By Alyssa Kollgaard

One of the things that indie developers tend to struggle with the most is how to market their games – especially if they don’t have a publisher, a marketing budget, or an expert on their team to lead the charge. Usually this work tends to fall to someone on the team who already has a ton of other responsibilities on their plate – coding, project management, art, biz dev (or all of the above, in many cases). In this blog series, we’ll be covering some of the different tactics and strategies we’ve used and seen used by some of the most clever indie devs in the world! These blogs doesn’t focus on traditional marketing like ads, although it does recommend the places that are worth focusing your spend on for the best effect. Some caveats before we get into it:

This is low budget marketing, not no budget marketing. Even if it doesn’t cost you money, these things will still cost time and effort. This blog does assume you have some internal skills at (and bandwidth for) asset creation, and if not, that you are willing to put some of your funds towards it. The focus of this blog is getting eyes on your game, but once you have them, it’s on you to convert those eyes to wishlists, follows or sales. This blog doesn’t focus on product branding or audience identification and assumes you do know a bit about what your game’s hook is and what kind of players would be interested in it. If you need help figuring that part out, feel free to reach out.

When considering these opportunities, you should also be aware of the tiers of content, and major moments in your campaign, and ensure you are maximizing your efforts around these. 

Showcases and partners are interested in exclusives. What can you offer them? This needs to be a mutually beneficial arrangement, and it will often require timed exclusivity so they can maximize traffic to their page.

Don’t forget the press kit and store page assets! Trailers, GIFs, screenshots and copy. These all need to sell the experience of your game.

• Tier 1: First reveal (the first time you are showing a game), launch date announcement, game launch, asset first reveal (the first time you are showing a major trailer), first playable.
• Tier 2: Platform reveal, DLC/new content announcement, DLC/new content launch, first reveal of major feature/area of game/boss/etc
• Tier 3: Dev diaries, behind the scenes, trailers that have already been released

Video content will always have the best chance of being picked up by a partner – these are your most powerful marketing assets. Spend the time and money to make these good, and don’t waste your opportunity to use them for maximum engagement!

Cross Collaboration with Other Devs

Don’t think about other people in the space as competitors (except where it relates to release dates). There are lots of opportunities to engage with other indies and share audiences and opportunities. It’s not a zero sum game, here. There are lots of opportunities to amplify one another’s messaging at varying degrees of difficulty.

Social Media Crossovers

Social Media Crossovers can include photoshops, memes, simple retweets, shoutouts/highlights, account takeovers, reply-locked threads, gags or giveaways that involve more than one developer or game. You can do combined Twitch streams, podcasts, Q+As or charitable efforts. 

One of the best things to do is mailing list crossovers and giveaways – if someone signs up for your dev friend’s mailing list, they get a code, a discount, or entered into a giveaway (and vice versa). We recently did this with great success with Digerati.

Respond to #ScreenshotSaturday #PitchYaGame #MissedThisIndie for additional views.

Sales Bundles, Ownership Discounts, Steam Promotional Coupons

Game ownership discounts and Steam promotional coupons are largely being discontinued by Steam unless there is a huge potential audience crossover (Steam decides this on a case by case basis, and you have to manually ask for this opportunity). On the inverse, multi-publisher bundles are now all self service and super easy to do. All it takes is some combined capsule art, some sort of relevant crossover and participation from 2 (or more) parties. These can be permanent or time-limited bundles – all up to you! It’s not recommended you have more than 2 or 3 bundles per title, so choose carefully. They can also be set up as “complete the set” so if someone already owns 1 title in the bundle, they still get the discount.

This is a fairly low effort way to ensure that games with similar audience appeal get some extra eyes! You can also make use of the “special announcements” section on your page and create widgets that link to other games here (your own or someone else’s).

In-Game Crossovers, Easter Eggs, DLC, Skins

This one has by far the most effort involved, but is a lot of fun if you have the bandwidth to pull it off. Games like Shovel Knight in particular have shown up in lots of indie titles.

Next time, we’ll take a look at how platform and console partners can give you plenty of love for free! Stay tuned!