17 replies to this topic

[roboant]

Hello,

What good ways to promote a game you guys think there are, with out investing massive money in publicity.

All opinions are welcome, thank you.

[SamuraiCrow]

You could put a signature on all of your forum posts on all of the forums you visit.

[roboant]

I spend some times on different forums, but I am not a top poster, putting the signature in forums posts is not a way to go for me.

[alphadog]

Are you an indie?

There is no easy road here. It takes a lot of work to get the ball rolling on a game.

Some ideas:

Try as best you can to make a game with a unique reason to play it. Could be a novel game idea, could be the artwork, etc. Another Tetris clone or line-up-three-gems game won't go anywhere.

Two words: guerilla marketing. Google it; there's tons of reading that I won't bother typing out. You won't get directly applicable ideas, but you will get some inspiration.

If you are a small indie, the only effective method really is word-of-mouth, so nurture ways to have people who play have reasons to talk about your game. Money is usually something you don't have for your first title. A month ago, on Facebook, I played Bejeweled Blitz to kill some time. Well, I got one really high score and it got posted to my friends. Two people ended up playing it because of me. I thought that was cool from a detached view as a game developer.

A parallel to this is get out in the community you are building. Shake virtual hands. Put up a blog where you have some meat to your posts about your development trials and tribulations. Participate on other indie blogs when you can.

Lastly, don't worry too much. Assuming you are or want to be an indie, you have the luxury of being able to wait and let your game grow. Big studios are the ones that worry about quick profitability of titles with large capex. Concentrate on getting games out with defined style and unique selling propositions.

[digitalgraal]

Hello,

there is an interesting article about the at the game-developers website
http://game-developers.org/node/96

they are including 10 ways to promote your game. Although I am not sure if they have not missing a couple of them, they a couple of interesting points.

Regards,
D.

[beather64]

Thanks alphadog and digitalgraal, those were really awesome answers!

I have been looking for a long time on more info about getting people to play your games. I'm also launching a game development site at the moment and this may really come in handy!

[alphadog]

It's a little old, but here's a blog that I stumbled across and it basically gives a recipe. One thing, it isn't harder work to sell a game than to make it, no matter what he says. They are both hard work. It's just that indie developers who must wear a marketing hat rarely enjoy that kind of work, therefore it seems harder.

http://www.gameprodu...e-games-part-2/

That article reminded of a good tool for getting attention: the contest. It's easy to throw away a handful of licenses on contests. Make them wacky too and get some press out of it. Remember that people who talk about games are often scrambling to have something to talk about, so give'em what they are looking for.

[Utra]

i would sugest www.MODDB.com all you realy have to do is have something to show and people will be intrested, they take mods and custom games.

[poita]

roboant said:

I spend some times on different forums, but I am not a top poster, putting the signature in forums posts is not a way to go for me.

Well what are you looking for? Are you looking for ways to promote your game without actually changing what you do?

If you're not a regular poster then become one. It doesn't take much effort.

[TehOwn]

This is exactly what I joined this forum looking for.

I'm trying to find out what is needed and wanted by people interested or actively participating in Games Development, amateur or professional.

The aim is to provide information and tools to help you achieve what is desired and self-publishing is one of the things we were looking into.

At the moment, we're just doing a survey, but your input would be appreciated.

Also, are you looking for places to SELL your game, or just to share it?

Survey is in my signature. :)

[olla86]

SamuraiCrow said:

You could put a signature on all of your forum posts on all of the forums you visit.

I have the same idea. It is realy working!

[TehOwn]

It works as long as you post. Although the best kind are those kinds of posts where you provide useful information or resources.

If you really want visibility, you have to be willing to provide in some kind of way.

Otherwise, you're looking for real advertising. Some methods of free advertising are to have something awesome enough to grab people's attention, whether it's wacky or just plain cool. Then you tell all of the news guys on various websites (as many relevant websites as you can find) and give them whatever resources they need and voila.

Consider it a "press release".

[alphadog]

SamuraiCrow said:

You could put a signature on all of your forum posts on all of the forums you visit.

That's not going to cut it. I have never, ever visited anything in a sig, even with a superb sig.

You have to figure out better hooks into someone's short attention span.

[JarkkoL]

Signatures doesn't of course replace "real" advertising, but it can still add an extra blip to your visits for no cost particularly if you got low traffic in the first place. I don't do any advertising really to drive traffic to my website and ~15% of my visits for the past half a year are from signatures clicks of DevMaster and I'm not that frequent poster (: I would guess that signature visits might also result in higher CR than other means of advertising for indies since it's more personal and is from people who are somehow interested in what you have to say.. so it's good to play nice in forums if you have signature link to your site ;)

[Reedbeta]

Also, signature links can improve your google pagerank, if the forum has a decent pagerank.

[rouncer]

You can get a small business going with the iphone if you want to code for a mac, i got a friend thats made ~$1000 in about 5 weeks just off his first project. Now hes writing his first game, hes kicking butt, way more than slowass me.

[Gaiiden]

Wolfire On Making Indie Marketing Buzz

You'll also want to look for "The Art Of Independent Game Promotion" - which was a talk given by Kyle Gabler (2D Boy) and Phil Fish (Polytron) at this year's GDC

[alphadog]

Reedbeta said:

Also, signature links can improve your google pagerank, if the forum has a decent pagerank.

Which, unfortunately, DevMaster does not. Ranks a zero. Neither does GameDev.

I guess I was thinking more in terms of generating direct traffic/buzz, then hopefully sales, rather than passively hoping you can land a high rank for your game in a search on an engine and actually get click-through, then a sale. You have to find people that don't even know of your game, much less the keywords that will lead them to it.

Jarkkol's idea is different. It certainly doesn't hurt to put your "business card" in a sig, especially in a "specialized" forum. I don't think you get sales traffic, though.