta version of your game to collect email addresses and build anticipation.
The three most obvious places to build and maintain your community are: - Discord with your server, - Facebook Groups (in some cases), - forums (mostly obsolete), and in terms of Steam games, reviews and Steam Forums. Make your community feel listened to and catered to. This, despite being a pretty early point in most cases, will allow you to strongly influence the reception of your game and obtain heaps of valuable feedback which could be used to make your title better.
First you need to target your audience,based on geography research,and then do a content calendar,that is a king. You can stream in a loop on the Steam store page, use steam community forums,groups,steam events,curator connect, playtesting on Steam, keys for crowdfunding. Also have a business account on every social media platform to can collaborate with influencers on platforms like TCM( for TikTok) and Grin (for any other platform) You can use Tyroo for Snapchat ads. Instagram has groups and you can stream on the page, as for Facebook (Meta suite) too, Threads. Doing a LinkedIn Page for the game and using gaming groups, you can do a Livestream too on LinkedIn Page. Forums like IGN Boards and Kotaku,reddit and more.
A sua comunidade pode fazer ou destruir o nome do seu jogo. é importante ter pessoas apaixonadas pela sua cria??o, mas é mais importante ainda ter um público que n?o afaste novos jogadores em potencial. N?o basta apenas criar e alimentar uma comunidade, ela precisa ser moderada por profissionais para n?o se tornar tóxica. O famoso "boca a boca" é uma via de duas m?os: podem falar muito bem do seu jogo, e também podem falar muito mal da sua comunidade.
Le marketing par e-mail et les divers réseaux sociaux reste le plus accessible, mais cela prend du temps. Prévoyez de poster si possible une fois par jour autour de votre projet, même si je sais que cela n'est pas du tout évident. Montrez des petites choses susceptibles de plaire à vos fans, parler de votre journée, des choses simples suffisent, mais il faut être régulier. Si vous avez le courage, une newsletter peut être un petit atout supplémentaire. Un premier trailer sera toujours une bonne chose pour le présenter à vos fans.
Community is very important, with so many games released every day, building a community will help you stand out against the competition, Discord is great, but there is also too many Discordservers out there which leads to players muting the servers they are in, I see Twitter is a great place to build community, you tag players you think could be a good fit for your game, you acknowledge creators who play your game. Every time someone engages with your tweets, their followers will see your tweet for free exposure. Also building somewhat of a creator program will help a lot, and you can then gain their e-mails to keep them updated with your content and updates.
The third step to market your indie game is to leverage free tools that can help you reach more people and optimize your marketing efforts. For example, you can use Google Analytics to track your website traffic, conversions, and sources. You can use Canva to create eye-catching graphics and videos for your social media posts and ads. You can use Mailchimp to send personalized and automated emails to your subscribers. You can use Buffer to schedule and manage your social media posts across different platforms.
Free tools have come a long way! There are some amazing tools to get started like Blender, a program for creating digital assets, like monsters or weapons. There is the Godot Engine, which is an open source 2D and 3D game engine, similar to Unity and Unreal Engine. To build your game, you could use a popular CI/CD tool called Jenkins, which is an open source automation build server. It's very popular in the software space. For project management (handling tasks/deadlines/etc.), there is a currently popular project, Plane, which has been climbing the ranks on GitHub.
Also you can use IGDB to register your game on Twitch, using tools like Google Search console to verify ownership to your game metadata. And even Canva to design your website and publish it with your domain. There are a lot of tools to use: Davinci resolve to craft a great trailer, abode premiere to make it look great,and more .
One of the biggest free tools is social media platforms, especially when you have limited resources. In my experience, paying your way out of marketing doesn't work on a small scale and with limited budgets. It is too costly to reach a meaningful audience, and it isn't effective marketing anyway. Instead, allocate that money elsewhere and leverage content creation for free. With good and smart content creation, you can reach an incredible number of people, especially on platforms that are always hungry for adding creators to their platform so they incentivize and boost new creators in their algorithms, such as TikTok and many other short-form content platforms.
The fourth step to market your indie game is to partner with others who can help you increase your visibility and credibility. For example, you can collaborate with other indie developers who have similar or complementary games, and cross-promote each other's products. You can also reach out to influencers, streamers, bloggers, journalists, and reviewers who have a large and engaged audience in your niche, and offer them exclusive access, incentives, or interviews.
This is a very broad topic, so I'll only mention cross-promotion and bundle sales. Cross-promotion is an activity in which Game A is promoted in Game B's communication channels. This helps quite a lot with building brand recognition, increasing some KPIs and gaining sales/wishlists. Bundling means that Game A and Game B are sold together - and they don't have to be your games, you can bundle with anyone willing to. Cooperation and partnerships (in many different forms) are often used in the industry and they can massively enhance your chances of delivering a successful title to the market or making a great next step in your career. I'm up for a talk, so if you'd like to partner in terms of marketing, DM me :)
One of the best ways to market your indie game is to partner with other individuals, influencers, brands, companies, services and even other indie games. A great example is how David Wehle gave a talk at GDC about his game The First Tree. Another avenue you could take, is to reach out to Twitch streamers to have them stream them playing your game. This will provide almost instant feedback, as they will be annotating/voicing out loud what they're thinking of your game. In exchange, you could provide early access to your game. Kickstarter is a tricky one, as money and hype can be quite high, but gamers expectations (of how you promote your game), might not match what happens on launch day (see: The Day Before).
There are a lot of platforms to collaborate with influencers, also even on their profile on socials have their email/ price for coverage. Who hasn't heard about Lurkit as an example ? Or Grin, TCM or more? Don't forget to give them exclusive merchandise, or even do a cash contest. ??
Marketing is essential, Use Twitter to tag creators who played similar games and tag them, follow creators, and try to engage with them. Engage with #screenshotsaturday and #wishlistwednesday. Use Key distribution tools like Lurkit to reach a huge amount of creators with very little effort, and remember when it comes to PC keys, spend a lot of them, the more the better to make some noise in all clusters of releases, biggest mistake is to think that you lose $ when you give away a key, that is far from true as the core idea is that the creators would promote the game to generate sales.
The fifth step to market your indie game is to learn from mentors who have been there and done that. Mentors are experienced and successful indie developers who can offer you valuable advice, feedback, and guidance on how to market your game effectively and efficiently. You can find mentors through online platforms, communities, events, or networks that connect indie developers with experts and peers. You can also ask for recommendations from your contacts or follow your favorite indie developers online.
One of my favorite ways to learn about how to market your indie game, is to watch previous Game Developer Conference (GDC) videos on YouTube. You can go back as far as 2014 (or earlier!) to see previous talks about indie game marketing. There are hours and hours worth of content to find ideas to work from. Granted, some of the tactics might not work anymore (early AdSense?), but a lot of the core concepts still pertain today.
On gaming events they are appearing like speakers , so be sure you follow them on socials. It is important to look for them and learn every day.
The sixth and final step to market your indie game is to test and iterate your marketing strategies and tactics. Marketing is not a one-time thing, but a continuous process of experimentation, measurement, and improvement. You should always monitor your results, analyze your data, and learn from your feedback. You should also be flexible and adaptable to changing market conditions, customer preferences, and competitor actions. You should always look for new ways to market your indie game with limited resources.
Use of Emerging Technologies. With the continuous advancements in open-source development culture, artificial intelligence, and various other technologies, you might be surprised to discover the abundance of resources available to integrate into your workflow in 2024. Even if we only focus on artificial intelligence, numerous possibilities arise. You can leverage LLMs in pretty much anything involving text, including daily analyses of your communities and their requests, requests from other communities of other games, and to discover new potential areas to explore, among many other creative applications. You can employ image generation or sound generation to enhance your branding, and the list of possibilities goes on