So this happened to a guy that worked for me. Loved video games, super talented front end dev. Made a horror game in Unity at evenings and weekends with his best friend. Launched it on Steam. Very low sales. But he learnt a huge amount about marketing and game design based on player feedback.
Designed a second game, put all the marketing learnings into it, 48 hours after launch the biggest streamer on twitch was streaming it.
4 days later he quit working for me. Couldnt be happier for him.
The biggest thing I saw was that 2 guys, Unity, unity asset store and some upwork artists made a really pretty decent game. I love how this has come full circle. I'm 47 and back in the 8 bit days games were made by 1 or 2 people. 15 years ago this just wasnt possible, but now with unity, unity assets, remote for hire work, steam and twitch for marketing you can legit make it as a 2 person studio. I love it.
The distribution of Steam and viral marketing of Twitch have revolutionised indie development for the better. In addition to this, as an asset he now has a Discord server with 10ksss+ subscribers. I doubt he will ever pay for a $ of traditional above or below the line marketing.
The flipside is that it's a lottery. Steam is overflowing with new indie games every day, and many very good ones die in obscurity. You really have to get lucky and go viral
But yeah, the entry fee for that lottery is at a historic low, which is still great (especially for hobby devs who don't care about the rest!)
When in reality, you have a great deal of control. Marketing IS something you can control.
Sure, some streamer randomly picking up your game is beyond your control. But you can certainly create conditions that would make it easier for your game to be picked up by a streamer (build relationships with journos, streamers; get paid marketing, etc.)
Calling it a lottery is a disservice to the people who actually put in effort to create these games.
Here's what I learned in life that's applicable to many areas, this being one:
Not sucking isn't enough. Even being "Great" isn't enough. And even being "amazing" just isn't good enough to be successful. You need people to notice and care and help you and carry you to success. Mediocrity with a lot of public and positive reinforcement beats quiet greatness. Truly great things die every day from lack of attention and the willingness / motivation of others to help you carry that greatness forward. No greatness succeeds on its own, despite how great it might truly be.
> When in reality, you have a great deal of control. Marketing IS something you can control.
If every creator does marketing, then everyone is in the same position and nobody has control. Also, check out this research paper, published in Science, showing that popularity signals like the number of downloads and ordering by popularity increases the unpredictability of a music market, which is an opposite effect to what you expect. I suspect similar effects happen for game and other cultural markets:
> Calling it a lottery is a disservice to the people who actually put in effort to create these games.
I think that both for simple and complex games there are those that nobody cares about and those that end up really popular. Sometimes it's about good marketing, sometimes it's about making what people actually want to play (instead of what you want to make), sometimes it's about developing it really well, other times it's just about being at the right place at the right time.
Those aren't mutually exclusive qualities, for certain titles you might need lots of one of them, or maybe a mix of all of them. In regards to what you actually need, it can indeed be a lottery and thinking that hard work (or marketing) is all that's necessary in ample amounts (or even is a pre-requisite) might be misleading, because it's not the full story.
For an example of how any mix of those aspects can lead to failure, look at the launch of Brigador, a well made game that was a flop: https://youtu.be/qUsuusNLxik
Then contrast that (years of development) with something like Vampire Survivors. Or maybe 2048, or Flappy Bird, or Wordle for examples of even simpler projects that were also easier to make, that still were immensely popular and much more successful.
Except that creating games and marketing games are two separate things, so calling it a lottery is an insult to marketers, and game developers would do well to recognize that simply building a game and not marketing it should be a conscious decision to shoot themselves in the foot.
Eh, I have a friend who is incredibly talented and when their indie game became iPhone game of the year it couldn’t have been anyone else I knew, the guy was just that stellar. Definitely a combination of ability and persistence and a little luck.
I don't think it's lottery. I think that we don't want to admit that most people are just bad at designing and developing games. I hang about on /r/gamedev and I've seen a lot of posts complaining about low sales and not a single one of those games was compelling
its hard to be critical. ive never seen a great game not do well. even games that might seem pretty not doing well if you look closely enough are often still missing something.
I challenge anyone to provide a link to an actual great indie game that hasnt done well. that flew under radar.
"Great" and "haven't done well" would be subjective, but here's my list of amazing games that are underperforming in sales:
The Hex
Eliza
Suzerain
Know by Heart (and all Ice Pick lodge games for that matter)
Of course it's not just a lottery, it's a lottery weighted (at least to some degree) by a variety of factors like the game itself and the marketing you put into it.
The point I think people usually mean to make is that the odds are low (really, extremely low) so it's not really a prudent financial choice unless you have other ways to support yourself and don't care about potentially throwing away the time/effort if it doesn't work out.
Marketing definitely has an impact, even just social media stuff, but unless you've got a AAA-sized marketing budget there will still be a significant amount of chance involved
Marketing matters more than the game if you're an indie, and I don't say that in a cynical way.
Unfortunately I've seen so many people pour their hearts and souls into a game thinking they can just start marketing it when it's ready: You should be engaging with your future audience well before then.
You don't have to take money from them, you don't have to make empty promises, but in the current landscape you need people to be waiting for your game, not you waiting for players, because odds are they won't come.
For every lucky game that gets the right streamer there's 10 more that are truly great games that just never get traction and die.
Every time I see a new-ish game released for free on the epic games store or indiegala, I think "bummer, I guess it's still mac and cheese in mom's basement for these guys.
> The flipside is that it's a lottery. Steam is overflowing with new indie games every day, and many very good ones die in obscurity.
Sounds to me like an opportunity. There may be a demand for a service that reviews indie games and "discovers" (promotes) little-known-but-great ones. It even has an obvious revenue source: allowing advertising by games (so long as advertisements and promoted works are VERY CLEARLY separated).
You just shifted the problem to a different place. Now it is the reviewer who has to get big, and has to be able to meet the expectations of their audience - over a long period. There are tons of reviewer channels on Youtube and Twitch. I don't think becoming a big enough fish as a reviewer is any easier?
I think it's more than lottery. Skills, contents and marketing are all important aspects of game production. I wonder what is the chance of getting 1,000 sales for the Nth released non-free game. It won't feed the mouth but is a good start (to convince wife). Steam probably has the data.
Easy: Among Us, for the many months that it toiled in nearly complete obscurity to the point of the development team nearly giving up the ghost and quitting, until one specific streamer picked it up and gave it the critical mass attention it needed to go absolutely huge. Had the developers had slightly less resources and shut down the servers before that crucial moment it would have never happened, even though clearly Among Us is a fantastic game in retrospect.
Quality is necessary but not sufficient for success.
Also: a while back, I wanted to empirically test the "any good game will succeed on steam, and if it doesn't succeed, it isn't a good game" hypothesis by setting up a little metagame called "Steam Prophet". We would track upcoming steam games and try to predict which ones would succeed BEFORE they came out. We eventually disbanded the project when we got so reliably good (but not perfect) at predictions that we got bored and quit. Turns out that just a few leading metrics were incredibly predictive of day 1 (and thus day 30, day 60, and day 90, and year 1) success -- chiefly the number of followers the game had on Steam on launch day. It is a rare game indeed that can succeed on Steam without first having banked tons of high quality wishlists (of which followers is a public proxy metric for).
The spirit of Steam Prophet lives on today in the form of Simon Carless' Game Discover Co newsletter, which obsessively follows upcoming and newly released Steam Games:
https://gamediscover.co/
The problem with Among Us is that it's an online game. Meaning you need a certain amount of actual people playing it before it's fun. So it's a chicken or egg problem; it's not fun without players, players won't join if it's not fun.
If you got that good at predictions, doesn't that show that for most games, it's usually not a lottery at all?
Aside from rare cases like Flappy Bird, and aside from the usual vagaries of commercial, technological and artistic projects. And aside from special challenges like the minimum playerbase size required for an online game like Among Us.
During development, developers could set up a Steam page, release one or two trailers as soon as possible (with mocked-up gameplay if necessary), and try to predict the audience's interest by the increase of followers/wishlists (compared to other games). In case of a lukewarm reception, they could decide to drop this game and start developing another one.
Did you write about the leading metrics and your insights somewhere, aside from this article, which seems to be from the beginning of your "Steam Prophet" project?
Most developers have very little understanding of marketing, and are very hesitatnt to pay for good marketing services.
Here's something most people won't tell you: the majority of online marketing is paid, either explicitly (i.e. you pay Google) or covertly (i.e. you "bribe" an editor at Forbes to feature your article).
That's difficult to evaluate since "good" is subjective. So is "selling well", to be honest. I assume you mean a game that is reasonably finished and polished and not simply shovelware, but still not getting the sales to be profitable. There are tons. 30 games drop on Steam everyday. Just sort by new and see all the games that any little indie studio would be proud to release but have few sales.
I've seen many. Wuppo didn't sell well until it was called out by an algorithm as the most underrated game on Steam or something like that. Of course, "good" is very subjective. I personally don't think the most popular games are any good.
It IS subjective.
For a game of its kind it can have sold realy well yet not have sold enough to make up for a poor management and way too big of a debt.
It wouldn't change the reality of "it sold well" but still validate "it didn't sell well enough"
After four years working on my retro game nearly full time, and several launches, I still don't understand marketing enough to understand what to do differently.
A lot of the advice out there is something like: "create a community" or "go join several communities" or "get to know other indie devs on Twitter". To me, this simply feels fake. I don't really participate in any online communities. I spend enough time in front of a computer for work and I prefer to socialize with my real life friends.
Besides, I simply have no idea how to get any kind of attention on social media. I created an eight-page booklet that recreates the first issue of Nintendo Power, except with my characters in place of Mario and Wart. It's an homage, because I developed a retro game. Somebody suggested that I post it on a retrogaming subreddit, where many others were posting fan art, and those people should recognize the magazine cover that I recreated. Well, I posted my PDF and it got about 4 upvotes. A simple photo, posted around the same time, of the very common TMNT NES cartridge got -- 800? 900? I stopped looking.
I understand that what I made is not going to be for everybody. I'm not expecting to be a millionaire. But damn if I can't figure out how to even get it in front of people. Everywhere I try just gets ignored.
The game is pretty substantial too. Mac, iOS, and Windows versions all done by me -- custom game engine -- 40+ hours of gameplay -- about a 5-6 hour minimum play time if you start from scratch and you know what you're doing (I was shooting for 3.5ish hours to equal Mario 3 or Mario World in "size" or "depth"). Lots of fun secrets. Nothing repeated. Challenging, but not as hard as Dwarf Fortress. Real life playtesters (not friends or family) asked me to reset the game so they could start all over again.
I just wish somebody else could do the social stuff. It all just makes me want to stop programming altogether. My brain just does not work along the lines of "how can I phrase this email to get this person's attention?" So I realize cold calling is a numbers game but I seem to be ignored no matter what I do.
I want to make great stuff, and I really don't care about attention/fame/money -- but what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me?
Assuming the game is "Hazmat Hijinks: Total Meltdown" on Steam. Here's some tough love:
The video takes way too long to get to gameplay. Screenshots do a poor job explaining what the mechanic is. I've read the capsule image, watched some of the trailer, looked at several of the screenshots and still can't tell you what the gameplay loop is. Sort of a top down puzzle thing? With a "match the color" mechanic? The art is not good enough by a mile. OK I just read some of the "About This Game" -- no one cares how many hours of gameplay, if it's so novel why can't you explain that better than "always something new", which is redundant. Surprises also feels like it's just more novelty. The first point about various suits is not exciting, why should I care? Having a handful of people really love it isn't sufficient. I had a game on Dictionary.com that people played hours daily, still couldn't make money from it.
Stepping back, I think there are ways you could vastly improve your marketing, but is it worth it? Take the "L" and move on to your next project. Use what you've learned to improve and "make great stuff." It's better to move quickly, learn, and make better and better stuff until you've hit on something that works. At least I wish someone had given me similar advice back in the day.
PS All this is coming from respect and recognition of the incredible amount of hard work and sweat you've committed to the game. You're a bad ass for working so hard and completing a game!
Thanks for your feedback. I agree it needs visual improvements. I chose not to spend money on an artist -- just had too much in the project already. The trailer should have been done by a 3rd party. I don't grasp what is going to appeal to someone anyway.
You know what? I won't make any more. I think I'm done.
I'm not interested in learning what people like or adjusting to what's popular. Why on earth would I go through this again? Nothing I am interested in working on is ever going to be profitable. Simple as that.
This has nothing to do with your comment. I've had it with programming, I've had it with tech, I've had it with people. I will just scrape by doing the bare minimum to survive as a freelancer.
Just going out on a limb here, but that's burnout. Take a break. Do things off the computer. Programming will call you back when you're ready. Or you'll find something new. Either way, take that break.
I am writing this reply not to dissuade you, but rather to hopefully be helpful in your understanding of what is happening here. As they say, life is a game, learn the rules, and I will attempt to explain one of the rules here. It may sound harsh - that's not my intent. I did't make up the rules, I just play the game...
Firstly;
>> Nothing I am interested in working on is ever going to be profitable. Simple as that.
This is a critical understanding. Because it helps you to determine what _value_ you get from an activity.
For most of us, let's say 99%+, we have creative hobbies. Some play music, some write, some cook, some make pottery or art, some program. The value of a hobby is that the process itself brings us personal joy. The value gained is in the process, not the result.
I've started making pottery. Some of it comes out the way I like, some doesn't. Some doesn't survive the firing process. But there is joy in working the clay, joy in decorating the result, joy in the finished piece. But it's safe to assume I will never sell the results (as in, no-one will buy them) and in some ways selling them would rob me of the "hobby". Frankly, I'd rather give them away. Given how much I pay for the studio time etc it'll never be profitable.
So if i's not profitable, why do it? Because doing it brings me joy.
So it is with programming. Either you are doing it for profit (work) or for fun (hobby). If you are doing side-projects primarily for money then for starters, don't write a game. there are a zillion games in the world, and just like music, the number of them that make actual money are vanishingly small. Going from "I need money" to "I'll write a game" is not a good strategy.
Lots of Indies write games though because writing games can be as much fun as playing them. The joy is not in the selling, but in the process. As long as you end up with a game you like to play, well, you have your reward.
In many ways, most open-source projects can be thought of as "hobbies", not in a pejorative sense but because, for most of us, they are not income. The value has to lie elsewhere, in the creation process, in the community or whatever.
>> I wish I could throw my computer into a river.
Clearly the act of programming is not bringing you joy. For you the computer is work, and you should use it doing things that people are paying you to do. That's completely ok. I use my car to go to a place I want to be, I don't "go for a drive". For me a car is just a tool, for others it's a major part of their lives. That's ok, we're all different.
So, in conclusion, if you want to make money with your computer, then there are lots of ways to do that. (hint: it's not in writing games.) If you need suggestions in this space, then by all means ask.
But most of all I encourage you to find an outlet for your creative instincts. One where you get joy from the process, not profit from the result. Programming is not providing that. Tech is not providing that. People are not providing that. You need to find that for yourself.
The responding comment to your original post was a bit harsh. You are also being a little too hard on yourself. I can only imagine how hard you've worked on your game. You deserve a break, but don't throw your computer into the river. Go get recharged and rid yourself of the negative energy. Then ask yourself the hard question of why you originally wanted to create a game in the first place.
> I've read the capsule image, watched some of the trailer, looked at several of the screenshots and still can't tell you what the gameplay loop is.
Interesting. I think I sussed out the gameplay loop almost immediately because it resembles Chip's Challenge[0]. Maybe that's misleading, but to anyone who grew up in that era I'd think that's what would immediately come to mind.
> The art is not good enough by a mile.
Disagree. It could be a little better, but it is appropriate for what it is aping and plenty readable. Many many games have done well on art of about this quality or worse.
> no one cares how many hours of gameplay
I do, and so do a lot of people if How Long to Beat is anything to go by. In my case though 40hrs is too many and would be a negative.
[0] I later saw that it called this out in the video, during a part I skipped because, as you said, it takes too long to get to the gameplay.
I don’t have any advice, but I will say the art in the screenshots didn’t grab my attention.
For what it’s worth, I had a similar experience. I launched a game on itch.io for fun, and got a ton of positive feedback (including “I love this game!” And “I can’t believe this is free!”), but when I launched on Steam (also for free, but now with music people said they liked and new features), it bombed.
The cherry on top was when I posted a Show HN here (it’s a zachlike programming game, using an esolang—-right up HN’s alley), and didn’t get a single upvote. I’ll admit: that hurt.
To be fair, hn submissions are a total crapshoot; don't take it too hard. The first upvote comes down to whether the right person looks at the new submissions queue at the right moment... And I often get the impression that very few people are looking at the queue and trying to separate good stuff from the giant piles of crap...
I wasn't even aware of the New button after years of casual browsing :) When I discovered it one day, I felt bad that I hadn't contributed to sorting through the crap.
>but what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me?
I have been struggling with this myself. Not just about programming but other creative pursuits as well. Recently it has been photography. I take pictures while knowing whatever I'm looking at has a far better picture on its wikipedia page.
I suppose we're supposed to take some sort of fulfillment in the process of creation itself? But that just goes back to the old koan of the tree falling in the woods. If I create something, but nobody ever sees it, did I create it at all? Doesn't feel like it.
> If I create something, but nobody ever sees it, did I create it at all? Doesn't feel like it.
You have been trained to require external validation for your work. Maybe it's a modern thing with upvotes and twitter and likes and whatnot.
If you create a thing, then you have drawn on your skills, probably improving them. Whether the thing is seen by others is irrelvant. What is relevant is your experience in creating it, and the use of it (whether it has a use, or just has aesthetic value).
Maybe practice by creating something, then destroying it, as if it had never existed. What remains? Memory and skill, both of great value.
> You have been trained to require external validation for your work. Maybe it's a modern thing with upvotes and twitter and likes and whatnot.
And simply the fact that, nowadays, you have access to the production of thousands of other people, with which you can compare yours. And in most cases it will compare unfavourably; to make it worse, almost all those people are unknown to the general public, they are often not even professionals, they are just very ordinary persons with a hobby, and yet you can see in a couple of clicks that they get (much) better results than you do.
On may call this a self-validation based on external elements.
Perhaps, as it devalues your creations in your own eyes, it reinforces the need for external validation.
I've thought about the same with regard to drawing (and previously with programming). While I agree that it's a tad bit disheartening to know that things better than what you are currently capable of are one search away, I like to consider the fact that prior to the internet those still existed and it was still somewhat easy to come across better photography by simply going to a library. Yet there wasn't such an easy way to get anyone outside of your own circle to acknowledge your work until you were already very good.
Thus you kind of do have to find at least enough fulfillment in the process of creation and of self-improvement to keep at the grind. Some amount of existential dread of that sort is also just part of the grind of any creative pursuit.
At the same time though, it also helps to keep some perspective and step back for some time if it becomes too consuming. I let this sort of dread get too far for programming, which had me shirking all other important things in life (family, food, sleep, work) just to keep coding. Once I stepped back from it I got a lot less stressed, managed to find other aspects of my skills I needed to work on and also managed to find a place to apply myself to which is sufficiently fulfilling.
> I have been struggling with this myself. Not just about programming but other creative pursuits as well. Recently it has been photography. I take pictures while knowing whatever I'm looking at has a far better picture on its wikipedia page.
> I suppose we're supposed to take some sort of fulfillment in the process of creation itself? But that just goes back to the old koan of the tree falling in the woods. If I create something, but nobody ever sees it, did I create it at all? Doesn't feel like it.
I think these questions come back to "what is the meaning of life?", no?
Among many things, I enjoy hiking. I also know for a fact that thousands of people have been to every place I go and none of my trips will ever be publicly notable. That's OK. When I hike, I enjoy the journey... exercise, clean air, calm views, quiet space, one with nature, and the ego-scratch of reaching a summit... my experience feels good, deep in the bones and belly. What more could one want? If no one knows about the trip, does that invalidate or lessen my experience?
I carry the same perspective to creative pursuits. The mental exercise, honing skill, going from nothing to something - some moments are frustrating, but in aggregate it feels good. At work, I do find capitalist realities corrupt the creative joy, but I accept that as part of where we are as a society.
Here's the harsh truth: unless you're well connected, the only way to get visibility on social media is to pay someone.
This can mean:
- Paying the platform (the easiest and most scalable, but also the most expensive and arguably least effective)
- Paying an influencer for an explicitly labeled sponsored content (effective, but depends a lot on your target demographic)
- Paying a popular account to share your content "organically", without any explicit sponsored labeling (the most effective, but also the hardest to scale)
You'll find that once you get a decent amount of following, it's easy to snowball into a much larger following - provided you have content worth sharing.
Nope, that's why you won't see anyone online talk about it (at least not on public blogs and magazine articles). But it's also the most effective since it feels less like marketing and more like organic sharing.
First I’ve heard of your game is via this comment, and as a fan of old Windows 95 / DOS games, this looks great! I’m eager to buy it once I’m able to load up some Steam credits.
I’ve been down your road before, and it sucks, but ultimately it’s why you need to make sure you enjoy doing what you’re doing above all else, with the hopes that others will enjoy it.
Sometimes you just gotta make something because you want it to exist in the world, and because YOU want to be the one to bring it into existence.
Personally, I love that you’re keeping a concept like this alive.
That said, because it’s the internet, I can’t help but add my $0.02 on your marketing efforts.
So, from your brief description of your attempt at Reddit marketing, I can’t help but notice that your game is very much going for the Chip’s Challenge / MS DOS / Windows 95 vibe.
Yet your marketing efforts and description of game length is trying to make a Nintendo Power / Super Mario connection. On a subreddit in which people were upvoting NES cartridges.
I’d say that’s the wrong audience. While there’s plenty of overlap between early PC gamers and early Nintendo gamers, most people tend to focus their nostalgia on one over the other.
You’ve found a cool niche, but I would expect far more resonance with the vintage PC / DOS gaming crowd, and maybe even the Amiga / Atari PC crowd.
But like I said, I’m not any better at this than you, and I also acknowledge that your Reddit story may be just one of many attempts you’ve made at marketing.
I hope you keep at it, and find enjoyment in the process, but don’t be afraid to take breaks, or try something wildly different. Best of luck!
what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me?
Life starts posing those existential questions at the extremes of sacrifice, especially when you're working for something your brain subconsciously knows could potentially turn out to be vaporware.
If you're going to play the game of wanting users, then 1) immediate and regular program-shaping user feedback is king and 2) many overnight successes take longer than expected [1]. At 4 years in you're really just getting started with learning. Obviously you're in the phase now where you recognize you need help and can't do it all yourself, so how badly do you want your Everest? It always takes teams to reach any great summit.
I don't think you can make yourself want to be good at game marketing - you need to partner with someone who lives and breathes that life and recognize, by ownership/compensation, that they are just as important as you to the business, and work on it together from the start (that person will have a better pulse on the audience and what they want to see and how to get it to them).
Your game looks super basic and through that unappealing. You would've gotten a feedback IF you would've not mentioned the 4 years sunk into the game. Virtually all that feedback would've been negative or critical, but people are just not assholes enough to tear into a massive amount of effort when it seemingly yielded so little. Hence the silence when you try and engage.
Marketing is a zero sum game to get people's attention. Attention is finite resource and you are competing with others for it.
It isn't a trivial task that anyone can do, at least efficiently (paying the minimum amount for the maximum number of conversions). It is just like programming where some people never seem to get it, except you are also competing against others.
If marketing is not something you are talented at or something you want to spend time and effort on, try paying for it. Even the biggest studios are buying ads and paying influencers.
I don't have the answer, but have been seeking it for a long time myself. Heard the same advise you got, make a community, join communities, post on twitter/reddit. As you said it just feels like fake advise.
As best I can tell, success in those efdorts is equal parts luck, wit, and having something unique yet relatable.
> Heard the same advise you got, make a community, join communities, post on twitter/reddit. As you said it just feels like fake advise.
It feels fake to let people know what you're working on by writing about it? That's what you and the parent are de facto saying.
How else do you expect them to find you?
There is no possible way around it. You have to tell people what you're doing. Repeatedly. You have to cultivate an interest in your thing. If one can't be bothered with that bare minimum building block, well, there obviously will be no successful outcome. It's definitely not build it and they will come (they don't know it exists until you show them). Give them a reason to care, cultivate interest, and they'll show up.
It's a chicken and egg problem. If you post, nobody will see it because nobody knows who you are. So you have to spend a long time "engaging" or "networking" with a community you didn't really want to join in the first place just to make enough of a name for yourself so that someday when you have something to say, a few people will listen.
I'm too busy making stuff and hanging out with my real friends to go be fake with people just to market to them in the future.
I guess you could try to make as many games as possible, quickly, and hope that one hits just right, and then focus on it and make it better fast.
I think this is why most people work in companies; there are tasks that need to be done to sell a product that we don’t want to do.
I mean, Dwarf Fortress was like the ultimate “good game, tiny community” example and even they had two dudes working on it, IIRC one of whom seemed to spend quite a bit of time dealing with the community. And despite making every game designer’s favorite game, they still had to hire a publisher in the end…
It is 'fake' in a way - you don't truly want to make/join these communities or post about this on twitter/reddit. If these communities really interested you, you'd already be a part of them. There are communities where the people have known each other for years and you're going to step into their forum, make your one post, annoy them, and move on. I personally wouldn't want to be that guy, but this is just what marketing is.
Have you thought about making a demo? That would give you something you might feel good about sharing on social media, and would be passed around on if the game is good. And it’s something you could make with your existing skill set (no crafting of emails necessary).
If you happen to visit the website and see the Nintendo Power-esque PDF, tell me, shouldn't that grab the attention of the right person? I know I don't have the best social understanding but I thought I nailed that one.
Marketing is just so opaque. I would rather write an OS from scratch. At least I know that can be solved given enough time.
I think the best insight I've ever come across about marketing was in The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. He had a strategy of building marketing campaigns before he built products.
He would go as far as to develop the website and marketing assets, all the way up to and including an order form, spending money on advertising, etc. and see how it performed. And when people hit the order button they'd just get a message which said "currently out of stock - check back soon."
If the numbers coming back from a marketing campaign were good he'd then go on to develop the product.
Now you could debate the ethics of this but the key point is that the best way to figure out the sales and marketing side of a business is trial, error, and measurement of the outcomes. You get a marketing message of some kind out there, and you see if where and how you did it is a winner. You get your message/funnel/whatever as close as possible to an actual sales process. You get as close as you can to measuring specifically buying intent. You defer as much investment in actual product development as you can. Your time and money instead goes into looking for a technique and message that work.
Eventually you get enough info about your market this way that marketing looks much much less opaque. You will come to understand who would buy your shit and why. If you are a creator/maker/artist/developer/etc. and you achieve that understanding you've basically written yourself a golden ticket for many many years at that point, because for you, making the thing which fulfills that demand is really the easy part.
It's understanding what the demand is and who has it that needs your time and attention at the start. Understanding the shape of the hole in the universe which you are going to fill. Once you achieve that everything else falls into place.
I watched the video on the site. I didn't care for the music, very jarring. Most of the graphics were bland such as all the gray blocks.
When I think of the fun NES games I played, they were not puzzle games. They were TMNT 2, Mario (obviously), TLOZ, Contra, Metroid, Megaman. Those are more action games, not puzzle games.
While watching the video, I couldn't really understand what was happening. You showed gameplay, but what was going on was indecipherable.
Anyway, maybe the game doesn't appeal to me, and it does to others, IDK, I don't spend much money on games. From time to time, I'll spend a couple dollars on a mobile game if I enjoy it. Maybe you should change your marketing to make it F2P and users can purchase the full game after 4 or 5 levels via in-app purchase.
> If you happen to visit the website and see the Nintendo Power-esque PDF, tell me, shouldn't that grab the attention of the right person?
Maybe 30 years ago, but we're all (mostly) grown up now. Even for those old school gamers, I don't think it's enough to just give them something retro -- there's still got to be something new brought to the table, and I'm just not seeing it here. I'm sure it's clever and all, but when it comes down to it, most people need (not want -- need) novelty.
If you are still in contact with the guy, could you ask him what the marketing learning actually were? Everyone has their own take on marketing and it's honestly really difficult to get the concept with most posts about it being so fluffy.
I'd honestly love some cliff notes or a bulleted list from someone who has actually succeeded, especially if they ( like me ) had no marketing experience beforehand.
I've read on the /r/gamedev subreddit of people succeeding with even just doing cold-call emails to popular twitch streamers. Someone recently posted a breakdown of how many streamers played their game after he sent out emails, and he seemed to get around 5% turnaround.
I was playing Diablo 3 one evening (I use my real name), and the guy who I was grouped with was streaming on Twitch. Reasonably big name streamer. He looked up my name, found my personal resume website, played the small game on there. His viewers play the game. It is just some super simple stupid little space invaders game. Next day I wake up to several hundred emails in my inbox from various people just randomly talking about game dev and software development. Several trolls of course. Couple of "are you interested in a job?" pings. An interesting phenomenon.
This is a cool story and a lot can be said about it, including how authentic/organic it is. I think your exact scenario had a lot of luck involved, but I think what we call "luck" is the type of thing is more common than we would think. What I'm talking about is continuously getting in situations that allow luck to happen. If someone is consciously aware of this phenomenon, they can continuously expose themselves and increase their odds. I think some refer to this as the law of attraction, but that doesn't seem right to me given the law of attraction's magical attributes. It's more statistics at play IMO.
It's important that it's authentic though as people can see right through someone's BS. In your situation you were simply playing a game you liked, which is about as authentic as it gets. There are a lot of people out there grinding away at something they don't necessarily enjoy, for the end goal of making money or success, which sounds terrible to me. I'd much rather grind away at something I truly enjoyed and where it's a win/win whether success comes with it or not.
In my younger and very introverted days I accidentally figured this phenom out. I was on a BBS site for a couple years, just hanging out with people with the same interest (motorcycle riding/racing). This led to IRL meetups, which led to me riding for a professional motorcycle racing team, where I lived my dream racing fully built Superbikes for several years. There was some luck involved of course, but it would have never happened if I hadn't participated authentically on some random website.
Since learning this important life lesson I've applied the same philosophy to my professional life. At this point I've had enough "lucky" situations happen where it's affirmed my opinion of statistics at play.
You know, I've been contemplating whether I should lose the pseudonyms and start using my real name for all of my online activity. This story has convinced me that it's something I need to do. That's such a crazy sequence of events that would have never happened if you had been playing under a pseudonym that's hard or impossible to connect back to your resume. All these years, I've been sabotaging my "luck surface area" with my stubborn insistence of online anonymity.
Not trying to be glib but the single most important thing is to make the right game.
1. Before you start the project, do some research and ask yourself what is unique about your game? Why would someone play it instead of the leading competitor? Don't settle for an idea that doesn't have plausible answers.
2. Build the game really well. REALLY WELL. Amazing artwork, great style, a visual feast. Fun, snappy gameplay. Depth. I'm talking hours of engrossing gameplay. Solid, performant, virtually bug free.
3. Along the way build moments into the game that really stand out, that would look hot in a gif, that would pique someone's interest if they heard about it.
--- most people get it wrong before this point ---
4. OK now you're ready to start marketing to people. It's easy, just tell them about your game. How? Break the game along different dimensions. The story. The game systems. The emotions players will experience. etc. For each of these, break them into smaller blurbs. You now have dozens of things to share, start recording gifs/video/screenshots to support what you've written. Now start posting to social media. If someone finds your Twitter profile and scrolls through, they should come away understanding what your game is and why they want it.
5. Next go to Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, websites, etc. and find the top accounts that cover / discuss games like yours. Follow them. Interact with their posts/communities. Especially keep an eye out for opportunities to share your work with them.
6. Advanced: come up with some marketing moments. E.g. announcing your game with a launch trailer, revealing the release date, releasing a demo, your launch day, etc. Put these all on a calendar. For each date, work backwards ~2 months. Coordinate social media posting, email with press/influencers using those dates.
I apologize if this sounds flippant, but it's really so so so hard to get steps 1-3 right. People delude themselves into thinking they're on the right track simply because making games is incredibly, super hard. It's outrageous how much work it takes to make something at all. But no one cares about that. Another reason I think people fail, myself included, is we tend to make very safe, hackneyed games. How many of us are guilty of making a game set in a vaguely DND/Tolkien world? That's tired. I know someone still manages to beat the odds every year, that's survivorship bias in action. Play with a stacked deck, make something truly original.
A fantastic game doesn't have to be visually stunning to be successful. It helps of course but visuals don't make/break an otherwise fun game. What does matter however is that the visuals need to make sense and be consistent.
You can get away with "ugly" or otherwise unremarkable graphics but inconsistent or confusing visuals will interfere with gameplay and the game will suffer.
Trying to release a game with "ugly" or "unremarkable" artwork is playing on hard mode. Be ugly in a "visually stunning" way that's original. E.g. Cruelty Squad. I know there are counterexamples. Many of them are just plain lucky, like Flappy Birds. This very article is about a game that kneecapped its sales for decades on account of being ugly.
I mean... df literally wasn't for sale until recently. They only monetized because American healthcare is bananas (its mentioned in this article and discussed more fully earlier https://www.pcgamer.com/if-dwarf-fortress-sells-millions-on-...). Otherwise it sounds like they would've been content with the ongoing patreon funding they had. It was quite popular before the graphics version.
It's true, Tarn and Zach are very committed to their art. It's really impressive and inspirational, truly, and I'm happy for their success -- both critical and financial.
Personally, I'm willing to make sacrifices to make games, but I'm not willing to go as far as them.
There's a whole genre of ugly fps right now, I don't even just mean boomer shooters, I can't recall the name but there's this one where your health bar is a little glass skull you hold, another hyper anticapitalist critique one, and I'm seeing gifs going around of some third one I haven't a clue about. Sorry this is a vague post I just think it's interesting these games are leaning heavily on non visual aspects and being rewarded with massively positive reviews.
I'd argue the opposite. They are executing their art styles very well. E.g. Cruelty Squad. Like you say, there's clearly something in the water right now. Kudos to folks making it work for them.
>Build the game really well. REALLY WELL. Amazing artwork, great style, a visual feast. Fun, snappy gameplay. Depth. I'm talking hours of engrossing gameplay. Solid, performant, virtually bug free.
To be honest, this is really all you need. Now granted, REALLY WELL these days means competing with reputably teams (indie and AAA) with a lot of experience and/or manpower, so we're well past the Cave Story days. But if you spend the time pushing your craft and/or finding like minded people, it's not impossible to just focus on this.
But in terms of budget (time and money), your steps are probably the best to make a "good" game actually sell well. Personally tho I want to really try pushing the envelope with my project one day. One day far into the future after I really learn the 3D art pipeline.
Getting a big twitch streamer to play his game was the only marketing he needed. Although their time is up for sale I think some amount of them do genuinely enjoy gaming and will try out something that is interesting to them.
People pay streamers all the time to play their games of course, but I think twitch TOS requires for the streamer to disclose that they're being paid, they usually have it in their title like "Playing {game}, !AD'
Love your comment, but I want to add something to this:
> 15 years ago this just wasnt possible
Actually around 2003 to 2006 I was doing that. Back then we were releasing games on PocketPC, which sold around $20. It was basically 1 programmer and 1 artist, or some could do that all by themselves.
But then came a period where mobile became really popular, and a lot of money started flowing into that game platform.
But I do agree that now you have both the platforms and tools for small game developers to pull off some very nice games.
> The biggest thing I saw was that 2 guys, Unity, unity asset store and some upwork artists made a really pretty decent game. I love how this has come full circle. I'm 47 and back in the 8 bit days games were made by 1 or 2 people. 15 years ago this just wasnt possible, but now with unity, unity assets, remote for hire work, steam and twitch for marketing you can legit make it as a 2 person studio. I love it.
While it's certainly possible it's very much the exception rather than the rule here. Let's take the parts of a game and individually look at why:
* Gameplay - This is where small indies really shine it possible to create a game with some cool gameplay. The problem here is that to create something that people actually find fun is rather hard. Most Indie games are boring as shit, they often have a single gimicky gameplay feature. You can try this yourself to come up with something that's truly fun. Sit down for 30 minutes and build a game that's unique and fun, you'll fine it's really hard. That's why the AAA game studios don't really do that. They use other techniques to sell the game like using and big well known IP. Most AAA gameplay is not unique and often is really not that fun for this exact reason. Note also here most indie devs who have never actually made a hit with tell you to just work on making the gameplay in your game really great. It's a cop out.
* Art - This is one of the hardest parts. You can kitbash a bunch of asset store stuff but then your game looks like a hodgepodge mess. You can hire an artist but if you want something really good looking you won't find them on upwork selling their labour at sweatshop rates. Really good artists are specialists in specific areas like character design, concept art, environment art ...etc. Trying to just find someone on upwork who will do all of that really well for you is basically impossible. Also note if you use stuff off the asset store you will need your artist to match that style which is actually really hard. To get really good art for a game you have to hire a team and build from the ground up. That's very difficult for indie teams most of which have no money to spend on art.
* Sound - Great games have great soundtracks. Often composed by someone with a lot of experience. These people are hard to find and even harder to convince to work on a game. Again like the art it's not something people are selling for cheap on upwork. Note also that you will want stuff in the game like jumping sounds, landing, clicking all that stuff. You can again find packs with this on the asset store but they often just won't have that sound you are looking for and mixing sound packs make the game seem cheap. The sound design has to be all one piece of work really. Think mixing 8-bit era sounds with more modern stuff it doesn't work.
* Testing - Often not looked upon but testing your own work doesn't work. You need someone independent to look at what you've done and break it. If you've ever played Bethesda Games you'll see what poor testing looks like. Note that the larger the scope of your game the amount of testing becomes exponential. The big AAA game studio have more testers than devs by far. If you look at many of the small indie game this really can kill the game. The devs chuck something together which looks ok and is fairly unique but is so poorly tested that no one is willing to buy.
All in all it's possible to do but really hard and I would say they got really lucky.
> The distribution of Steam and viral marketing of Twitch have revolutionised indie development
Yes but not in the way you think. Before anyone was able to put stuff on these shops getting on Steam was a one way ticket to $$$$. There where curated stores and even being in them meant you got a seal of approval from the likes of valve. Now-a-days the steam store is filled with so much asset flip junk "indie games" it's become a meme. To be seen on any of these platforms is now a real miracle. Again on twitch getting picked up by a big streamer is like winning the lottery. The vast majority of streamers on twitch make no money and have such a tiny audience getting on their streams would only net you double digit sales if you are lucky.
Designed a second game, put all the marketing learnings into it, 48 hours after launch the biggest streamer on twitch was streaming it.
4 days later he quit working for me. Couldnt be happier for him.
The biggest thing I saw was that 2 guys, Unity, unity asset store and some upwork artists made a really pretty decent game. I love how this has come full circle. I'm 47 and back in the 8 bit days games were made by 1 or 2 people. 15 years ago this just wasnt possible, but now with unity, unity assets, remote for hire work, steam and twitch for marketing you can legit make it as a 2 person studio. I love it.
The distribution of Steam and viral marketing of Twitch have revolutionised indie development for the better. In addition to this, as an asset he now has a Discord server with 10ksss+ subscribers. I doubt he will ever pay for a $ of traditional above or below the line marketing.