Marketing For Indie Games | Land a Hit Game!

this is our conversation with Chris owski about how to Market your indie game and how to sell more copies on Steam in particular I want to find out what a marketing expert says when I tell them that you just need to make great games and that marketing is kind of overvalued will Chris kick my butt for that I used to believe that you need to make a great game and do great marketing now I adjusted my world model to believe that making a great game is the best marketing that's why in a recent video I said just make great games and I even specifically pointed out that I thought marketing was overvalued but even in my own world model marketing is kind of the bigger Circle so something feels very wrong here You' figured out something that was solved in 1960s there's this um famous marketing professor and he came up with this What's called the four pce it's product price place and promotion and the product is what you're talking about with this double v diagram with marketing and making great game that's your product and that is actually marketing and that's that's how what you have to kind of like wrap your brain around because too many people think marketing is like oh what do I tweet about marketing that's one of the pie

the little tiny one that's called that I Ed my pinky for which is promotion Chris Kowski is an absolute legend in the industry he has an online block and newsletter on how to Market a game.com he's like a regular speaker at GDC at this point and he's well known for deep diving into the data on how to actually sell games on Steam we'll have a look at some of my data in this video as well but most importantly we'll try to come up with a full framework for how to Market your indie game successfully product versus promotion like how much would you assign to each oh product is like 90% of what determines whether your game is going to succeed or what the impact of your game is going to be its product is 90% I think one of the main mistakes I made in my model is using the wrong words for the wrong things I'm probably gonna say it wrong and I'm going to correct you too Jonas yep whenever we say something like hey um tweet that is promotion that isn't just marketing we need to expand our definition not just like that is marketing no that is the the promotion side of marketing and I know it sounds like I'm making antic but

we really have to understand that to kind of wrap our minds around how selling a product works within that product what would you say for indie game specifically what do you need to pay attention there I really think genre is the most critical within the product itself um over and over again I've studied like how steam what games are selling on Steam and over and over again I have seen there's certain types of games that sell well and there's certain games that just don't no matter how well you do the promotion and the price and all that stuff yikes I think a lot of people won't like it but let's hear it yeah okay so the ones that I'm always like if somebody comes to me and they say like Chris I'm having trouble with my game and I'm like what kind of game is it if they say one of these in I'm like oh okay I'm sorry I you know it's gonna be hard okay and those are Platformers 2D and 3D puzzle games don't sell that well VR VR is very hard on Steam now this goes back to the platform side which platform we're on local co-op I I don't know why some local co-ops break through there are some that do um

but for the most part no RTS a lot of people like to make rtss Starcraft 2 is one of my favorite games of all time but RTS on Steam at Indie scale is very very difficult and on the other side um are there a couple of genres that usually perform better absolutely and these games don't get made by Indies as much and I'm shouting to Indies please make these types of games these do so well but nobody's making these types of games so here let me sh at you all of you I I lump these in to a giant mega structure of a genre and it's not really very specific it's kind of wrapped around in a thing I kind of refer to them as crafty buildy simulation management games it's a very amorphous blob but you can kind of group them into this thing where what you're doing is not um playing a story like where you go on an adventure and you go top to bottom end to end in a story like you're a dude these are games where it's almost like

Legos where it's a box of Legos you dump out the box of Legos and the player can just do whatever they want and so these are let me give you some examples but they're kind of this broader genre they're like Colony Sims where it's like hey here's five settlers in an ba abandoned area you have to rebuild their base that's that's a call you have to manage resources however you want to build the base however you want to manage the resources it's up to you there's no story no nothing it's you alone building this base like Legos um city builders work very well another genre is called management games where it's like you own a store these are often wholesome successful wholesome games are often these where it's like you manage a store and you have to set the inventory and the prices and you have to hire people and fire people and there's no real goal it's just like do well with your little cute bakery or you know card shop or supermarket those sort of things which are a hot genre too um the other ones are simulations which is

like you have an airplane fly this airplane and everything is simulated those are simulators then this is like Euro Truck Simulator flight Sim and then everything playway makes which are these simulation games like lawnmower simulator all these kind of weird simulation games do amazingly well and not enough people make them um there's other games like idlers I think idler does very well where it's just a number going up and however you want to spend those idle points you can do it um other ones are like similar to building games like um kind of these room Constructors where um you have a room and you pick the furniture and you put the furniture in there you lay it out however you want those are really big um some of these like no objective Castle Builder type of games there's no like resources to them uh these are like tiny Glade uh those type of games um all very well so in general there's not like one specific genre because people think oh does it change no it's a game where there are no

set linear narrative it's just like here's some Legos have fun kids there's some resources that you have to manage and some rules but you just you do what you want with it those are the games that I think very well on Steam what I'm noticing with all of the things they saying is that they all sound like they're relatively fantasy heavy games so it's you didn't really mention any abstract things like the abstract things like the the Platformers and the puzzle games were like more in the do not so well categor and the the more fantasy heavy games like simulators with very specific fantasies like you own a shop you manage a mall or something like that those tend to do better so I'm I'm not surprised by by that part and here's my theory on those is the typical steam player wants 20 to 40 hours worth of content when they lay down their money they want that much content we can argue whether that's right or not whatever that's what the customer expects they don't for the most part like a 5H hour chunk now I know you as designers all of

us were like well we don't have time for games I would just want a nice tight five hour experience I wish I did good for you but the typical steam player and I've studied the market enough the typical steam player wants 20 to 40 hours wor of content now us as if we're making a platformer or an RPG or an adventure game it is very hard for us at Indie scale to make 20 to 40 hours worth of content that's a lot of bosses that's a lot of dialogue a lot of narrative that is hard to fill that space there's a loophole though that we can can exploit which is Crafty buildy simulation games where it's just the content is generated by all these Lego bricks like I say it's kind of like Lego bricks where the the player can just sandbox this and they can just play for 20 to 40 hours just with your fun little toys and that's how we are able to make 20 to 40 hours of content at our scale because we don't have to like type out every line of dialogue we don't have to design every boss we can just say here's some cool Legos do what you want with them have fun with it one word in particular that Chris said stood out to

me toys what differentiates toys from games is that the rules are more open and there are usually not that many predefined goals in toys it's more typical to pick the goals yourself a bit games are more about optimization toys are more about exploration but both of them are very much about Mastery and it's not like you're either one or the other there's very much a spectrum between a toy and a game and you can fall anywhere in between when I look at this blop I think what it's describing is toys or toy likes or anything that's positioned in like this part of the spectrum over here a little further to the toy side of things creating complexity through emergence seems to be a good thing and also fantasy heavy games seem to do better than the more abstract ones what would you say if if I want to go into a different J for example I want to make a horror game or a racing game like is is the genre something I should be really very worried about or how how should I approach it if I'm just set on on making a different kind of game well horror is the one little Aster well it's that's a big bloody Asis with like a demon eye

coming out of it horror games do very well and they are linear for the most part and they can be contained within like two hours two to five hours is totally fine for the horror fan because nobody wants to be horrified for 24 hours nobody wants to do that they just want a nice quick scary experience I looked at the top selling games of every year and always there are more horror games in the top of the charts than any other genre so the steam audience really likes horror games if you made a puzzle game here's here's the thing if you made a puzzle game that failed folks okay you're like why didn't my puzzle game do well take it keep the puzzles just cover them in blood put them in a scary place and make somebody chasing you so that you have to solve the puzzle re-release it as a horror game I guarantee it'll do better I don't know if it'll be a hit but it will be do better if you just throw some blood on it so if you had a failed game throw some blood on it and re-release it that's my uh my Chris zukoski guarantee right there don't you can't there's no guarantee but you get the point steam fans love horror games

they just love them so that is one genre where you can do a linear narrative smaller I was a bit irritated by the fact that we were talking about genre so much when I thought we would be talking about promotion and you know all of these kind of other things but step by step it all started making sense a little bit later in the conversation I asked Chris how to get the attention of content creators like what do you need to do to get content creators to play your game if your game is the right type of game for steam everything works you do everything and it works if your game is not into the type of game that streamers like to play in general like streamers do not like to play puzzle games even if you reach out to a thousand streamers with your puzzle game they're probably not going to play it or if the graphics aren't good enough they're not going to play it remember they're trying to get viewers to play their stream and if it's an ugly game with bad graphics and it's a puzzle game which they don't like to play because they get stuck and they look dumb they aren't going to want to play the game on stream because the viewers will be like

man this game's not good looking and it's boring and they're just going to leave that streamer so the product again really determines how effective your promotion is so these crafty buildy games that I talk about where there's endless content from them streamers love those types of games that's why they're so popular on Steam is because streamers promote those games because they're fun for the audience they're fun for the streamer and people like to go play those so again the the product determines the promotion okay that's another very interesting connection we made there that um the genres that content creators like are the ones that tend to do well on Steam that's now that I think about it you're you're probably right yeah that's not an accident that is not an accident I mean here's the thing here's here's why that works is because streamers it's kind of like it's kind of like survival of the fittest the players are going to watch the streamers that

play the types of games they like so they're kind of like evolving together almost like the hummingbird and the flower just evolve together to symbiotically relate to each other um streamers play the games players like and players like games that are long and streamers like to play these games which gives them more promotion and more people see them and more people play on them so they they kind of build on each other and that's why crafty buildy simulation sandbox Lego brick style games do extremely well on okay okay I see yeah we keep coming back to that that's cool is it one one of those cases where if everybody followed your advice it would stop working like if if everybody started making these um Simulator games and so on would it would it stop working or how do you see that I am I am just one person and nobody listens to me anyway Jonas so I I don't think that the biggest problem is not is not that too many people listen to me and then it becomes a crowded Market

that is not the problem the problem is you you keep screaming at developers and they don't do ity somebody wants to make a platformer every five minutes right so there no do you think there are things you can do if you're in in other genres to make the game more suitable for a steam audience let's for example say I really desperately want to make a platformer game or or I really desperately want to make a firstperson shooter game or I guess first person shooters to kind of okay yeah I'm not sure but let let's just say doesn't matter which all but let's just say I want to do some different genre do you think there are ways to adjust your game um to to better fit the steam audience I do I mean there are games that are Platformers that do okay so for instance Noida um that's a platformer but every single Pixel simulated there's this emergent gameplay there's this physics to it that did very well so the other one would be Terraria

that's a 2d game but it is so deep like everything's simulated there's so many like upgrades and monsters and you can like build your base it's got to be this like sandbox quality and then a platformer can work but if it's like a narrative where it's like you're a dude going on an adventure and you have to battle bosses linearly it just it's it's super hard and no matter how good the graphics are and no matter how stunning it is platform just a platformer tax on Steam and there's not much you can do unfortunately I just I encourage developers to try looking at different genres I really do there there's some really neat interesting genres that are just begging the players are begging us for making good games for those please folks look at some of these other genres and just to really drive home the point Chris also showed me some data from my games from the games I made I like to look at what's called CCU or concurrent users um this is how many people are simultaneously playing a game um valve actually uses this metric a lot to

determine some of the the way your game is seen especially if you're making a free game they use this algorithm to determine whether they should promote you more as CCU so what I did was I went to all three of your games because this is public data you can go to steam DB and pull the concurrent users for the lifetime of your game and so I grafted all three of your games on the plot at the same time so so they all lined up at the same time so day one the launch of your game and just line them all up and so what you see is there's three bars or three line graphs Throne fall is green will you snail is red Islanders is blue and this is what I kind of see and I see this all the time folks and I don't mean to pick on Platformers but what I use this data for what I see this what this dat graph is telling me is how important genre is now what you'll see here is Jonas you did excellent promotion you did great with uh will you snail I

couldn't have done it better like and to be honest I consider will you snail a hit it did well it's a platformer anytime I say Platformers don't work people will sometimes even say to me well will you snail succeeded and it did I totally get it I totally do um but even when a platformer hits when it succeeds it still does not hit as hard as these crafty building games and what this is if you look at the graph for throne or for will snail that red line it starts really high and that's because you do great great promotion with this excellent audience that you built up but you can see after the first couple days the first month or so the concurrent users drops uh kind of at a linear scale and then it never recovers it's just flat whereas your other two games which I consider crafty abilities like a throne fall Islanders they're just they're the type of genre that steam likes these kind of like sandbox style games they're constantly going back up and I think each one of these spikes you said oh yeah we did a Content update we did all this stuff when you do these cont updates or sales the audience picks

back up and they're like oh I love this game let me try it again I'm want to replay it there's such an impact on you can actually control it when it's one of these crafty building games because the audience likes to come back to these type of games and I think you even told me for will you snail you added a level editor later and we can't even see the impact on this graph it is such a minuscule impact of adding a big thing like a level editor um and what this is telling me is even if you have a hit game promoted well if it's the wrong type of genre for steam it still just doesn't quite function in the way steam likes I think from a developer perspective it's kind of frustrating because a lot of people get into game development for the creative freedom and you're like create whatever you want and you know uh players will come and enjoy it the same way you do and this is a little bit of a like this graph here is a little bit of of a harsh wakeup call I feel like to that

that like I put four years of effort into will snail and it just got stomped by the other games that we made in a way shorter amount of time that's like yeah um you you have to find some sort of balance between what you like to make and what actually performs well feel like you have to to make some compromises there is what I'm taking from that and here's and I think that's a great point and Sometimes some of the criticism I get when I when I talk about this stuff is people say oh well they're just chasing Trends uh you're just copying what's working and I say no don't don't think of it that way this is what's what's happening here this is what I recommend is there are genres like these crafty build that not enough devs are making they are wide open open ocean and they are begging for Innovation like the the games are just they're very similar in this crafty building space okay and if you are a developer who brings your creativity and

looks at the space like Hey we're going to make a simulation game let's let's play some of these simulation games you're going to find out like man a lot of these are are not that Innovative if we brought a new art style to this we could do very well and I think that is true and so what I want to do is I'm inviting you Indie devs who have interesting artistic talents great design ideas to come take over these genres that have a very hungry thirsty whichever whichever taste you want um audience and give them something new and I think you are a perfect example of this um Jonas I I think with Islanders you took like a city Builder and you brought Innovation and that it's like you boiled it down to the the absolute minimum of what it is like this it's like placing buildings that's the primary thing that you don't have to worry about water and all this kind of stuff it's or you know like laying pipe or something like that you you down and I think there's so much design Innovation out there if you pick these crafty build genres but I feel

like uh if you try and make a platformer there isn't as much creativity in and Innovation space it's like trying to grind out a mine that has already been mined out you're like grinding for the ore that is little tin Flex of gold whereas there's like there's mins where the gold is just like hanging off the wall asking for Innovation and there are people like please just just do it for us please give us this Innovation and I'm just saying is such fertile ground and it might not be your favorite genre but you can do some really Innovative things so maybe maybe just making great games is actually not enough and what you also have to do is making the right games this is not as idealistic it's not as romantic I don't like looking at it but maybe it's more realistic from what I've observed a lot of developers are actually quite annoyed by the pure existence of genre definitions they're like they're confining what you can do you know and basically you shouldn't

even care about genre definitions at all here's the problem with that though customers absolutely think in genre like they entire preferences are encoded in genre like if you ask somebody what kind of games do you play you're almost certainly going to get some sort of genre as a response so I watched the most basic ass Gamers browse Steam and so I watched them for like 24 hours not straight but like I spent at least 24 hours of combined streamer watching somebody brow Steam and so basically my basic concl conclusion is people have the the typical steam audience not not game designers have a very limited set of genres that they really like they say I like this type of genre and when they look at your steam page they're trying to determine is this game this genre that I like and so what they're doing is they're taking your steam page and you're they're seeing if it fits it's kind of like those pegs in the holes like is this a round peg in my round hole and my round hole is like I like the genre so does it fit that's

what they're doing and So the faster you can make your game look similar to other games in that genre I know it sounds ironic and weird you want to just do these secret Clues like we are this game they are this genre if your steam page is confusing and it's like I don't know what kind of game this is is this an RPG or is this a first-person shooter is this a tactical game is this RPG what is this if if the audience is seeing that with your steam page and like what is this that is aad sign you want them to look at your page go RPG I love those yeah wish listed moving on that's that's what you want so in general make your genre very clear and do the secret signs that says my game is this genre so not only do you want to embrace genre definitions you even want to very clearly and specifically Place yourself in a genre so that it is very obvious for everybody what kind of game you're making look at it like this if you are making the right game but nobody knows you're making the right game for them

then what's the point I I'll just drill into this a little bit further cuz this is something that I've seen done a couple of times I I just want to hear your rant about it is um I I feel like a lot of developers feel like mystery is a great strategy to um to lure people into your game basically on steams or they're like very mysterious you don't quite know what my game is is it is it a horror game or is it like a bookkeeping game about children look we have puzzles and here's another screenshot of your skill tree aren't you curious what what you can do in this game this kind of vibe I not a fan of that and and here's here where I understand where players are coming from because if you look at AAA games I think a lot of people make their marketing decisions and how they think about marketing and promotion from AAA games that is not the way we are tiny tiny bacterium on the game industry

we are so microscopic we have to play a totally different game and it's cool when a AAA game does this like a AAA Studio like if Ubisoft went something mysterious and they showed like one quick frame of like something and you're like people are like dissecting it and trying to analyze it that's because they have been around for like 30 years releasing million dooll games for decades so they have a huge audience who wants to know what they're up to and they have characters an IP that is just billion dooll franchises right we are a bacterium the biggest problem we have is nobody cares about us we have zero visibility so we cannot afford to be cutesy and stuff like that the only kind of Indies who could maybe do this are Indies who have had a previous hit maybe that's the only people that could possibly do this like if Edmund McMillan were to do something slightly mysterious then people do that but if this is your first game and you've never had a hit

and nobody knows who you are do not go mysterious you have to realize what game you're playing which is nobody knows you exist so don't do that Chris talks a lot about how to make the right game which I'm very grateful for I think it's been a bit of a blind spot of mine as for how to make a great game unfortunately I don't think we really have time for that in this video it's something I talk about in a lot of other videos the typical stuff of fun appeal scope searching your design space efficiently making sure sure you have the correct amount of innovation in your game not too little but also not too much appeal in particular I think is a super important quality of your game that will massively massively help you with the marketing of your game can you Market an an ugly game and say you have a really or or can you promote a a very ugly game successfully what do you think I think you can if the genre is correct um the the way it works is I think games can be either super duper beautiful or super super deep those are the two kind of

metrics I mean ideally you're super pretty and super deep but we can't AFF to do both so if you do not have art skills and your art is terrible go is deep deep deep in your game crafty buildy up the wazu like everything every pixel is simulated every atom is simulated there's amazing interactions those can actually do well like I said um Colony Sims like look at Dwarf Fortress that thing is enormously deep but the graphics for the longest time more like asy artart um there's other games and I don't want to throw this game under the bus but I love it is Cosmo tier it is a spaceship building game you can like simulate the Death Star in this spaceship building game the graphics are not fantastic they're not bad bad they're they're they're not the greatest graphics and so you can get away with poorer or less professional Graphics if the simulation is so deep like every single thing interacts with everything else and and these kind of like emergent gameplay comes out that's

what it takes but if you're trying to make like a story Rich platformer uh that you have to have the best graphics my definition of appeal would be is it's what draws people into your game when they just see a couple of screenshots or like a very short gameplay clip from your game you want to create an attractive Force some sort of zck that sucks people into your game and I think there are different ways to do this most obviously there's Graphics as Chris mentioned there's also gameplay depth but one thing you got to remember is that appeal is always visual it's always visual so if you're going for gameplay depth then that depth needs to be visible one third dimension that I personally would add to this is fantasy what do I get to role play in this game it has nothing to do with Graphics it has nothing to do with gameplay depth it's really just what do I get to experience what do I get to roleplay in this game once again that is visual so you can see there are different ways to draw people in all of them are visuals so you don't necessarily need need good graphics but you need appealing visuals

and there are different ways to achieve that all righty let's now maybe move on to the other 20% or or 8% or however you much you assign to it which is the the the promotion um what's your perspective on promotion in general or you should what should you do them okay so I likeed your video Jonas I agreed with again about 90% of it um here's here's how you have to think about steam um steam the reason you pay pay 30% which is a lot of money that is a third of your Revenue going to something steam will give you traffic and even hit games and we looked at your numbers Jonas part of I I wrote a Blog and we can link to it below here in the comments um I looked at your three games and where traffic came from the majority of your traffic if you're doing everything right will come from the steam algorithm which is like where people are like well is it is the promotion part of marketing or or the algorith where is this most of the marketing uh the most of the visibility

will come from the steam algorithm but how do you get that and the way I like to think about Steam and this is what you again a mental shift um valve and the steam algorithm is like a bomb and in order to get people to buy your game it has to be like an explosion of of Interest huge hot flames but we Indies have no money nobody knows who we are we have like a Flames worth like if you were just to light a little candle that's how much heat we can generate that is not enough to sell so the way steam algorithm works is the steam algorithm the big bomb is looking for little Sparks and what you do is you use a little bit of visibility this little flame that we can do to light a fuse and that fuse lights and it rolls up and then ignites the bomb so we use a little bit of marketing to trigger the steam algorithm to say hey this is there I did it I did I said we use a little bit of promotion this little tiny flame of promotion to light the algorithm bomb and then steams like this is a real game this is worth promoting okay boys let's

turn on the algorithm for them and then the algorithm promotes your game from there that is how I think of promotion on the steam algorithm we got to do a little bit so that steam can take over that's how it works let me let me show you firsthand with your own data what I mean by this okay so the first graph that we're going to do is for What's called the discovery queue and I think this I surprised you with what the discovery queue was and how important it is when you launch your game when you release it on Steam steam puts your game in this thing called the Discover queue and most games when they launch 50% of their traffic comes from the discovery queue it is a huge driver of visibility for your launch okay now the the funny thing about it is the Discovery queue tests your game the way the algorithm works is they give you a little visibility in this discovery queue and if you do well with that bit that they give you they give you more the next day and if you do well with that they give you more the next day and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull up a graph right here

take a look at this I looked at the discovery CU for every day of the launch of your games so for will you stale and Throne fall we we couldn't get Islanders data because you don't own that game anymore um but what this graph shows is how many Impressions valve and the steam algorithm gave you for your games each day now what I found and this goes across most games um if you Market your game pretty well you get those 10 reviews you have a lot of wish list valve typically gives you about 20,000 impressions in the discovered queue on day one and I see that right here um I see willly SN got a little bit less thrf fall almost got 25,000 Impressions and both of your games did very well day one and then day two on the algorithm they were like you did great in day one we're gonna give you more but you'll see will you snail get just a little bit less and Throne fall got more it got just over 75,000 almost like 80,000 kind of depending on my scale um and then you did well there but then day three you

really see the algorithm kick in so basically I don't know what happened on day two for will snail but valve was like you know what it's looking it's a little soft on will you snail we're gonna cut your visibility this is very typical on Steam if they don't see the numbers performing they cut your visibility in the discovery queue but for whatever reason who knows what magic algorithm they're looking at Throne fall fall did awesome so they gave even more visibility the third day and the fourth day and the fifth day they kept giving you more and more because you were doing well with the visibility that they gave you this is the steam algorithm in action they look for signs that your game is doing well and then they give you more there is nothing you can do to this there's not ads you can run to influence the discovery queue there's not like tweets that you can do this is what I mean when I say the steam algorithm provides most of your visibility and you just see it in action and I see this over and over again so I invited anybody who's like man why am I in the game not so well look at your

Discovery Q traffic and you'll typically see and I see this all the time for games that do poorly they either don't start out with that 20,000 Impressions or by day two Val was like well you did nothing you sold no copies when you gave you 20,000 Impressions why would we give you more we're gonna cut it because another game can do better than you that's that's how the steam algorithm works it's it's a competition where they're like well I have a game that does better than that game that we just showed so I'm going to their game instead of yours it's it's a hard truth but that's what it is so if your product is right the steam algorithm promotes the heck out of your game but not only does the algorithm like to promote good games I think people do the exact same thing I bet if you think about the last 10 indie games you played about eight of them were recommendations from friends or from content creators there are so so many games out there recommendations are just a very good way to find good stuff yes word of mouth is very important and then somebody's going to ask well how do I improve Word of Mouth you make a good game there's nothing there because when

game's good people will say you've got to try this game it is so fun or steam will say if you scroll down on the steam page there's a big area that says um so and so has been playing this game like when somebody plays a game there's it's a little toaster they call it a toaster it pops up and says so and so is playing this game or you'll see things like so and so wants this game there's all these little widgets all over steam that are all about this player likes this game your friend likes this game your friend is playing this game all of these friends are playing this it's like steam kind of increases that and the only way to do well in that there's no one trick like oh just just add this metadata to your game and you'll do it no you just make a good game that people want to recommend to their friends um so it's really powerful the only other one thing that is a slight tweak is co-op games I do think a lot of Indies poo poo multiplayer they're like H I don't want to add that that's too hard I do think Co Co-op helps a game do well in that

regard so Co-op horror games are very popular very hot um and I think a lot of it is the word of mouth because somebody's like this game's fun let me go get my friend to buy it so that we can co-op together go through the spooky dungeon together um that is very popular and that is Word of Mouth um same thing with you'll see a lot of games they'll be like good you'll see the review it says good game Co-op when because people love games are a social experience and I think a lot of because of the tech it's really hard to do right people kind of like why are they always asking for Co-Op they're so needy no players really when they love your game they want to play it with their friends and that's one way of doing Word of Mouth now if your game's bad adding Co-op to it is not going to help it a question a lot of you seem to have is when should you start marketing your game like when should you set up the steam page and when should you start posting about it on social media but again we're talking promotion here so when should you start promoting your game okay so very good question um here's what I would do is when you're kind of like getting art

style and stuff I would just like tweet out images you don't have to say this is my next game just like kind of messing around in unity or whatever and and you just show like something that's cool okay um there's lots of games that started that way like one of my favorites is Tiny Glade I kind of mentioned them before they just showed their first tweet was just like black and white showing the wall construction algorithm that they were just kind of dinking around with they didn't had they didn't have any intention of making a game but that blue up and they're like maybe we should make a game out of this that's that's where I say like at the early stage just show like your coolest gifts and just just post them on social media Tik Tok whatever no goal don't don't worry about if it goes viral or not just just try it that's what I'd say but you're not saying this is my next game or anything you're just kind of like just just throwing things out but with no intentions of anything happening but then once you're like okay this is the game this is when I'd say you need to buckle down get your steam page up and start rolling one is that you know the genre like you

said like is this a Metroid Vania is this an action Rogue like whatever the like genre it is decided you know okay that's number one two I think you should have a trailer you should always launch your steam page with a trailer and you should like definitely have it and you should do a promotion around that trailer and the launch of your steam page but let's hold on here and then the next thing you need is your art style decided doesn't mean final art doesn't mean your character has to look final I'm just saying like it has to look like if you're going to do pixel art you do the best pixel art if you're going to be cell shaded cartoon low poly whatever you've decided or if you're going to be dark and grimy you know you're dark and grimy but it doesn't have to be the final art it just has to look that kind of like style and then what you need to do is then three environments and that's because you don't want all your screenshots when you put up your steam page to look the same because then people are like well if it looks all the same they probably just bought an asset

pack off the asset store and this is a low effort game you need to show that this is a full game it has lots of depth so once you get those things aligned you bundle up your steam page and you start promoting your game that's the minimum bar that I say that you need before you go full promotion mode should you run paid advertisements for example paid ads on Twitter or paid ads on on YouTube cuz usually they don't work out but a lot of games still do it so maybe it's worth it in some way what's your opinion on that I don't think that it is that important for you to run paid outs and here's the thing is you can kind of see some reaction from it but I never see it really move numbers it usually leads to disappointment the thing that's most important is you need to see that organic lift if without running ads you post a trailer it kind of goes viral people pick it up streamers like to play your game like if you give them your demo and then streamers play it that's

all good signs those that is what you want like you have a high resting wish list rate which I say is like if you have a resting wish L wish list rate daily of 100 wish lists a day without you really doing anything it just naturally comes in that's are good signs then it might be worth marketing paid using paid promotion I should say paid promotion I said it um paid promotion might be necessary then you'll see you know like goblins that that um publisher go does some promotion that way they they they'll do paid ads um those I I think once you've reached that quality bar and people are interested then paid promotion is a multiplier and it can amplify but if you are like man nobody's paying attention to my game I try everything I tried streamers nobody wanted to play my game I tried this that tweeted blah blah blah nothing's working I'm just going to do paid ads you're throwing money down the toilet no effect because if people aren't excited for your game for free they're not going to be excited for you to pay to show it to them they're just not it's better to save that money maybe

make a second game maybe do something else but I don't think you can fix a problem with paid ads are publisher deals worth it for for marketing for purely marketing should you sign with a publisher if they tell you hey we're going to help you Market your game and you give us 40% of your Revenue what what would you say to that I'm I'm a little cautious around that I don't think there's a couple publishers I think if the publisher specializes in a genre and they have previous hits in your genre I think it's strong I think that's a good idea I'm talking the hooded horses um I'm talking like some of these um there's some horror genres that you know the horror Publishers that publish just horror games I think those genre specific ones are kind of worth it um but for if it's if it's a publisher and you look at their median you can go on sites uh like um uh VG insights is one of my favorite and you can filter by

publisher look at the median Revenue per game and if the median revenue is not very great that is a sign that the publisher just pulls games in tries maybe run some ads tries for the best and if they don't sell they just keep your recoup and whatnot that is I I do not recommend that so unless it's like a big one like coffee stain and you're making an automation game hooded horse and you're making a strategy game um some of these uh um like Dread X Collective and you're making horror game those are the Publishers I'm like yes that's a perfect fit I would try some of that basically think can we get the Way Cross motion from a publisher Works in is actually good is if they can take their old games and then take their audience to their old games and say hey here's our new game from the collective and everybody who played those other hit games of their collection goes awesome let's go buy this next game and that's your game that's a good sign if it's not they publish every type of genre then I I I take a more critical look and you can also just check out the the reviews of the games they released so far how many reviews they have and so on one

qualification I would say that to check out the things look to see how many games of theirs that they've published have 1,000 reviews or more in general it's not as exact science but if a game gets a thousand reviews that means that valve in the steam algorithm thinks it's a quality game and it's kind of promoting it that's a sign that's not it doesn't take it's not that you turn a th you hit a thousand reviews and all of a sudden steam PR you don't do that that's that's the wrong to look at what it means is if a game gets to a thousand reviews that means that there's something good about the the promotion and the product that Steam and the steam audience likes to get it up to a thousand so that's what I say is look at the back catalog of that publisher and just count up how many of their games have a thousand reviews it's just a good piece of of metric to look at what do you think about uh Creator marketing so for example paying YouTubers or streamers to play your game or should you should you pay them should you try to get them to cover your game more

naturally what's your take on that natural natural and here's the thing is people don't reach out to them enough um I think you should reach out to 300 to a thousand streamers that before you play your game and when I say streamers I mean both YouTubers twitch streamers whoever I just mean some somebody who's playing the game for Their audience um I I say hey just reach out and and see if somebody plays your games they're like oh I reached out so many will tell me they're like oh yeah I reached out nobody wanted to play my game I was like well how many did you reach out to and they're like like 30 I reached out to a lot no 30 is not a lot you got to do like 300 to a thousand it is a numbers game you are just just scraping through so many of these streamers to get them to play your game and that's that's what it takes I wouldn't pay until the end like once you're ready to promote your game once your once your game to release and you've got a couple people who played your game organically and they did well for you brought in a lot of wish lists then I'd go back and I would

uh pay them and say like hey you you did well for us for free how about we pay you to play on this date because we're going to do a big thing but for the most part I wouldn't pay for for the streamers it just comes off fake and it doesn't work very well I want to show an early version of this video to one of my friends uh they were like how the freak do you manage to reach out to 300 to a, content creators I forwarded this question to Chris and his answer was very short you just grinded out for example one good strategy on YouTube is to just search for people who have played similar games or maybe you even already have some content creators in mind that might be a good fit for your game you can usually find their contact information somewhere just open your eyes sometimes I make videos on my YouTube channel where I offer to play your games and give feedback and whenever I do that this is roughly how my email inbox looks like the last time I offered to play your games I got 500 submissions I guarantee you for the biggest gaming content creators the email inbox looks exactly like this so we can kind of treat this as the content creator simulator if you will here goes imagine you're a content creator browsing through these so you're

probably clicking relatively quickly cuz there are like 500 more you have to go through what you care about now is getting views for your gaming channel the only thing you care about so you don't care about the feelings of the developer you don't even really need to find a game here you can also just look on Steam so you're only going to play something if it really stands out to you and just to clarify this is not exactly how I approach it when I make these videos I have kind of different criteria for choosing games but I think it's very very much worth it to just use this as an opportunity to put ourselves into the shoes of an actual content creator who makes gaming content just so you can kind of see what kind of game we're playing here and yes this is the game we're playing while I think it's totally possible to reach out to 300 to 1,000 content creators yourself if it's something you don't necessarily enjoy doing then you can think about Outsourcing that aspect for example for throne fall we hired future friends to do all of the email Outreach for us they did a great job however it's important I think to look at this like a shortcut and not like a Silver Bullet that will magically fix all of your marketing problems hiring a marketing agency

doesn't fix any of your marketing problems it just makes it more efficient and takes it off your table so you can focus on different things it's not pay to win it's pay to skip and of course there are various ways to get screwed over with this so be careful how well does interest translate to sales like for example let's say you lend a viral post on on Reddit or your trailer goes viral or or something like that how how much does that to translate to ual sales later on it's not quite the right question this is what the way to think about it again remember that lighting of the fuse that I talked about if you get a viral Reddit post or if you're maybe you make a trailer and it goes viral on the on YouTube or something that is just that spark you have lit that candle and that can be enough to light the algorithm and steam goes ah this went V we can tell because they can see when traffic comes from external and then it turns into a lot of wish list they go ah that happened this must be a good game because that so let's ramp up and turn

on the visibility here's the thing is one successful Reddit post doesn't do that much and you shouldn't calculate it as like a a math problem where it's like oh well this many people wish list it and this percentage buy it and this is this don't try and do you can never you'll go crazy trying to calculate that out okay instead think of it this did I trigger the steam algorithm did my viral Reddit post or my viral YouTube Get Enough visibility so now I am earning this 100 wish list a day because the steam algorithm woke up for me that's your goal is to trigger this algorithm so the algorithm likes your game that's the game that's what you're playing then the next one I guess was kind of more of a question to me which was uh do you need death locks to promote your game and my quick answer to that would be no of course not do deathlock help with your promotion well yeah of course they do I would be lying if I said they don't but are they the best use of your time if you're just trying to make a successful indie game I would say in the most cases no of course it depends but mostly no and if you don't believe me

then look at it like this what do you think is easier getting a 100K subscriber channel to play your game or building a 100K subscriber channel from scratch yourself well spoiler I think the first one is much easier and another Advantage is that you can do it multiple times right you can get many many channels to play your game of course there are nuances to all of this for example your own audience is probably going to be a lot more loyal it's going to convert a lot better like having your own audience comes with a lot of very cool perks but even if your own audience converts extremely well it's probably not going to be enough by itself here are all of my games and roughly how successful they were compared to each other and here's roughly how many YouTube subscribers I had when launching each of these games sometimes people tell me the reason why my game succeeded is because of my YouTube channel and if that's what you think there's nothing holding you back right just start your own channel however if you ask me H I'm not sure you know it doesn't really seem like the most deciding factor from my perspective but the follow-up question to you would be so if if you don't need devlogs then then what else do you do do you start a Twitter account or do you go

on Reddit and and post funny images of your game or like what what do you do for promotion if you don't do a YouTube channel yeah don't do YouTube kids don't do YouTube I mean here's the thing is YouTube then you got to learn the YouTube algorithm and at the same time learn the steam algorithm too hard you're never going to build up your audience big enough I do not think YouTube is the answer I'm sorry you included Jonas I I think you can do whatever you want you you did good with a YouTube channel you did fantastic but here's what actually works really what you're doing when you're promoting what the things that work are not you Tweeting you don't tweet like a thousand times and then get a thousand wish list that's not how it works what happens is the way marketing actually works is you go to somebody who has a big audience and you say you knock on their door and like can you show my game to your audience and then the audience of that bigger person shows it everywhere so when you go with your game and you knock on the door to a to a streamer like a YouTuber or something you say can you

play my game they go yeah and then they play it and then they they show their audience the so that is that is basically the way promotion works on Steam you go to a place with a big audience and you say can I show my game to your audience okay so here let me tell you in order I've studied this here is what works for promotion okay this is how you do it you've got to make a demo the new world is you have to make a demo not enough I didn't get any questions about demos yet you have have to make a demo not enough people are thinking demo there is um there is before you make a demo and after and I've studied this so many times and what your wish list graph looks like before you have a demo is like this super flat then once you have a demo all of a sudden hopefully if your game's the right type of game and it's being promoted well it just you can see that you can see it in the graph there's so much action there's so much momentum and stuff like that you have to make a demo that's how you do it and here's why it is because of the promotion that you can do have to because what you do is you take your demo and you knock on the door of a YouTuber and say Here's My

Demo can you play it on stream and I go yeah okay this looks like a great demo it's one of my favorite Jas it's this crafting game like oh man I love crafting games it's an open world Survivalcraft I love those games because crafty buildy simulator those are the types of games I love to play and everybody loves to watch me play them um that's how YouTubers usually talk and then they play that on stream and then you get a ton of traffic from that and then the YouTube algorithm goes whoa all of a sudden we have all these wish list from YouTube that's awesome let's promote this game that must mean it's good and so your game gets promoted by Ste algorithm so essentially you have to have to have to please folks forget about Twitter forget about Reddit all this it's the demo because then you can reach out to streamers the other one is festivals and I track it on my website how tomarket game.com festivals my community tracks festivals and we just we see what these are and what these are not the inperson ones don't go to the inperson ones they're not worth the money the effort or anything they're not worth it the the virtual ones are you apply with your demo you take your demo and you go to knock on the door of these Festival promoters like hey can I promote my game with your festival and they they evaluate it they play it and

so you get featured in these these festivals and they stee puts your game on the front page and they're like crafting games today's the crafting game festival and your game because it's a crafting game featured right there at the top and then you get thousands and thousands of wish lists from that and then also streamers are looking at those festivals they're like oh are cool games oh crafting Festival I love crafting games my audience loves crafting games they play it then they play your they're like well this Demo's so fun and then they play demo on there see how they just like all this stuff builds those are the two biggest ways to get wish list is get that demo give it to streamers give it to festivals that's what it is folks it is not tweeting into the void nothing ever works that way it just doesn't work tweeting Reddit post devlogs no make a good demo give it to the right people H that's interesting so would you say if I just don't make a YouTube video I don't even have a Twitter account I never post on Reddit I still can make a

successful promotion campaign for my game absolutely in fact I see a lot of games see here's the deal these crafty buildy simulation games they usually don't do well on Twitter because the the the fun of the game is when you play it when you play the game and you're like yeah this is fun this is so deep I love how how complex this game is that's what players like that does not come across in a tweet it really doesn't um and so I I know most of the games if you go to my website how Market game.com and you look at all these uh case studies that I do most of the games that I do case studies for they have Twitter followings of like 3,000 or fewer but they sell millions of copies it is rare it is a very rare game that does well on Twitter Youtube that kind of things or you know like the developer making the YouTube now those those games that I'm talking about these crafty build simulate games they do well when a streamer somebody else plays

their game but the individual developer playing promoting the game with Twitter or their own devlogs rarely are those the games that take off it's it's or they don't have much of a traffic on on Twitter or YouTube or Tik Tok these crafty buildy simulation games and and here's here's the thing is like it's the reason I think people think Twitter is because you can do it like can sit down you send a tweet you hit send and then you're like I did marketing today which is really promotion um it feels like you did something so people automatic oh that is what I do I I've got a tweet in my way to success doesn't work that way the thing that that works you never see you never actually see these success stories like oh how did this game do well you don't see them going to a content creator emailing 1,000 content creators you don't get to see that so you never internalize like oh that's how I promote my game you got to do this thing that nobody sees you just you just Hammer

through you make the right genre you contact those streamers and then you apply for these festivals you don't all of a sudden you you you start up see me see a festival and you're like how' these games get in here I don't know it just it's invisible the stuff that works is visible and that's why I think so many people are so obsessed with Reddit YouTube and Twitter because it's visible like you go and you see tweets coming at you when you fire up Twitter or you go to YouTube and you see somebody making a devlog doesn't work it's the secret stuff that's actually what's working yeah that's that's how I feel as well I just feel like um people really crave this uh busy work like this this promotion that it's almost like a busy pointless busy work so just so that they can say oh I did marketing see I did I did promote my game and it still didn't work so yeah and it's also again remember you have to knock on the door somebody with a big audience say can you show my game that is that is like

emotionally hard like sending a tweet you can be like boom here's my game and send a gift that's easy like you didn't I mean it's technically easy but to go up to somebody you say please and then they go no that is emotionally hard and so people don't like to do that because you are putting your game out and then somebody like smacking it away that is emotionally hard and but that is what you have to take a lot of shots and you have to get good at at getting rejected and it's that's I think the biggest barrier to a lot of people doing that stuff can you do free marketing a lot of people have worried that marketing is too expensive what do you say no it's the stuff that actually works is essentially free um everybody thinks that it's paid it's not um I mean building a demo takes time and money because you have to buy the art assets but again build that demo contact streamer for free don't pay for it if they say oh it's going to be this don't pay it and

then apply for festivals sometimes festivals have like a$ 100 to $200 application fee I think those are worth it if you get front page featuring you've got to guarantee that they'll say hey we got guaranteed front page featuring with valve check that in their in their notes if they do have that it is worth it to pay 100 to 200 bucks um really the only real paid marketing that you have to do is hire a capsule artist that is worth it maybe hire somebody to make a trailer for you but again if you are a struggling Indie who has no money make your own trailer but um for the most part paying for ads or paying for streamers to play your game not worth it your game will succeed for free for the most part this is not paid none of this stuff's paid you you mentioned one thing that just triggered a follow-up question from me because we I feel like we have to at least touch on this briefly when we're making a a video about marketing and promotion and that is uh the steam store Page itself how important is that

in your hierarchy yeah well um it's so important I made a free class because I think it's so important that people get this right so go to how to make a steam page.com uh I make a steam page course that it's just free and it just teaches you how to make a steam page here's what I think it is it's not I I see it as like you know how have you ever looked at the graph for a logarithmic if you do the logarithm algorithm it's it's like very Steep and then it flattens out and that it's basically flat I kind of see the how important a steam page is is kind of like that thing if you have a terrible steam page it is very critical that you make it good but then you kind of have diminishing returns once your steam page is like pretty good I'd say like a solid B B+ doing drastic improvements isn't going to improve your numbers very much but if you have like if your page looks like an asset flip my first game type of you better fix that steam page because when you apply for streamers like people

kind of like they come to me and they say like well I improved this thing and I saw a 1% increase in my clickthrough rate that is just noise that is not how it works what happens is remember how I said Mar promotion I almost said marketing promotion is all about going to somebody who has a big audience and saying would you like my game can you play it and then they look at it and they go yeah yeah this looks good I'll play it um if your page is terrible your steam page is terrible improving it actually helps you with the the streamers and the people because when they look at and they're like oh God this looks like an asset flip looks like the dude made his own capsule yuck look at this trailer it's awful it's like five minutes of of cut scenes that's gross get out of here but if you have a good steam page that has a good trailer and you give it to them they go ah this this looks good this looks like a crafty building game everything about this is same crafty building high quality not asset start asset flips let's go for it that's why your store Page has to be a minimum bar of quality

and then once you reach that bar then it's like okay diminishing returns of like constantly tweaking it and stuff are there any more red Flex where you're like okay this can if you mess this up even if you do anything else right this can ruin your game or something one of the big things we haven't really talked about it is early access a lot of people make the big mistake and they go straight into Early Access they're like they they put up their steam page and then like two weeks later they're like I just want to get some feedback on my game just see you know get players to kind of tell me what they think I'm going to go to Early Access let me launch into Early Access and we'll see what I need to fix about my game don't do that do not red flag absolute stop what you're doing don't do that when you launch to Early Access you have launched your game and the valve steam algorithm looks at your metrics at that early access launch and makes a lot of determinations about whether your game's worth promoting so you just killed your game by doing that also Publishers you will never get a publisher even if you're thinking about it a publisher will not touch your game once you do your Early Access launch because most of

your Revenue comes during your Early Access launch and then everything comes after that um so don't just think Early Access is like a lot of people think it's like oh let me just try it out let me just try that is not how early access Works do not you've got to treat Early Access like the big launch of your game stay for a bit longer there's a super juicy summary coming up this is not sponsored I just want to shout out my guests real quick you should check out Chris blog and newsletter it's filled with valuable insights for Indie Gam developers there's so much more you can learn from Chris just click the first link in the description open it in a new tab and once you're done watching this video you can go check it out what I want to do now is quickly summarize what I've learned in this video I'm totally a framework kind of person I love Frameworks marketing consists of promotion product price and place for Indie Games the place is kind of set into stone it's steam the price is very important but it's not rocket science the promotion and especially the product is where the most things can go wrong for your game for the product set of things you really just need to make great games but you also need to make the right games it sounds kind of

obvious on high Insight but if you make a great game that nobody's interested in it doesn't really help you very much so bring your creativity and Innovation to where you can make the biggest impact with it and if you desperately have to make a platformer or a puzzle game then see if you can find a way to make it more suitable for a steam audience and for Content creators I have the theory that more toy like games tend to do well because they inherently have more replayability and they have some room for self-expression which is great for Content creators don't forget to make your game good though it needs to be fun it needs to be appealing appeal specifically means that it needs to draw people in visually it doesn't necessarily have to mean great graphics it could also mean a great fantasy or a lot of gameplay depth but it is 100% communicated visually don't fight genre definitions embrace them that's how players encode their preferences they are an impressively powerful communication tool that you don't want to miss out on once you meet all of those base requirements and let's be honest those base requirements determine the success of your promotion campaign more than your promotion campaign you can move on to promotion there are only four things that can reliably move the needle and that is store Page demo

content creators and online festivals especially probably steam festivals and steam nexts these all play into each other these all strengthen each other the end goal is to get the passive promotion engine going which consists mainly of the steam algorithm but it also consists of content creators and Word of Mouth like what you see on screen right here this is the viral bump that you want to go off and your promotion is essentially the fuse that you're Lighting in the to make that happen remember that what we're doing here is Theory crafting there is a chance that parts of this Theory could be wrong this Theory can coexist with other theories out there I know that there are always different ways to approach things I hope that cleared some things up for you certainly did for me check out Chris Low's website and see you in the next one cheers