Indie Game Marketing Tricks

Hey, yo!

Good, thanks. You too?

Correct.

They did.

Well, the first time was out of complete necessity because we didn’t have any funding for the project and we wanted to devote some time to it. So this was one of our only options that we saw at the time. Also, I had a bit of negative publisher experiences back when I was still a student, we made a mobile game, had a publisher for it and unfortunately it flopped really hard. And then I decided that the next project will be self-published. So I will feel that it’s my own fault if it fails. So that was a given, so no publisher money for us. So where would it come from? All of us didn’t have a lot of savings. So, yeah, we tried it and we were quite successful with it the first time , a lot more than we expected, actually we expected to raise 15,000 dollars and ended up with 75,000 and to us that was: ”wow, okay”.

There’s a lot of potential in this platform. Not only that your existing fans can come there and contribute. But also the platform itself has quite the community. And also this community reaches a bit outside of the usual game dev and gaming community. And with projects such as Niche, which is very much inspired by science, we managed to bring some people to the Kickstarter. Scientists or teachers that really wanted this game to be made, but probably not even buy the game once it’s out on steam or something. So Kickstarter has this different audience than a game store usually would have. And we like to include them in the people that support our projects.

For the second project it was very different. For the first one we had already like a community of maybe 200 or 300 pretty dedicated people. And for the second game, we had very little time to prepare and pretty much no existing community. So we tried, if we can use Kickstarter to build up a following on the fly and just give them an incentive to join in.

And we did that with a free demo that we kept promoting on social news platforms mostly, such as 9Gag, imgur and Reddit. And then the people who really liked the demo basically came in through there because they had to sign up for the newsletter to get to the demo. And so we could easily reach them again to tell them about the Kickstarter and the demo also had a Kickstarter pop up in it.

It’s also maybe a good idea to just keep doing this, to see if there is a market for what we’re doing. So if we would just invest all our funds in a game, work on it for three years or so, and then release it and it would flop that at this point, this would still be critical to our studio, if that happened and we would maybe have to close.

So we decided to adapt a stepped development strategy, we call it. We have an idea that we work on for a maximum of a year or so. And then we release a Kickstarter campaign. And then we work on it for maybe another year or a maximum a year and a half or so and then we launch into early access. And from there on out the game has to finance itself. If it doesn’t do that, then we would just finish it up with everything that we promised and that would be it. And if it keeps going well during early access, we can work on it as long as we want. As long as it’s profitable, maybe start a side project.

We also did one additional step - actually always - already after like a few months of really having worked on the project, we start to share pictures or maybe even a small video on social media to see if there is an initial response to that. And I think with this approach we faired quite well so far and it’s very well possible that we will continue to do it like this.

Yes. The second game had a Chinese publisher, but not a global publisher. And the third game will definitely not have a global publisher at this point anymore since we already managed to build up quite the wishlists ourselves. But for Asia, we’re currently looking if we want to work with a Chinese or Korean or Japanese, or maybe all three.

So far, it’s always been that one worked out right away.

I think with the newest project, with the Wandering Village, we just have a very good pitch and a good visual style. So it worked very well on social media. The other two games weren’t as viral. Nimbabtus was pretty well worked pretty well too, but on completely different platforms than Niche it.

So for every game you need to test around a little bit and where the sweet spot is. So the Wandering Village has been a side project for already three years, but we only worked on it like one day a week coming up with the concept and making a few prototypes for it. And then once we really started working on it, full-time with the studio after three months or something, we started sharing information about it. And if nobody would have cared, we would have been very scared to, to advance to the next steps, to do a Kickstarter for it.

Yeah, there’s one very specific point that changed. So the giant creature in the new game was originally made of flesh and blood. And so when you wanted to plant something, you were basically digging open the skin and putting it into the skin and people found it gross. So I personally have found it was cool, but a lot of people were like ”No, I don’t want to do that”.

And we’re like ”Okay we’re going to see if we can reconcept the creature into something less gross.”. And now it’s made out of earth. There’s still gross things you can do because it still has organs but at least you don’t see that kind of stuff in the first 10 minutes of the game.

Absolutely. I thought it was cool and everybody would think it’s cool, but no.

There’s definitely projects that fit better or worse, but I think it also has to do just with general appeal. So if your game can’t get 10,000 or 15,000 on Kickstarter with the pitch and the visuals that it has, chances are also pretty low that it will do well, if you would release it like this, right.

Maybe it has the greatest gameplay and then 10 people play it and they tell all their friends, and then you have this word of mouth snowball going on, but chances are not too good. In my opinion, I usually recommend doing Kickstarter. I think the only thing that is bad about it is if you have a game and you’re looking for a publisher and then you fail the Kickstarter, can maybe make your publisher negotiations harder.

Other than that, you can always relaunch a Kickstarter. If your Kickstarter fails, other than maybe the slide publisher disadvantage, what’s the problem? So maybe only your pride that you have a failed Kickstarter, but nobody has seen it. If it failed, nobody knows about it. You can still release your game on Steam.

And I don’t think anybody outside of your small game developer circle will even know you have a failed Kickstarter campaign. And what I think is really good also for new developers about Kickstarter is that you have a whole month of time try out your marketing approach with nothing really at stake .

So you can try all kinds of angles compared to when your game is actually launching on Steam or whatever platform and you have to please the algorithm, which will decide how many copies you will sell over lifetime. I think the challenge of releasing a game and hitting really hitting the spot for these three launch days or something is way harder than running a Kickstarter, where you have a whole month so it’s a good playground to test, if you have to the right approach.

Yeah, I think usually it takes up to one or two months of preparation time for almost a whole team. And then another month of running the Kickstarter. But in my opinion, as long as the Kickstarter finances itself essentially, it can be worth it. Just the added benefit you get from wishlists also, this is a whole month that you’re putting into marketing, so you have a lot of wishlist, hopefully. And the additional benefit of having a community build-up early on that will support you.

Don’t do too many physical rewards because those will keep you busy for months and months after the Kickstarter has ended. Also what we did for the first time now with the Wandering Village is running Facebook ads. So far the first two Kickstarters that we did were completely zero budget, and now we had a bit of money that we could spend. I think we spent 20,000 or so, and we got 40,000 or some or even more out of it and we have continued to try and run Facebook ads after this, but we never had such good results even close to when we had the Kickstarter with the return of investment.

So I think just Kickstarter projects and having a nice agency that can run ads for them is a very good combination, if you have a bit of money.

Yeah, pretty much. I wrote a detailed article about each of our Kickstarter campaigns and in the newer one, you see how much we got out of it and which services we used. So maybe we can post the link.

Yeah, we do it every time. And then we say, we’re never going to do it again. And then we do it again, cause it’s just too much fun to have little figurines or key chains or plushies for your games. It’s just too much fun too to design them and have them, but they are a lot of work.

Exactly!

Still working on it. So I have one friend, she makes all the figurines by hand and then ships them out. This time we only have some t-shirts and some science sketches. So it’s a very limited amount. For the t-shirts we ordered them right at the service and give them the address, so it’s shipped there directly. So I’m hopefully not touching any boxes, we will see.

So for the second game, when you wanted to download the free demo, which we heavily advertised everywhere, essentially you needed to sign up for the newsletter. And with this approach, we gathered 50,000 newsletter subscribers within the Kickstarter month, and then another 50,000 down the road for Nimbatus, which has been a very good tool to advertise sales and so on.

And we’re currently doing a cleanup of how many people are actually opening those emails and so on and moving it to another service. And in the end, I think only like 20,000 people or so are actually looking at the emails sometimes, but I think it’s still a pretty good number.

That’s fine. I stole it from Landfall games.

Right.

Yeah. So we used MailChimp all this time now because we bought credits for $5,000 or something. Well, I don’t know, three years ago. And so we have been churning through these credits and now we’re almost running out. And for a time, it seemed that they would not offer credits anymore, but you had to pay per subscriber.

That’s when we decided to switch to Sandy and now apparently they’re offering credits again, but it’s too late. We’re already in the process of moving away now. So we’re going to see how that will go. Maybe we will come crawling back.

Yeah, Amazon web services, you mean?

Right. That’s also what is connected to Sandy.

We used to have separate game newsletters, which also made it pretty hard to maintain. We are just today, I wrote the email to everybody that we’re switching to a studio newsletter. So yeah, I think that’s a better idea. Especially if you move away from one project and there’s not many updates anymore there, you can’t really keep people entertained.

So let’s hope they will. We ask them if they will move with us to the new service and to the studio newsletter.

Yeah, I agree.

It’s a very double-edged sword. So as Reddit says be a Redditor with a company and not a company with a Reddit account, and they are really, really serious about this. So if they have the slightest impression you are misusing their site you’re going to get blocked. And so at the beginning, I was more a company with a Reddit account, and now I’m trying to be more like a Redditor with a company.

So I really started posting more personal things and it’s quite a bit of a time investment, but then sometimes we have posts that hit really huge, couple of 10,000 upvotes and you always feel them in the wishlists. So currently we’re a bit of a hiatus, but once we approach the release, definitely going to have some more Reddit posts happening.

So I tried to only use Reddit when we’re in a phase where we really need the push and otherwise, trying to play the low ball. Just post some of my balcony, gardening pictures.

Exactly.

I don’t even think you should try to post with a branded account from anything there. No company with Reddit accounts, so it’s always from my personal account. It’s also a bit scary because this is already my fourth account all the other ones have either been banned or shadow banned, even though I was sticking to all the rules. I gave some shout-outs to friends and people called me a paid PR agency. And there was pretty big shitstorm going on there and I’m like, ”I’m out of this account. I’m never coming back, starting a new one right away”. So yeah, they that can be quite unfair.

I think the moderators are sometimes very random and you have to be prepared that all your work for your account is useless if you’re blacklisted and you have to start from zero again, but all in all, I still think it’s worth it.

So, if you want to have a really big post, that has a really big effect, you can only post in the big ones, because. It needs to be able to get to r/all. That is where the big traffic is. If you don’t make it out of the subreddit, even if it’s a bigger one, it can be good, can be maybe a couple maybe a hundred, maybe 200 wishlists in a bigger subreddit, but if you want to hit it big, then you need a big subreddit and you need a lot of upvotes to make it to r/all.

I think we have done it three times and it’s always very, very good. So we keep trying to do that. We also sometimes post in smaller subreddits, but then you have to keep in mind the self-promotion ratio of your account that is required for some subreddits. So when I make a post in a smaller subreddit, I have to do nine other posts in order to do a one in a big one again. I don’t post in smaller ones too often. My team mates sometimes do. They have their specific sub reddits where they go post.

Agreed, they have to see that you’re a human being that worked hard to get to this point. So they will appreciate you, or that you did something really wholesome. They also appreciate that a lot. Lately we’ve been into Tiktok.

So we started to take talk two months ago and it already has more followers than our Twitter account has after five years. So I recommend you get into Tik Tok now. Every post feels like a lottery ticket because sometimes it just hits big with the algorithm and then it keeps producing new followers, over weeks sometimes. Oh, 200 new followers. Why? Oh, my post that did very well two weeks ago, got another 50,000 views.

So like every every post you got there might hit it big and might bring in hundreds of followers and it’s not they have to be the best and most amazing viral posts in my opinion - on Twitter, it’s a little bit like this - but it just feels very random, which posts gets a lot of views. Some of our better ones have got pretty much nothing and some pretty stupid ones gotten 10 thousands.

Observing other people who started tiktok at around the same time as we did, maybe a month or two longer, and pretty much everybody is at a couple thousand followers now, which is completely different from when you try Twitter.

Just two years ago or a year ago, I really liked posting on imgur and nowadays it’s gotten a lot more competitive, so I rather make another Tiktok.

I’m not sure what exactly the problem is. It could also be a change in what is counted as upvotes or how different things are shown. I haven’t really been very active anymore. I just saw everybody else struggling and Tiktok it is.

Yes. Quite a bit. And so far, we haven’t been able to match the results from Facebook ads. You can’t really target, as much on Reddit. I think the costs are similar or even sometimes a bit cheaper, depends on where exactly you run the ad, but you can only select a specific subreddit or have a very limited amount of settings, nothing close to when you make a lookalike audience with an existing audience that you have on Facebook, where it’s very, very targeted, right.

So we actually hired somebody to run our Tiktok and if she’s not busy with an event, so just last week she had an event, she posts every two days or so, because it really feels right now there is there’s traffic and we don’t know for how much longer. And we’re just going to get as many lottery tickets as we can. I’m actually sad that we started so late.

I considered starting already a year ago, but we had no time that we could invest in it. And now we finally managed to hire somebody to do it. And I’m very happy that at least, even if we’re a bit late, that we can play the Tiktok game now.

Do you have a company Tiktok now?

How many posts did you make already?

Buy some more lottery tickets. One thing that I heard is it actually makes a very big difference where you are. So if you post from Germany or Switzerland, then it would maybe be a better idea to post in German because the algorithm targets our countries. I think that’s a bit stupid.

So now we hired our guy that is doing our Facebook ads, Andrew from Ranagain marketing, I can really recommend working with him if you want to test out running ads. And he will help us and post our posts from his location in America. We can see if that makes any difference. That’s due next week.

I think the guys from pixel maniacs, did you see what they are doing?

Yes. Yeah, Pixel Maniacs is the perfect reference there. So go listen to that podcast as well.

I’ve really seen everything from just in-game captures to in-game captures with voiceovers to just your face to a mix with your face and the video. I think every format can work as long as you use some Tiktok features. I think their algorithm likes that.

Yeah. Filter or if you put some stickers . All the kinds of stuff you can do to edit your video in the Tiktok app, I think.

Yeah, totally.

Agreed. We’re currently also trying to set up a pipeline where we can repost the Tiktok onto YouTube shorts and into Instagram reels. So we can use Tiktok, as the main posting thing, but also get some additional traffic on the other platforms.

That would be the idea. Yes.

Yeah, we try, but we only manage to get into hot once. And this was our biggest post, even bigger than the Reddit posts, even though you cannot even put a link in there, people are still manually looking up your game and it has such a gigantic reach. They have become quite a bit more strict about ads.

So if too many people are like ”Nope, this is an ad”, then moderators are going to come and remove your posts. I’ve also seen a very big one from Grime lately that the game was released lately and some other ones. So it’s definitely still possible, but it’s pretty hard to get into hot so you can try, but yeah, if you don’t have time for anything, then maybe just repost whatever you post on other channels and don’t try to make a separate post for it because chances that it will hit are very small. But actually I have to say I’ve been very, very lazy with social media this whole year. Do you want to hear what, what I was up to this year, other than social media?

So pretty much all my marketing time this year was spent on event management, because there are so many opportunities right now.

You don’t have to fly around the world. You can just sign up for showcases and awards. Everything is online. I stalked Steam for the past three years and made a list of things that I think will get a featuring. And then this year I just kept stalking them all and applied everywhere so much. And we got into so many showcases and whatnot that my team actually told me, ” Okay, stop you are not allowed to sign us up for any more of these”.

We actually have to make a game. And so I’m currently on event break. I’ve only allowed to submit to events where none of my team members have to do anything. So things where you have to submit a trailer the Escapist showcase or the mixed showcase are a no no, no for me. And it sucks because there’s so many opportunities going on still and a lot of them are still getting featured.

So if I were you and I had a trailer that hasn’t been shown, I would definitely apply to all of these fancy events.

Yeah. Just when you have something that hasn’t really been shown, apply there. If you have a new trailer now, maybe before you post just post it on YouTube, sign up for those, because a game reveal and a new trailer have the highest chance to actually get you in there. I also try to apply with a developer interview. But there’s also some cool smaller things. There was just a roguelike sale going on on Steam, and I had no idea about it and I’m very sad. So now I immediately wrote them a message and ask if I can still join and they said ”no”.

Sometimes this works and I just signed up for the newsletter now, so that I will definitely not miss it next year. The Tiny Teams event that was on steam is also something that smaller teams should absolutely all have had applied for. For example, we participated in PAX east, I think, and PAX Australia. With our games and it usually costs a couple hundred dollars and it always brings us, at least a couple hundred, usually 2,000 or 3000 wishlishts. And we’re now at 170,000 wishlists I would say a hundred thousand wishlists are from events.

E3 was by far the biggest one with 40,000 or something. So that’s crazy. That’s a level that we never were able to reach before. And I think this time also, we were only able to reach it because it was remote. Otherwise we probably wouldn’t have attended and got this slot.

Yeah. especially if you have multiple things going on at the same time. So put your energy into event marketing, go for it. As long as we still can do it, or hopefully they will keep hybrid formats and we can keep doing this for a long time.

Yep. I organized it. I noticed that Steam was giving people beta access to this new sales tool. And I was , I’m going to get Beta Access got Beta access and I’m like ”Could we maybe do a Swiss game sale?”. Now I already have to beta tool. And I know how it works. And I asked five other bigger Swiss studios, if they would participate in that I told Steam these studios already said yes.

And if you have Farming Simulator, you have steam and after they approved it, we try to reach every single Swiss developer out there who has a Steam game and just added them in different tiers. And for many of them, it was the most wishlists they ever got from anything. So that was very cool.

And it also had a very good connection event on the Swiss community because we had to join a Discord so we could coordinate with each other. Yeah, I think every country should do it. And a lot of countries have been doing it recently, so that’s good.

We also had another nature game sale two months ago. So that was the second one we had another one, two years ago that.

We curated with the people from our old nature collective. It’s usually a very good idea to grab a couple of developers with a s hared theme, and if you can even attach it to a special day, like World Environment Day or something Steam is usually, I think, pretty open to hearing your pitches.

Yeah, exactly. So all the sales are made with this tool. I’m not sure if it’s still in beta. That was one and a half years ago. So I think I was maybe one of the first people who signed up for that and tried it out, which I think got has the opportunity in the first place, because Switzerland is not the biggest country.

So that was cool. I think nowadays, if you’re just contact Steam, usually I think you can get access to the tool.

I think Twitter is very, very useful for networking with other game developers. So pretty much everybody has one and a lot of people have their DMS open and I feel that I’m getting more responses from Twitter, direct messages than from emails. And we are also still, as a studio we’re updating Twitter.

We have a couple thousand followers that want to hear from us. But even with some pretty big semi-viral posts, we haven’t gotten that many new followers. So I’m not really sure if Twitter is in order to stay, in order to find new fans that are gamers and not game developers, I’m not sure if it’s the number one tool. I would invest my energy in currently.

So there are two guys it’s Simon and Chris you’ve probably heard of them. Both of them run a pretty cool newsletter where they do analytics and just general marketing observations. Simon also has a paid newsletter, that I subscribe to that. I always find it very interesting. They have a tool that, tries to predict how successful a game will be on Steam when it launches.

They also analyze Switch charts, which is also interesting for us. Other than that, I just hang out on Twitter, see there’s Twitter again. And sometimes I come across some very interesting threads of other game marketing people where I find some cool infos.

See see!

And another thing is just observing what other people are doing so you can stalk other people on SteamDB, where you can track their follower number. I actually built a tool. So our tool developer build tool for me where I can say, okay, I want to stalk this and this and this and this and this game.

And if they get more than this and this and this amount of followers, from one day to the next, it sends me a mail then I can go ask. So I’m going to definitely stalk you also. And then you will receive emails from me when you get a lot of wishlists, because I will know.

That was pretty easy. It’s just a simple crawler. I think it took him a day or something or two days to set it up.

Yeah, because it’s really true in my opinion, that the game you make, will just have such a huge impact of how easy your marketing will be. I just saw it now with the Wandering Village compared to our other games, I feel like the marketing is doing itself. I’m just assisting a little bit. And when I had to really put in a lot of effort and make a lot of posts with our previous games, the Wandering Village takes one and it’s more successful than 10 posts of the previous games or something.

If you can really find the game that you like and want to make. But it’s also something that people are actually interested in. Your life’s going to be so much easier if you’re trying to make a living of being a game developer.

Yeah. Either. You make something that is better than everything else. You are, you are inspired by, or you make something new that people can understand why they should absolutely play it.

Perfect.

Sure. Always.

Thank you. See you soon.