How to Market Your Indie Game!

hey this is Jonas I'm one of the developers of Islanders which is a game we recently published to see the launch went really really well like we have over 1,000 positive reviews already big youtubers like jacksepticeye played our game a lot of games media and games Press picked up our game and reviewed our game and it also sold really really well over 50,000 copies according to Steam spine so in this video I want to tell you how I think we did it and how I think you can do it as well just keep in mind that I'm not an indie game marketing expert by any stretch of the imagination yes we managed to pull it off one time that might have very well been luck I also want to dive a little bit into why I think it worked especially well for Islanders why I think for my next game will you snail it will be a lot harder and also what I would do the next time I make a game to ensure that it will hopefully be a success so that should be quite interesting hope you enjoy let's go the first big chapter is making the correct game I personally have the perception that certain games are just infinitely

easier to market and sell than other games so just making the correct kind of game is basically the groundwork for selling your game later on first thing you should do is make a game that doesn't exist yet don't just copy an already successful game because you don't want to compete with that already successful game you're gonna lose that battle for Islanders we were lucky we were able to find a game system that hasn't been explored before a very interesting unique and elegant set game system with my next game will you snail I think it will already be a little more challenging cuz it's not that obvious what will your snail adds to the table why it's different why it's unique so if I want to have a good chance of marketing will your snail then I probably need to invest a bit more time into that and I need to make sure that it really stands out compared to other skill-based platformers if I would start making an entirely new game now that would definitely be something I would think about a bit more how can I make sure this game is obviously different than other games in that Joran secondly

which is an obvious one but also a very important one make a kind of game that people want to play even if you make a very new and interesting and innovative game that doesn't matter if nobody wants to play it how do you find out if people are interested in a certain type of game or in a certain game idea best way to find out is with a lot of playtesting try to get a lot of reactions for your game early on try to fill it out a little bit it's obviously a very good sign if there are similar games that are very popular you've got to find the middle ground yes you want to do something that's popular a popular genre something people are interested in but you don't want to compete with any of the popular games you want to do your own thing so finding the middle ground between those two things can be a little tricky I guess once again for Islanders we are quite lucky because there are not a lot of strategy games coming out at the moment city building is something people enjoy but it's a different spin on city building and that's why Islanders were kinda well for will you snail I'm not that sure apparently some people like it I've already pulled out a couple of

demos man like so if I started making another game today I would definitely put a little more thought into that make more different prototypes and then compare how people react to different game ideas I have and this way the likelihood of me picking something people actually want to play will be quite a bit higher although I'd try to use a bit of common sense do people really want to be brutally smashed in a 2d platformer and feel like they have no chance at all or do they want to build beautiful cities in a relaxed environment you know then the next step for making the correct kind of game I have is make a game that benefits from content creators so make a game that is highly replayable that has the benefit that content creators youtubers streamers can make a lot of content about your game they can make an entire video series about your game or keep streaming your game for months if they want and then all the high replayability usually means that when people see

somebody play the game they can still play it themselves whereas if you make a story-driven game that you can only play once then I'm not sure how many people will still buy the game after they've seen somebody play it but for something like Islanders seeing somebody played again kind of makes you want to play the game as well and if you make that kind of game then that's obviously a bonus I wouldn't say that Islanders is a super-duper streamable and content creator the game but it's definitely not a horrible one either or will you snail I'm not quite sure how it will play out I imagine that it will be quite fun to watch and some content creators especially the ones that like screaming a lot will be all over this game however I'm not sure how well that will translate into the sales for the game if I started making another game now once again this would be one of the points I would spend some thoughts on will this be a game that people will be able to stream and watch a lot and will those streams and videos translate into sales all of that depends on the kind of

game you're making and if you take the correct decision yours and marketing your game later on will be a lot easier one thing that makes your game more content creator friendly is just making a game that is very fun to watch because obviously if the audience likes watching the game then content creators will make more content about the game in general I think what helps is if it allows the person playing to be creative if the player can portray skill if it's just generally exciting to watch if it has good pacing and a nicely balanced tension curve stuff like that makes your game a lot more watchable and obviously also how easy it is to understand that's also a big factor if somebody tunes in into a stream or into a video and they instantly get the game that is a big plus for watch ability as well the next step I have for you is make an appealing game unfortunately there's no formula for appeal but I still kind of have a formula for you and that formula is make something with a strong fantasy and with a strong fantasy I mean something people would like to do in real life if

somebody tells you hey would you like to be the leader of an army bad without any of the negative consequences and if a lot of people would say yes to that in real life then you probably have a strong fantasy there so this works really well for Islanders just building a beautiful city onto an island is an appealing fantasy a very strong fantasy and the same applies to the last Grizzly games game super flight where you fly with a wingsuit through colorful blocks and I think flying with a wingsuit is just something a lot of people would like to do in real life if there weren't any negative consequences and if it weren't that scary and I mean that is exactly what you get in a video game right you get the experience but without all of the scary stuff though that while you're shooting for a strong fantasy I'm a little concerned for will you snail will you snail does not have a strong fantasy if I ask you would you like to be a snail in a digitally simulated world and would you like to be tortured by an evil crazy AI then maybe some of you would say yes but also a lot

of you would say however the appeal formula is not quite done yet a strong fantasy is not all you need to create appeal in order to create appeal you also need a high visual quality literally the first things people see of your game are the visuals when you first see a game you don't care about the gameplay nothing matters nothing matters but the visuals so you really want to make sure you have really good visuals for your game that's such a big marketing factor I can't stress that enough if your game looks crap people will think it's crap if your game looks good and visually satisfying then people will think it's good in my opinion it's definitely worth to invest a lot of time into the look of your game luckily for Islanders I wasn't a team and we had a great artist in our team freedom and he did a great job game looks fantastic and a lot more inviting to give it a try as a result of that 4 will you snail there's still a bit of work to do yes it looks ok but in terms of visuals it could definitely be better if you see a screenshot from will you

snail you're not like oh my god this looks amazing I need to try this whereas if you see a screenshot from Islanders that's not an entirely unrealistic reaction you could have so if I made another game visual quality something I'd pay a lot of attention to and then the last thing you need to create appeal is visuals that communicate your fantasy people do not know what the fantasy of your game is and as I've said the first thing they see is not some sort of text or some sort of description the first thing they see is always an image a screenshot something like that and if that image of that screenshot or if that video clip or that gif if that can communicate the fantasy of the game then you have a big advantage so in my opinion that's the three things you need to create appeal you need a strong fantasy you need a strong art style and you need an art style that come your fantasy that's how it all ties together that's how you create appeal that might be an oversimplified system yes creating appeal is very complicated

but appeal is the marketing factor if you manage to master one skill in marketing try to want master appeal it's the most important marketing factor of all if your game is appealing then everything else will be a downhill battle Islanders is appealing will you snail not quite there yet if I would make another game appeal appeal appeal appeal would be what I'm thinking about and then the last tip I have for you to make sure you have an edge later on in marketing is to make sure you make a game that is contagious make a game that's easy to recommend make a game where people want to share screenshots give people a way to create something awesome to achieve awesome things that they might want to share with their friends battle royale games usually create really fun stories that people want to tell of stupid ways they died or funny ways they won again if your game creates cool stories like that that people will just naturally want to share that is awesome obviously if your game has multiplayer if you can play it

with a friend that is something that will make your game more contagious because people will encourage their friends to buy the game so they can play it with them and obviously just make a fun game that's easy to recommend in islanders a lot of people make screenshots of their cities and share them with others simply because they are proud of what they've created as they should be so to sum this chapter up makes the correct kind of game because if you get all of those points right then I can promise you the rest will be a downhill battle I think in Islanders what we did is we got a lot of these points right we made a very appealing and marketable game and as a result of that it was quite easy to market our game for will you snail I'm convinced if I don't make any significant changes to the game it will be a lot harder and we'll see how that turns out I'll share my experience with that once I've done it so far I'd say if I would make another game I would pay more attention to all of these points and make sure that I make a very marketable game the next big chapter in marketing is to get

the word out there to make sure people know your game exists and one of the questions I see a lot is when should you start sharing your game or when should you start marketing your game I think there's no right or wrong here I've seen both strategies work for example if you look at thin matrix he's basically developed his entire game Aquila knocks on his YouTube channel and from what I can tell that marketing strategy has worked out really well for him on the other hand I Landers was announced one month before launch that worked perfectly fine as well so whatever you prefer both can work the first way and one of the most important ways nowadays to get the word out there is social media the cool thing about social media is is that you can build an audience over time and that audience will grow bigger and bigger usually they will obviously start off kind of small and will not have all that big of an impact but the bigger your social media accounts grow the easier it will be to market your games I recommend you don't go for all social media channels

I would pick one or two and focus on them I think that is probably more promising and although as a game developer you have different things to do than posting on social media all day long so you want to keep the time investment manageable I personally really recommend YouTube and Twitter both of those in my opinion are really great for indie game marketing feel free to disagree and one thing I've also just recently realized is that quality seems to be more important than quantity yeah quantity and especially consistency is very important to grow your audience over time however when it comes to selling your game and when it comes to getting some actual attention it is much more profitable to just focus on making one really good quality posts I saw that recently for when we did the marketing for Islanders we've wrote one really good Twitter post which completely took off and gave us thousands of wish lists for our steam page and all the reason

these are this for one of my youtube videos which took off it was just a pretty decent video with a good title and a good thumbnail and that video gave me more subscribers than all of my previous videos combined know that once again shows that really invest in your time into making one quality post when it really comes with is more beneficial than pure quantity and the next step for getting the word out there is just to set up your store page early so people can start which listing or pre-ordering your game in my opinion that is really important because if you start gathering a lot of momentum and if one of your tweets does go viral or if one of your youtube videos does go viral then obviously you want a place to direct all of those people to you want to direct them to the store page so they can wishlist the game there needs to be some call-to-action this way if you get attention it will be a lot more profitable for you I think when your game launches wish lists are very important because a certain percentage of those wish lists are just naturally

gonna convert to Zales wish lists help you to appear in that popular upcoming section which lists help you to appear in the new and trending section so before you launch you really want to make sure that you gather as many wish lists as possible maybe I would even go as far to only announce the release day at once you've gathered a certain amount of wish lists this way you can make sure there will be a certain amount of people buying your game when it comes out launching a game without any wish lists feels a little risky can work as well although there's really nothing speaking against setting up your store page early so people can freakin wishlist your game what you want to make sure as well really early on is that your store page just looks absolutely much because your store page is where people decide whether they want to buy your game or whether they don't want to buy your game the higher your conversion rate from somebody visiting your page to them actually buying the gameís the more likely it is that steam will promote your store page as well and show it to a

lot of people because steam just wants to make money as well if steam knows they can make money by showing people your store page then they will obviously do it so just make sure you have a really good store page and then one little tip I have for you as well is to pay a little bit of attention to the text on your steam page I didn't really know how that works the way it works is that users can tech games with certain text but you as a developer can also give your games text and you as a developer can also delete text from your game that you think are unfitting so just make sure when you launch your game or even better before you just make sure that those texts are about right and describe your game somewhat well the next step I have for getting your work out there is pay huge huge attention to your most important marketing assets of course the store page is a very important marketing asset but then two other very important marketing assets are the trailer so make sure you have a really good trailer for your game a really appealing trailer that communicates what your game is about why

it's special why it's fun and why you will enjoy the game at its core it's a minimalist strategy game about building cities on beautiful islands building something in Islanders doesn't cost any resources instead you have an inventory with a limited amount of buildings in it and then another very important marketing asset is the little thumbnail you see on the store page no storefront just shows your store page right away first of all the user usually has to click on a little image on a little thumbnail of your game that little thumbnail of your game needs to be absolutely perfect once again it's one of your most important marketing assets because if nobody clicks on your freaking thumbnail then nobody will see your store page and nobody will be able to buy your game if steam suggests that thumbnail to people and people just don't click on it then steam will definitely just stop showing it so just make sure you have a really really good thumbnail as a youtuber I can tell you how important good thumbnails are and

that does not only apply to YouTube that also applies to steam because in the end what you're trying to do is you're trying to get people to click and if you fail to do so you won't get any results the next thing you do is putting a bit of thought into your release date that is something I haven't quite figured out yet I mean what is a good release date I think one of the main things is just to make sure that there are no major games released at the same time even worse if they're very similar games to your game for example for Islanders we kinda had the choice to release before or after the new unknow game we decided to release two weeks before the new anno game cause if all of the strategy games players are playing I know then they can't play Islanders it might have been a similar kind of audience so we didn't want to compete for that attention and then the day of the week plays a bit of a role as well do two games press games media if your game is released on a Friday and you send out your press release on Friday then a lot of new site will maybe not catch it or

it will be too late for them to post anything about it so releasing on Friday mmm it's maybe not the best idea not quite sure about Monday either so Tuesday Wednesday Thursday is where I personally would release a game simply because that's where you can expect to be covered from games media how exactly all of that place our land what what really makes for a good release day it like I have no idea okay next thing you can do to get the word out there is to publish a press release I personally didn't know about this before but luckily my team taught me how to do that there are certain websites on the internet like James Prescott comp where you can publish press releases for the games media and seems like a lot of games journalists hang out on sites like that and have a look at those press releases so when you announce your game and when you release a game it makes sense to publish a press release which is basically just a little bit of descriptive text of what your game is and why it's interesting who made the game there's a little bit of information

potentially even containing your press kit that's writing a press release on one of those sites have a super big impact hmm who knows but does it help to get the word out there yes then the next thing you should do is to set up a press kit a press kit is basically something games media can download a couple of screenshots a gif maybe a trailer the logo of your game a little bit of background information to your game so if a games news site wants to write something about your game they can use those resources that you provide in the press kit to hopefully write and publish a good article if you don't have a press kit then you make the work of games journalists a lot harder and they are less likely to cover your game so just publish a press kit and make sure it's available somewhere whenever you send review keys to games press you should always also send a link to your press kit and that way your game is just going to be more likely to be covered by press release dead press release press cute ah next up contact games press if you're

really lucky and you generate a lot of busts like we did with our first announcement tweet on Twitter then games press will reach out to you and they will ask for review keys and for a press kit potentially if that is not the case then you should reach out to games press and just try to find a couple of email addresses of games journalists of big game sites send them a bunch of review keys so they can actually play and test the game send them your press kit and then pray and hope for the best make sure that if you send out those kinds of emails they should be very nice appealing short it should be very clear what they are about the steam keys should be very visible and easily accessible and then what you can do as well as you can just politely ask them not to publish any refuse before the release date that is called an embargo we did that for Islanders as well we just kindly asked let's players and press not to publish any in-depth reviews before release obviously we get most of the traffic when the articles come out we

get most of the traffic when the videos come out so it's just more beneficial to have all of those things come out when the game is out and not before that because before that you can't buy the game yet the next thing you can do to get the word out there is to send out a bunch of review keys to content creators and games press just give them the game for fries and throw out those keys because giving somebody the game for free is well worth it if that means that person can get two or three others to buy the game if people have a freaking 100 subscriber YouTube channel and they're really desperately want to review key and don't hold back just give them the key whatever the more coverage the better and one tool that seems to be quite useful for that at the moment is key mailer which allows you to send out a bunch of review keys automatically to content creators using Gmail or cost a bit of money but we think it was well worth it for us and then the last thing which is also a big deal in my opinion is to be very honest about what your game is and what your game isn't I really really like that

honest marketing approach or Islanders who are very honest about what the game is it's just a small casual city builder with islanders we want to offer you a relaxed an intuitive way of building beautiful cities in no time at all please keep in mind that it does not offer the same amount of death and late-game features as other more complex city builders instead we hope that eyeliners is one of those beautiful relaxing experiences that you can come back to every once in a while its North City skylines it's no city simulation just a fun little casual game and I think being honest with your marketing has a lot of big advantages first of all it makes you stand out because some people are just not very honest with their marketing they want to sell you their game at any cost secondly if you set the correct kind of expectations for your game your review scores will be infinitely better because I think usually people will give a bad review on Steam if the game didn't meet their expectations so if your marketing isn't honest and you said unrealistic

expectations you will get a lot of thumbs down if you set realistic expectations and those expectations are met then you will get the thumbs-up and obviously your Steam ratings are very important makes your store page a lot more appealing and a lot more people will download your game if you have a lot of positive reviews if I'm browsing through Steam the review scores always one of the deciding factors whether I buy our game or not so you want to have good ones that's pretty obvious if you're very honest about what your game is yes that will cost you a couple of sales but those people would have given your game a thumbs down anyway so you don't want them to buy your game just let them go I think this is just a very consumer friendly practice that even helps you out as a developer just be very clear about what your game is and then nobody will be disappointed obviously honest marketing only works if you have a good game if you have a crap game and then you're like yeah it's a crap game then maybe you should go for the dishonest marketing instead so really there are only so many things you can do to get

the word out there either they work or they don't and whether they work or they don't depends a lot on that first chapter we talked about if you make an appealing game that just looks good and has a strong fantasy and communicates that fantasy then all of this will be a downhill battle if you don't have an appealing game then getting the word out there will be either very hard or not possible I'm very curious how that will work out for real you snail because as that I'm not super confident in the appeal of the loose nail let's see how it plays out now we come to the third big chapter I feel like we should definitely talk about multiply yourselves don't leave any money on the table and there are a couple of very easy ways to do that for once translate your game into different languages because steam will only show the game to people if that game and especially if that star page has a translation in their language so if you release your game only in English then a huge majority of Steam users will not even be able to see your game on Steam and will not even show up for them except when

they specifically search for it and I think for the Islanders sales only 30 to 40 percent are from english-speaking countries if you translate your game into a couple of different languages you can at the very least multiply your sales by two we didn't even do any marketing in other languages it's such an easy investment like you pay somebody 200 bucks to translate your game into a different language and if you sell a somewhat reasonable amount of games then you'll get that money back in absolutely no time at all once again I feel like that is a reason for me to be a little concerned about will you snail because will you snail will have a lot of voice lines that will very will be very hard to localize to other languages that's why will you snail will probably only launch in English which means it will just by default even if everything else goes just as well not reach the same amount of sales not even half of what I lenders does it's very obvious it's very simple if you don't translate your game

to other languages then a lot of countries will simply not be able to buy your game if you can translate your game it's worth it a similar thing probably goes for publishing on multiple stars like there's no reason to just publish your game on Steam you can also publish on on the epic store or on each dot io there are a lot of different options and my common sense tells me that if you do that you will probably sell more games in total obviously it'll mean a little bit of work it will be a little bit of additional management you'll have to do which is also why we didn't bother doing that with Islanders so far however that is definitely some you should keep in mind and consider that you can probably just squeeze out a couple of extra cells simply by putting your game on to a couple of other storefronts once again same story not just with publishing on different stars but also publishing for different platforms if we manage to export Islanders for mobile or if we manage to part Islanders to the switch or to the console that would probably generate a

ton of extra sales only problem here at the moment for us is that parting twos console or mobile is not as straightforward unfortunately as translating to a couple of different languages translating through other languages is like such an easy thing to do with such a big impact parting to other platforms is a lot more work and a lot more complicated source so looking into into that however if your game Szell's somewhat reasonably it's probably something you should consider and then another thing you can do to generate more sales is just to update and improve your game give people a reason to talk about your game again give them a reason to revisit your game make your game better so it's even easier to recommend an Islanders update is going out very soon I'm not quite sure how big of an impact that will have I can't really tell you but my educated guess is that obviously having a better game a more updated game will help your sales in the long run in case you want to learn more about the technicalities of how to publish your game on Steam I

highly recommend you check out the video I made last week where I cover exactly that if you found this interesting I would HIGHLY appreciate you leaving a subscribe or perhaps even a thumbs up that supports the channel helps me out keeps me motivated and make sure you'll get more quality content from me from shaggy the developer who can't pronounce s I don't wanna do nice comments anymore hope you found that interesting and this will help you to market your next game successfully I'm rooting for you and see you next time bye