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In the crowded market of indie games, it’s understandable to strive to make your game stand out in any way you can. Beyond the obvious – having an amazing game and endless marketing budget – there are a number of other strategies out there to explore. One of the avenues many consider in their quest for exposure is indie game awards.

Marketing works best when it has a long run-up time, and having your game amass a few badges to attach to the trailer end card is tempting. Reputation building is one of the hardest PR struggles indie studios can face and having someone else endorse your product can serve as an easy shortcut where that’s concerned. This post will explore the variety of options for indie developers looking to submit their game for awards, and ask the question: is it really worth the effort? read more

Welcome back to Indie Game Marketing 101! If you haven’t read yesterday’s beginner’s guide, and you’re completely new to the concept of games marketing, you might want to start there.

For the second part of our Games Marketing 101, we wanted to open the floor to game developers on Twitter, to find out exactly what questions have been searing their ways into people’s skulls.

We had a fantastic response to our shout-out on Twitter, and some brilliant questions we wouldn’t have thought of ourselves – apologies if we end up missing any questions out. Here’s a selection of the most pertinent ones, which we’ve done our best to answer. read more

Once Upon A Time…

Once upon a time, on an excel spreadsheet far, far away, a lonely games marketer sat and wished they could engage their audience just a little bit more….

Storytelling, when used in the context of PR and marketing, refers to the combination of facts and narrative. You don’t need to be an experienced writer to utilise storytelling PR, but instead, be able to see the story already there in your game’s development. Storytelling can open another entry point for players to access your game, and add a competitive edge to your campaign. read more

Over the last few years, influencers have radically changed the marketing space for video games. Although traditional gaming media is far from obsolete, the power of influencers has proven to be a dominant force in an industry that continues to grow year on year. If you’re marketing a game in 2019 it’s certainly recommended you considered the impact and implementation of influencers in your strategy.

That’s not to suggest that every game needs to be supported by an influencer marketing campaign. For some games, this approach might not be suitable. But any robust marketing plan should be taking influencer marketing into account – even to simply analyse the impact of user-generated coverage, which you might have no control over. read more

Are you a games journalist, blogger, streamer or YouTuber? We’re looking for people who fall into that category – whether professionally or as a hobby – who can spare ten or fifteen minutes to complete a quick survey for us.

The survey – which can be completed anonymously – is about your experiences of interacting with game developers and PR people, as well as what sorts of things you’re looking to cover in 2019. We’ll use it to help improve the ways we work with you folks, and we’re also planning to use the data to help us compile a report, which we’ll release publicly (we won’t include any personally identifying information in the report unless you expressly give us permission to do so). read more

One of the hardest parts of indie marketing is getting your game into the hands of the right people. You might know who those people are: games journalists. But, getting in touch with them is no easy task and even when you do, getting a response might be even harder. Journalists are very busy and their inboxes are filling up every day with a never-ending tide of PR emails from indie devs asking them to look at their game. It’s hard to know how to stand out in that crowd. PR agencies take great care in building the kind of reputation that gets their emails at least opened by journalists, but even that doesn’t guarantee coverage. read more

Tracking the success of your indie game launch can be a complicated and daunting task. For a start, there’s not a lot of information out there as to what numbers indicate success. That’s, in part, due to the fact that a game’s success could be viewed in a variety of different ways depending on the desired outcome. In this blog post, we’re going to assume that the desired outcome is for the game to make a small profit.

Which numbers should you care about?

To figure out which numbers you should care about it’s best to start with your sales metrics. What sales are you hoping to achieve for the game to make a small profit? This will be different for every game depending on your costs. There are a lot of variables here, from the amount of time the game takes to develop to the number of developers working on it and, of course, how much you are planning to invest in marketing. In this blog post, we assume an overall cost of $40k for a solo developer across a year’s development, which is quite a modest sum to develop a game, but the figures can be scaled to adjust to your project. Let’s assume this means it’d take 4,000 sales to break even, and – say – 5,000 to make a small profit. read more