Talking to Justen about marketing that I could be doing for no signal.
Firstly, he wanted to stress that the most important thing I could be doing with my time is to make a good game and to prioritize that over marketing. Good games and word of mouth, while potentially slow, are much more effective than other marketing tactics.
Aside from that, here are some of the suggestions he made:
Find relevant communities to advertise the game to. Consider using Lurkit and Keymailer to connect with streamers. Generally, I want to find audiences that play the kind of games that I am making. The game development community is a good community to connect with, but it isn’t a big enough audience.
Connect with press such as IGN, Polygon, Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer, etc. Don’t overlook smaller channels! More specifically, instead of reaching out to the publications themselves, I can look for people who have covered games like this in the past and try to reach out to them directly.
Depending on the person I am cold contacting, I should change what I say based on what angle is most likely to pique their interest. I should tell them about myself, what kind of games i want to make, and what I’m making right now. Or, if I expect them to be less receptive to that I can just tell them about the specific aspects of the game and what it is similar to.
I should also say that I can send a key if they are interested. I shouldn’t send more than 2-3 paragraphs. The structure of the message should be:
- Paragraph 1: Say hello and share why I’m reaching out to them specifically — show awareness of what they have done.
- Paragraph 2: Provide details about myself and the game. Tell what the “news” is, say what is unique about the game, or whatever it is that will interest the reader.
- Paragraph 3: Links about where to learn more, requests to connect on more opportunities, and offer to send a key.
For porting, consider reception over profit. If a game is being reviewed well on steam but hasn’t sold many copies, then it might still be worth it to port it to mobile given how big the mobile market is. Similarly, if a game is being reviewed poorly, then it might not be a good idea to port it even if it was making money — I should be improving the game and fixing issues people have instead.
Social media depends on how you want to be perceived. There are two different things I can use social media for: I can tell people about myself and/or I can tell people about my game.
Think about how much I want to tell people about either thing, and then try to post in that ratio. For example, if I want to know people about me I can talk about my perspectives on game development. If I want people to know about the game, I can post regular updates about how development is going.
To avoid repeating myself, I can set up a calendar for what topics or themes I want to do. I can reference the calendar to see what I’ve already talked about when planning what to talk about next.
As for platform-specific characteristics:
- Twitter is a toxic platform that still has a lot of traffic. People still use this platform to find new games and I can reach out to a lot of new people and communities on this platform. Talking about my game should be more effective here.
- Mastodon and Bluesky are better platforms than Twitter, but they lack the traffic that Twitter has.
- TikTok is unreliable for driving traffic, but content tends to be more evergreen as older posts can still become viral. On this platform, talking about myself will be more effective.
- Instagram is good for games that focus more on visuals, but it doesn’t really drive traffic because people use it to follow games or developers they like and it’s not really used by people to find new games.