Top 10 Indie Game Marketing Questions ANSWERED!
Вставка
- Опубліковано 24 сер 2021
- Simon Carless is the leading expert on marketing your indie game, and he's answered the top 10 most popular questions regarding how to find an audience for your game on Steam/consoles and (hopefully!) sell 100,000+ units. This isn't sponsored, I'm just a huge fan of Simon's work!
Sign up for the GameDiscoverCo newsletter, it's free! gamediscover.co/
Want to join the GDU Discord server and learn how to start, finish, and market games? Use coupon code YTPROMO25 for 25% off, and unlock your game dev potential: courses.gamedevunlocked.com/p...
01:59 - What would be the first thing for a solo indie developer to focus on for marketing?
06:32 - Should I market from the beginning?
15:07 - How much time should we put in developing vs marketing?
20:12 - How to determing pricing for your game.
28:03 - How important is the name of the game for discoverability?
29:31 - What is the best way to market a game without strong visuals?
31:35 - Is okay to make videos unrelated to your game's mood just for attention?
37:00 - Question about community building on Steam wishlist outdoing Discord and Twitter followers as indication of success.
Thanks man
09:42 Question 3: How do we reach our target audience rather than other gamedevs?
That saying of "If you had two people of equal skill, one is pretty and the other one is ugly, who do you hire?" "You hire the ugly one: they got to the same position with more prejudices/bias against them along the way."
Point being, if this man is in ONLINE MARKETING and says "JIF" like this without shame he's probably a freaking wizard to have gotten this far.
This is really useful.
Most of the questions you asked are some I ask myself and it was really good to have someone more experienced answer them.
Thanks a lot !
Absolutely fantastic interview, thank you both!
Some really valuable information here, really appreciate you providing us with this awesome content!
The section on pricing is really good and interesting as I've often wondered about what I would charge if I made a full project. I can see, and have thought about, both sides of the argument but not sure if it gave me any clearer thoughts about what I would charge! I guess it would depend on the play time as they mentioned.
I think out of all the successful game devs out there you are the most genuine. I love how with each stream and video you want to help us succeed at what we love. Thankyou
Thanks guys for the great content! My first indie game, Interstellar Sentinel, It's as if Einhander and DeathSmiles had a baby delivered by Dr. R-Type (a shmup, super micro niche these days) and it was fun to think about this problem of discoverability for my game over the course of watching this video. Cheers!
Amazing video! All this information is insanely useful so thank you both for putting this out there and helping us fellow devs!
Did you release your game?
@@LunarBulletDev sure did! the release changed my life
Amazing Episode, really helpful to indie game devs
David, it would be fantastic if there was a chance to activate captions :) With a hearing loss and English, not my native language, I have an immense problem understanding. Thank you :)
I have several games made on apple devices and relied on UA-cam to show my trailers. Thank you Simon and David for your information and will now focus and implement your recommendation to give my games a fresh release to the masses. I will give you a update on my progress cheers Perry
just the questions i had thank you so much!
3 months in with my game dev journey. Just made my steam page live while building a community in youtube by making devlogs for my development progress. So far so good. ☺️ Thanks for the insights. ☺️
Did you release?
@@LunarBulletDev still developing the game. It's a big project so it may take some time. I now have a team that helps me make the development faster. ☺️
Really enjoyable interview. I would love to chat with the both of you on these topics.
I'm not disputing the response to the first question as it definitely contains some good information, but it is rather broad and may be a bit too overwhelming for someone just starting out.
My response would be that it is never too early to start marketing. Do not be afraid to start small.
Get some early input from friends and family based on your game concept or rough gameplay. Expand that to a broader circle of friends who may be a little less biased. Then, based on the feedback you've gathered, you can determine your hook and what may be some of your unique selling points (USPs).
Use these and begin building a stable of assets that highlight your USPs and your primary hook. Pair the assets with a timeline and story that will help you navigate social media when you're comfortable making your announcement.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg really. 😅
Good luck!
Edit: he's spot on with GIFs and video. Attention spans are so short that you've really gotta' make your point fast on social media.
Haha and yeah, getting yourself caught in that indie dev circle/bubble can be hard to break out of on social media and it can be sort of a false positive of sorta. Try mixing the conversation up and using different hashtags. Check out Hashtagify to get a better understanding of hashtag popularity.
I will say that Tiktok is definitely one platform that I wish I knew better from a marketing standpoint.
wow thank you so much for this
This Helped me a lot with my marketing strategy. I'm marketing 2 years in advanced
Just want to say thanks for giving all the brilliant information, David! I’m a narrative designer and writer by trade (also video editing) and I am just starting to learn about game development. I have helped others write their stories and now I want to start writing and developing my own. What resources would you recommend to get started out?
I am saving up for Thomas’ and your course too :)
Also, do you still use visual scripting tools such as Playmaker and Bolt?
24:20 never ask a fish how to catch fish, ask the fisherman
Game devs buy games, so its not necessarily a bad thing to have devs tweeting your stuff.
eyyyyy it's simon!
An indie game marketer on the internet said: if a Steam customer is willing to pay $15, they are nearly always willing to pay $20.
hard g gif is the correct pronunciation
23:39 okay so that response can go in the bin.
A big one for me is how to get the gamepad/controller to work in menus alongside the keyboard. I got 14 of 20 levels designed for my game and I currently have no idea how to incorporate that into my game
If you're using Unity, I suggest the asset called ReWired. Works like a charm!
Did you ever get it sorted out? 😂
The G in GIF stands for Graphics/Graphical, with a hard G - so that's how I say it. GIF, not JIF
:)
I have to completely change the way I approach this. I need a solid marketing plan before I even begin a new project.
Doesn’t the playability (popularity) of the game matter too? It has to be fun and stand out. There’s just too much not fun in creative junk.
This! I know of a company that paid a marketing company to promote their game. They definitely got lots of eyeballs on the game and all the sites promoted it. However the game is very generic and full of bugs, so despite all the marketing it went nowhere....
At 5:30 I strongly disagree that Twitter should be written off as a social media strategy. Just because a game sold well and had bad Twitter performance, does not mean Twitter is a platform that should be ignored. There are plenty of games that I've only heard about because of Twitter, Swords of Symphony, Garden Story, Here Comes Niko!. Just go on No More Robots Twitter, it's utter shit. Nobody wants shitty memes, they want to keep up with current projects and games from the publisher, think of it as more of a personable news feed rather than "I'm going to post funny cat xDDD". No More Robots' UA-cam channel is really good though.
Edit: Okay I just continued the video and he said find which platform fits your game lol.
I agree. Ive discovered so many indie games only because I follow devs on Twitter (im an indie dev). I think discounting twitters reach would he a mistake.
twitter should be written off as using for anything.
@@JesterJones based
This dude talking about jifs 😂
Jafical Interchange Format
i'm not gonna advertise my game until i actually start coding because i'm still learning how to do it
It's called "GIF" of course, not "JIF".
I need someone's help! I need an indie game developer who can make me a video game for the PS4 or Dreamcast that is retro inspired. I want this to be a physical video game and if it came in an NES styled retro game box with a matte sticker seal so much the better, but not necessary. This game will be a beat'em up and the title of the game will be called, "Super Hangtab Bros." I have the rest of the details in my head for any indie game developer that has the time to take this job. I will pay whomever to create this game, paying you $$$ is no problem. Any takers? Lets discuss the details.
Game Dev Unlocked seems like he had no interest in this interview or the views of his interviewprtner and just did it because its his job, while the person beeing interviewed seems like he has a blast :(
I don't agree with your comment. David responded quite a bit to his answers, they had a conversation.
I think it's just his speaking cadence that is throwing the vibe off. Especially if you watch in 2x speed. Also he seems maybe a bit nervous?
I think he's just nervous personally
He mentioned that he's an introvert in a video. And it's really hard for an introvert to sound interested (even though the person is). I'm saying this because I'm an introvert myself.
Probably because he doesn't have much experience in interviewing
The host had much better ideas than the guy being interviewed