Marketing Indie Style

I so we're gonna get started everybody ready all right all right so I hopefully you guys are all in this right location you see our presentation today is marketing Indy style and once you release ourselves my name is Justin Woodward I am the founder and creative director at interrobang entertainment I'm also a part-time marketer and I helped to co-found the mix the media India exchange and we'll talk a little bit about what the media India exchanges during our presentation today my name is Joel Dreskin I'm an independent marketer I work with Justin on the mix which we will tell you a little bit about is sort of a piece of our presentation and I'm just finishing up a book on indie game marketing which is going to be coming out later this year there's a link at the end of the presentation with more

information about Justin and myself and where you can get more information on some of the things we talked about today so for today's presentation we've got two different perspectives my background is in marketing I've done product marketing for LucasArts did work with telltale from their second through their seventh year I've worked in tech and other different places so I come to this and I do I do work now for Indies helping them with their marketing programs so I bring that perspective to the presentation and then Justin's gonna talk about how this all affects him is he's working as an indie game developer and other things that he does as well and we'll also talk about how our experiences come together in different ways and sort of intersected and overlapped so let's start with a quick question in terms of how many people here have released an indie game great and how many of you have marketed on

your own and how many have worked with someone outside of your studio to market your game okay so there's a smaller number so we're gonna try and you know when we're putting this together we have an hour and there's only so much you can cover and so we're trying to get the right level of content that will hopefully help with where you start and some of the fundamentals so I think some of this might be information that has a level of awareness already with you but I think it's also important to think about things in a very fundamental way you might have marketed a game but you might not have approached this way so well it feels like maybe I've already done that what I'd like to try and do is encourage you to step back a little and think about your planning process a little bit different and see if that might affect how you shape your marketing plan as it comes together so we're gonna I'm going to talk about where when and how to start some things to think about as

you're developing your marketing plan I'll talk about different kinds of programs and vehicles you can use while you're marketing a game we're going to use some specific examples both from a launch that I recently worked on as well as a launch that Justin did and also fold in some other examples too and you know importantly you know don't don't be this guy um it's I still have people come to me and say oh I just released my game yesterday can you help me market this game or my games coming up tomorrow can you help me market this game or it's coming on in a couple days and and it you know I think the main point is you think about it as early as you possibly can and you might not actually actually be actively marketing your game from the very beginning but it surprises me that I still get a good number of people who don't integrate this into their plans at an early stage and then the game is coming out and it's it's much you have a much easier task starting you know six months out nine months out and further in terms of how you're gonna approach

your marketing you might not actually do active programs at that point also important there's not really a magic bullet so you see games out there and you say man that game is amazing and look what it did and it's so awesome and you know they did they just did this one thing but that's really that's kind of a rarity there are people who do get that magic bullet and they do have a program that just hits where they have a game that just hits but I think way often it takes a lot of persistence it takes a lot of you know something some trial and error and not every program is gonna be right for every single game so you sort of got to work your way around that and see what's gonna you know understand your game and who it's going to appeal to and what's going to be the best fit for a marketing program for your game in terms of starting I mean I think there's some there's some fundamental concepts that will really help you as you work your way through the marketing plan development process and I tried to avoid you know some of the jargon but I'm gonna lapse into that briefly because it's useful you know I

mean some of it some of the jargon is useful because it's been around for a while and you know traditional markers we'll talk about the floor peas and when you're starting a marketing plan you think about what is my product you know what it let me define it what are the features what's going to be compelling about it where am I going to distribute my product I think the way that you would market a casual game on mobile is going to be very different than you would market a deep game to a core core audience somewhere on you know more experienced audience on something like Steam or Humble yeah it's really important thing about the price I think that's another thing that becomes an afterthought for people sometimes they you know like the day before launch this I'm just gonna settle for you know a dollar you know or five dollars or twenty dollars so there are some ways that you can be really intelligent about how you approach your pricing and sort of you know survey the field and see who's performing well and and you know price points that work better and worse than others and and not just say Oh everyone's doing free-to-play I'd better

do for you to play you know so so I think it's really important to think about that that peak of the floor piece and then promotion what are the vehicles and initiatives you're gonna use to get visibility for your game also as as part of the fundamentals early on is who's my game for the this the kind of audience is really in effect the kind of program you do if it's a casual game if it's a core game if it's a you know quick pickup and play game or if it's a game that has an established audience or a specialized onra your game pitch will talk a little bit more about in a few minutes you know what's your elevator pitch how do you describe it to people in a succinct compelling way think about environmental factors in the release lands landscape seasonality and then who's going to drive marketing for your game whether it's going to be you or it's going to be someone in your studio or are you gonna think about hiring somebody also as you're developing a plan another kind of helpful building block is thinking about what shape do I want my initiatives to take and you know a great model is I

definitely encourage you guys to take pictures there's no problem with that at all but I also want you to know that this is all going to be posted on the GDC vault shortly after the show and so yeah it's gonna it's gonna be online somewhere but you know definitely take as many pictures as you want and I forgot to mention too that if if anyone hasn't turned off the ringers on their cell phone please do that so that phones don't ring in the middle of presentation so yeah so getting back to this point I mean I think you want to have your activities peak right as your game is launching so be smart and strategic about you know what what are your best kind of assets you know what are the best things that you can have to generate interest that you know trailers tend to be really good or you might have an announcement about you know some some really cool content that's in there or you might sort of stagger out features so that you're kind of building to a critical mass or you might have some contributors so you know again just sort of thinking about all the things that you're going to talk about from your

announced time to launch and how are you going to stage those in such a way that you're kind of fueling this ramp and also important to think about how long you can stay in sustain those communications and there might be a tendency of people to get so excited about their game that they just want to announce it and the game's not actually coming out you know it realistically it's maybe not going to come out for two years or three years or four years and you sort of it's hard to kind of keep that interest sustained over a long period of time so sometimes it's important to restrain yourself a little bit and say I'm gonna announce it when I really feel like I've got all my ducks in a row and I can build this launch and have a sustainable communication plan leading up to my release date and yet just quick last point here is just kind of thinking about that last you know two to four weeks is kind of the critical masses you're building interest when you create the plan I think it could be helpful to think about it the same way you think about your game development I imagine you know a lot of people in this room are game developers you know the indie Studios tend to be

you know the programmers and game designers and artists and so on so you know take that same kind of rigorous and structured approach you know calendar eyes it all out and say these are the things I need to do to get my marketing plan in place to have an effective launch I'm gonna have the plan done at this time I'm gonna do my announcements at this time I'm gonna stage my releases at this time and so on just kind of really be kind of smart and intelligent the same way you are about your game development and while you're doing that to think about the calendar think about seasonality what is the right time to launch my game you know November is really really crowded and there's lots of Triple A games so you know think about that summer can be a little bit quiet so there's kind of some pros and cons with that but think about that think about big holidays you know launching on July 4th is maybe not great unless you've got a game about American independence maybe that might be an okay time but also you know like this steam steam christmas sale you know if you want to launch on steam and the Christmas sale is going on they take

over the whole website and it's all about discounted games so think about all those things and just kind of be as complete as you can while you're plotting out your launch and then kind of build back from that I also think about other competitive games you know similar games or games that you think might be vying for attention against your game I'm gonna briefly touch on the marketing mix here and we're gonna get into more detail as we get into some examples but as you're approaching your plan think about all the different kinds of things you could do there's and this is sort of tuned for Indies you know some vehicles I think can lend themselves to Indies a little bit more than triple-a so PR can work really well I always encourage people to develop their audience as early as they possibly can and what I mean by that is you know get an email signup you know front and center on your website and if someone's interested then you could get their information and have a conduit to communicate with them and you know nowadays Twitter works really well Facebook works really well so you know build your followers and then you've got a direct channel of communication to all

these people while PR can be great you've got gate gatekeepers at PR and you know it's all up to the editors that whether you get covered or not but when you start having your audience of you know hundreds thousands and more of followers you can sort of have another supplemental form of communication if PR is not firing for you we'll talk a little bit about events and promotions you know these are kind of all the different things that you could do in your marketing mix and you not all these initiatives are right for every games so you should think about this and what's going to be most appropriate for your game and also think about how the landscape is changing and how new vehicles are emerging and a lot of these things are very great for Indies and not so appropriate for a triple-a game so you know game jams you know editors pay attention to game jams and they look for those kind of content coming from there you know YouTube and twitch you know I think the visibility of those is like getting really well established with Indies now I think you know three six months ago people weren't thinking about the video channels as much as they are

now but I'll just kind of emphasize again that that is a super important and impactful channel that also can supplement traditional PR and can work just as well as traditional PR in a lot of cases and you know again I'm not going to go through every bullet here because we've you know we've got limited time but I wanted to get these in front of you and also say pay attention to other things that are merging I you know I find Twitter to be one of the most useful news sources and so follow a lot of Indies and see what they're doing and see what's working for them and what's resonating and when someone announces something that can spark some ideas for you so I think that's been one of the most useful vehicles I found not only for communication but also for getting intelligence in the space so now I'm gonna segue into an example of a campaign that I worked on and sort of walk through some of the points that I was just relaying so many motorists Racing was released by a game by a company called the binary mill they're based in Australia they had done a

variety of games and different genres all the way from you know kind of a comedy game to you know an action game and so this was a brand new genre a new franchise that they were looking to establish but they didn't have visibility in racing games or this mini motor franchise was kind of an endo entity they were planning for a December launch which as I talked about seasonality I think there can be pros of cons of that but that was that was their plan and so I think we thought about how we're going to work with that and see if that could work towards our advantage and so that's kind of the broad strokes of mini motor racing at lunch first on iOS was the the lead platform so we thought about you know what are the fundamental components of mini motor racing it's an arcade style casual game it's a RC radio-controlled games and it's got some breadth and depth it's a small studio at peak is about 17 people but as we looked at the game you know I

think indie a lot you know there's there could be a long discussion about what Cindy and what's not indie but I think a lot of times you'll kind of see these alternative crafty artistic games and you know that can really work well for kind of the indie terminology in the press so while we talked about indie to some degree that wasn't our main messaging point and we landed it a quick messaging line which was little cards big fun developing the marketing plan we thought about some of the considerations I mentioned before the nature of the game seasonality the genre what we thought was going to work best for it whether it was going to be you know we had some good partner opportunities which I'll talk about in a second we looked at the channel we put together sometimes promotions which I'll talk about and then the team was also very nimble so they were able to take advantage of different opportunities as they emerged so one of the first things we decided to do was you know at the December launch we came up with some seasonal content like when I say we it was them it was the game developers so

there was a but we had that conversation and said you know is there something we could do to fit there and they came up with a great a great holiday theme track and you know Santa's sleigh was one of the vehicles and you know this thing had so much legs that one year later we did it again and they actually they used the gyroscope and the phone so it was like a snow globe on the main interface so they did some fun things with that to really help that connect with the seasonality they also knew the half brick folks well so that and you know fruit ninja was kind of at its peak at the time it still does really well but they were able to get some fruit ninja content in there with a track in a car that was you know that was loaned out from the folks there so that was helpful PR you know I think a lot of times you'll pitch things and see how it resonates with with people and and we were fortunate that IGN was responded well to the game and they put it on their home page and but again we needed a balanced marketing plan so if PR hits that's great but if it doesn't we needed other things in our in our arsenal if

that if that wasn't going to hit but we had the good fortune of getting on the homepage of IGN by pitching them reviewed well which helps tremendously so I mean I think game quality is always kind of spoken about repeatedly is a really important thing but I'll just kind of realize that here and then we we worked with the folks on the app store and we got a great slot at launch day which again when it works it's fantastic but it doesn't always work so you've got to have other things in your arsenal and then that that carried over into a best of 2012 were in the App Store and it airs choice on Google Play we also came up with a plan that had different components over time so we we launched in December so we had a really nice peak we went full price at $2.99 on tablet and $1.99 on phone and then we had kind of a stage promotion where we're gonna go discounted about three months two to

three months and so you could see we had a nice peak as we got into February and then that peak EC in May we were back at full price and the team was think about an update and what we did was we collected some features and we turned it into you know not just one point one but we turned it in one point five and we made it a bigger release and we got more attention and we got another feature on the app store and it was you know I think part of the point here is not thinking just about the launch but thinking about what's your sustaining plan and don't have everything just about day one because again when it works it's great but you've spent you know one two three years on your game and you know if you don't make it all in the first week think about monetizing it over a longer period of time I think that's a really important part of the planning process as well we subsequently launched on Android which it simultaneously can be simultaneous releases can be great and I recommend that as often as possible but I know it's not always possible so it

fortunately worked out well for this game we got another wave of interest and activity and reviews and an app store placements and you know when I talk about opportunism you know intro Scrooge is such a degree that someone came to them and wanted to do our Kaede cabinets and and different arcades around around the world so that was that's a little visual you see off to the side ultimately the games gone on to do six million downloads which is great there was a free app of the day promotion which worked out really well and they had in app purchasing to help monetize that so you know I think kind of the summary point here is is think about your plan holistically and think about all the different things you could layer into it and come up with a plan over time that could be strategic with that I will turn things over to Justin hey what's happening I'm gonna tell everything or tell the main points through my perspective which is a nd I believe that marketing come and marketing sales emanates from the inside out

so when you're marketing you're not only marketing to the consumer you're also marketing towards your team you're marketing towards your publisher anyone you're gonna you're gonna work with so these are my main points for the whole talk socialize and relate to people add value to people's lives cultivate mentors be persistent resilient and tenacious pursue visibility and what works for them works for them so I say that because you know we when we spoke last time people had questions about you know specific points and it didn't quite relate to to what we did it only relates to you so this is the game that we released is called supercoppa man this is our elevator pitch and it is 2d side-scrolling fighter set in a sticker world with custom combos and hand-drawn animations and it took us a while to get to the point where that our vision was complete I'm

gonna explain everything through chapters of my journey and the journey was the plan the journey the hustle and the launch and that's it took us four years to complete this game and many struggles a lot of pitches and that this is how we we rolled and did things so as Joel mentioned we so my background was a graphic designer I had a graphic design business I graduated from the Art Institute as a game artist environment game artist and I went and worked for THQ for a few months and I hated it so then I turned to to develop and someone laughing but yeah so I started a game does a graphic design business and I cultivated some some mentors that helped me through the the strategies of business operation and we released the first game which was on iOS and they we said as a team let's create something

that's better that's bigger has more production value in that we can release on a console so we created a marketing plan we created a business plan and the marketing plan kind of rolled into the business plan and we wanted to spend most of our time on the game production because you know we're artists first and then you know business people second so one of the things that we wanted to do early on was figure out how we can mark it with someone else and we figured early on that we would work with a publisher we weren't sure how we were going to do that but the numbers kind of spoke for themselves so when we talked to mentors and we created a business plan we understood that it would cost a lot for us to just pay someone outright market for us so we decided you know that maybe the next the best step it we did a lot of market research figured out the visibility mechanisms for each platform and that's basically how we talked to I talked to a lot of mentors I had a

mentor a Clinton Keith who brought a jille development to the games industry and he helped me with the business plan as well and it showed us you know concrete details on how we were press forward with this game so in the early stages we had our business plan there was a contest for Nexon where they wanted to create the next maplestory and they had like $100,000 pot for the winner and we felt that our art style was perfect that's our our little character struggles with the talking fanny pack and the mullet Nuggets on top we were going for this anime whacky feel and we thought it was a we had this whole idea that the characters were all going to be stickers and so when we pitched it to Nexon we were like okay so they have these necks on cards at Walmart and that target which you they have different keys on them to get different abilities or just you know money for their store and so the way we

pitched it was we had little animations and different characters and we had our business plan and the idea was you peel the stickers back and you you get a key for different abilities and and items that you can use we didn't it didn't work out well we didn't win the contest but we did get some good feedback from that and we knew where to move forward with with our next steps and it was it was very iterative process as far as our marketing plan was concerned and that really helped us because we understood who they were trying to reach at that at that moment the next thing we did was we did a Kickstarter campaign and this was in the early days before this was 2010 so you could see how long this this game stretch back we released the game in July 2014 but we did a video and the video was super ridiculous it didn't have a lot of gameplay we showed a lot of the team we were marketing our team to people and I think like our moms and uncles were the only ones who actually

you know put in you could see that the total amount was a thousand bucks so it really didn't get us far but it did give get us a you know a good video that we can you know the video was really ridiculous I went to Walmart and have you know those little styrofoam Earths and stuff you know the planets and I wore those on my head to be this character so it's very entertaining and we we just kept iterating on our process for marketing and that's what I was talking about is we were marketing not only for you know the people were gonna buy the game but to the publishers that we were talking to right here you see the product positioning chart which my mentor showed me how to do was a good exercise to show where we were gonna our target market was you see at the very end it's more of a hardcore game on the other side it's more of a casual art fit in between it's like a combination of Marvel vs. Capcom Street Fighter meets Streets of Rage those are some of the stickers and our we have a product plan

right here our development plan so different key points in time we're like GDC well we were thought we were going to show packs we thought we would show those were some of our milestones and how we also created the elevator statement is there there to the left to so as a graphic designer I knew the importance of presentation and how presentation plays into who you're marketing towards and and who you're contacting so we were talking to PlayStation so I created this this to sheet with the Sony Vita and how it would work when you're swiping and the stickers would peel back and it really resonated with them also at the time I don't even know why they did this but Gamefly had an Android program and we were trying to find any opportunities possible to you know get the money in the marketing to move forward with our game so that that kind of talks about the you know the pre-production and the plans that we came up with but it it obviously doesn't turn out the way you

want to exactly you know so I'm going to tell you a little bit about my team story so after I was in my master's program for production and design and and management and the opportunity came up to help my mentor with a leadership forum at the IG da and during that time we also there was also a a contest to be at IGN game spy and have office space they had an incubator and when that happened we pitched to them and we used everything that we gathered beforehand and they saw our video they saw our marketing plan and really and really dug it so they gave us or not they gave us the go-ahead they loved our pitch and they're like come up here so we had to figure out within a week time whether we were gonna take that opportunity and one of my mentors was he's like you got to take light by the

balls and just go with it because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity so I took the opportunity I'm a very very opportunistic person and every time I see something I'll go for it and it ended up turning out well we were in i GN and we worked for three months straight on this the prototype so this this goes to the training so we had GDC after the three months of hard development we had a GDC demo space and that was a great opportunity to talk to press and 47 Communications which is actually here in San Francisco they had their lead Cramer who used to work with Capcom and they trained as they actually came in and told us how to talk to people because I had a I was very nervous to talk to press about our game or just to talk to people in general and I didn't know exactly what to say I would fumble my words or I would give these lengthy explanations of things and they helped me become succinct and concise they also

had press pitch sessions at IGN where they had like seven people from members of the press come in and just rapidly fire off different questions takes pictures of us and talk talk to us in the press junket type of fashion fashion I remember at one point I completely froze up in front of everyone and I didn't know if I was gonna you know jump back from that but it wasn't as bad as I thought you know so it was really interesting to do that training just to understand how you mark it towards other people because marketing towards other people each press each member of the press each publisher that you talk to each person that you're selling to has a different story a different background and you want to make sure that you create that story that you know works with them you know and reflects their ideals so so these are these images represent you know our time there my mentor in the middle Clinton Keith and we're at the Indy open house we won the next game boss which was this reality show on IGN

we worked very hard you see the the cast of the indie open house and you know just different people playing the game so I'll say the HUD this is the hustle phase one even though this is like a console phase eight we showed at multiple events and try to figure out how we can show free and that's really important to is when you're pitching you show you know you show your plan and you figure out how you align with specific products and product holders we at that time you know I lost my team so I jumped back and had to figure out how we were gonna pitch and raise more money and there you know there was a lot of rejection and I had to figure out how to bounce back from that we jumped to a second Kickstarter fundraising campaign at the end of the indie open house we had a large presentation and it gathered the attention of Adam voice who is now

the one of the VPS at Sony and he just took me under his wing and he was like I want you to pitch to every publisher possible cuz that was one of the only ways I felt that we were going to actually get the game out and market it towards a broad audience so he took me to Capcom he took he took me to Sega he took me to EA all these different places some people I just went to on my own I was just pitching pitching pitching and also my other mentor who was in business she hadn't she knew nothing about video games so she was teaching it from a different standpoint which is very interesting and it's good to get multiple angles and paradigms when you're trying to figure out your road to success when marketing and developing your game so at one point I was in Berkeley and I was like there is this place called cream I don't know if you guys know of it it's an Ice Cream Sandwich stop ice cream sandwich store and I was like yeah my my character eats cookies and it would be a perfect mascot for your for your marketing campaigns

and they totally got they they dug it and it and they wanted to do it but the thing was we actually wanted we needed money too so marketing wasn't the only thing we were searching after so it didn't it didn't completely Fick fit but us you know pitching how the marketing would work completely fit with their campaign it was a good experience these are some of the other vents that we showed at hot import nights they had a Dead or Alive 5 booth there the Comic Con Evo our games of fighting game so we went to the the fight the biggest fighting game competition in Vegas in July so this is hustle phase 100 so we were going 100% we just raised more investment and we started second Kickstarter fundraiser campaign the second fundraiser campaign I understood how the media and the press worked more and I already had a lot of different contacts there so all I did

was reach back to them told them that we were making this game or we progressed in our game further showed them new builds and they are really interested in and it got a lot of buzz that way I also talked to the publishers as well so I always reached back at different stages of development when we were trying to move forward with marketing investment whatever at this time the mix was born so as we Joel spoke about we created this media india exchange at IGN where just the press and the Indies got together and they were able to you know vibe off of each other the press got to see games they've never seen from the hottest Indies and the Indies who some of them you know don't really speak out to press even though they have great content and great tech were able to talk to them in a more closed manner you know

so we did a second Kickstarter it was ended up being successful we reaiiy reached back to publishers capcom really liked the game but the deal wasn't really it didn't really fit with us and at the second GDC we were at eye when pitched Adult Swim games they love the idea and they didn't take it right away because they weren't working with steam but when they did start working with steam they were like okay let's let's do this and it was good because we understood their marketing they already had influencer marketing campaigns and people on Twitch and that's kind of where things were going and it really helped us to push the game along and get other people interested because once they got interested we were able to get more investor support more press support and the people that I contacted before I used that as leverage so this is like so we were supposed to launch I believe in April and it took a little longer to release because this was our

first large game and we we launched on Steam and Humble there was initial PR fumble with the publisher and the production staff there early build got sent out to all of the press but marketing wise it was a complete success because we got hit by every single not every single but most of major press checked our game out gave our game previews or reviews we had northernlion some of the the largest youtubers checked our game out and regardless if they liked it or not because they got a buggy build it still got a lot of press and the the whole education of what we did in the that four years kind of escalated to that point which was really good we maximize coverage we built the mix out of it we we had an initial Humble Bundle with Adult Swim and I cultivated a relationship with Humble

Bundle so I was what ended up happening was we got our rights back from Adult Swim because we wanted to start doing things on our own because they didn't want to support this anymore and we released out of all of these updates and we did another Humble Bundle which was a brawler Humble Bundle which was was pretty successful and it also built our foundation for the next game all right so yeah so just kind of you know quick quick point to sort of wrap them things together from my part and Justins point part you know I think they're two different approaches to marking and I think some really great takeaways from Justin's presentation is you know a lot of persistence and and creating things that could be leveraged for another program later on and just being really open and nimble and flexible and and thinking how you could kind of keep things going and you know kind of Forge your way to launch and as Justin was saying - they came out with the game they got the rights back they kind of keep plowing ahead you know they

kind of think about the longer tail as opposed to just the launch burst if it didn't go exactly how they wanted and you know part of the part of the end result is you know here we are post launched and now they're working on their next game so that I think that's part of the vision of the indie world is you know best-case you're you're launch comes down it fires in all cylinders but kind of next best is you know you do well enough so you can keep going on to your next game something else that comes out of the indie world is that it's a great community and I think there's great opportunities to think about programs that not only help your game but also help other games and I think it's excellent how people work together and and the mix is a great example as Justin was saying he was working at IGN GDC rolled around and they said hey let's let's have some journalists in here and let's get some other indie games too and here we are so that was in 2012 and here we are years later and that's really turned into a tremendous platform for indie game developers we just we do it every year now and we have expanded from four events last year

we're planned to do six or seven this year including e3 we're going to South by Southwest next week Comic Con SIGGRAPH and so we're doing things that not only help some of the you know Justin's game and other games but we're helping other Indies and give them a platform so that's kind of a little bit about the mix and how things tie together and how we started working together was I was thinking as a marketer it's great to work with individual Indies but how could I do programs that benefit multiple people at the same time and get some efficiency so that's that's part of the connection with how our worlds have come together and it happens you know a number of times that's been fantastic the Humble Bundle started as some of you may well know is um you know that was will fire and they were marketing their game and they were inspired by what world of you did with the pay what you want and you know things kind of evolved and evolved and they did you know they were just like hey hey let's do a bundle and then next thing you know it was tremendously successful and it became its own business and so yeah so that's one

example and yeah some of the some of the developers at the idea in the open house we had we started meetups and a lot of the developers came and cultivated and we worked together and contacted Tim Schafer and that presented an option to have an incubator there as well at Double Fine someone in the audience Dylan has games nest and that's blowing up too and that's how some of the the Indies work together yeah so so yeah so I think it's it's interesting that you market your game but as you're doing it there could be opportunities that not only help your game but also you know can benefit others in the community you know I think a lot of people know about Ramius Mills press kit was something he did he developed a started his game but now a lot a lot a lot of people use it to help make their press communications

efficient and there's some other examples here that I think people are familiar with I'm gonna segue into one more example for you that is connected with this not on steam icon that you see here and this is a case of another studio that created their game released it and found that it didn't perform how they wanted and you'll see the first couple months if you know if this was you and your game studio might be a little bit discouraging but they kept plowing ahead and they were really tenacious and persistent and I'll talk about some of the things they did to be successful but you know one one big takeaway here is that of their year one revenues they got 90% of the revenue in months four through 12 so I think people might stereotypically think you know everything I'm gonna make is gonna be in the first month or the first three months and if I don't do it then I'm sunk and I think these guys are a great example I don't know when they're

speaking but they might have already spoken but here GDC if they're speaking tomorrow I would suggest check him out and they'll talk more about what they did and so you know so they launched it didn't perform what they wanted they did a blog on Gamasutra and on their own website and it was you know was one month later losing steam and I think their takeaway was you know we self released but we weren't able to get on Steam and that's been a big part of why we're not performing how we want that got some press attention and greenlight was going on and they launched this I mean just going back to the icon well real quick they launched the not on Steam sale and that was kind of their own creation and they said you know we need to be we're not on Steam and here's a whole bunch of other game developers that aren't on Steam and how can we kind of come up with the program so they did what you know about steam sales they did discounted pricing they had a humble widget on there so people can buy directly through this not on Steam sale and they also had a link to everyone's

greenlight page so they can help kind of build their fuel their greenlight campaign and and so that really resonated press found it interesting and they wrote about it they had dozens of developers over the course this promotion and then the other thing that happened was not only did race the Sun get greenlit but a number of other games got greenlit and so you'll see this this bump in December and that you know then they finally came out on Steam they monetized it they did really well they kept plugging ahead they decided to add steam workshop in in March and that gave him another really nice bump and they just promotional pricing and then they had other promotions as time went on so and they're continuing on and they're getting ready for a PlayStation release and so on so you know again quick summary point here is just you know while I could be discouraging sometimes there's some trial and error and sometimes just kind of trying and experimenting with different things to go after success just kind of quickly

here this is just we talked about Chan we talked about PR this is just kind of really quickly there's examples of people who have done well with advertising there's some people have done well with releasing playable code with with early access there's people who've achieved their success through promotions and not just price promotions but sometimes working with other Indies to have compelling content and PR so some of these examples are written up in more detail on the link that I'm gonna have in a couple slides so you can read more about these and in conclusion just a couple of takeaways to take with you going back to earlier points from the presentation begin early be nimble be flexible the plan is very likely going to change be flexible and be nimble and you know state tenacious you know just go after it's this is important you're spending months and years of your life in this game so I'm working on this game so you know stay after it and it can be discouraging it sometimes but you know tenacity will help you be successful and

if not the first time maybe the next time we talked a lot about relationship building and networking you know Justin talked about how he was just so aggressive and persistent and talking to as many people as possible and you never know what's gonna pan out for you so get out there go to shows cultivate your relationships meet people in person as often as possible and that that can that can bear a tremendous fruit for you have a mix of vehicles in your marketing plan you know well it can be tempting to rely on just one thing it's useful to have a balance so that if one thing doesn't fire you've got other things to support your program and I'm starting to end with a cliche but you know it's a marathon not a sprint you know just just think about it in the long term this would be a great place to take pictures because these are some links where we've got a little bit more information I know there's gonna be posted soon but there's more examples from what we talked about the presentation in the second link so that's that's my my blog it's not super populated right now but I've got some

resources and some other links in there the last URL here is is Justin's studio interrobang and media exchange comm is the events that we run together that we talked a little bit about and with that we have time I'm just going to check my clock real quick we have 15 minutes for questions so invite people that come up to the microphone and if you ask questions please it may make sure you ask your question to the microphone so it'll be recorded for for the video hi is that is the microphone on for the audience seem to be yeah okay there goes so briefly right into me right at the end you mentioned early access and early access there seems to be a desire from it on the consumer side like there have been several games that have been really

successful it also seems to have tanked games when it's been botched so I wondered if you had any more thoughts you could expand upon with early access and how it ties in to marketing and eventual success of the game yeah you know I think I think part of it is if I can I'm gonna try and flip back real quick is if I could briefly like I think you got it sometimes when you're looking at early access you got to think of it like a Kickstarter campaign some of your sales will migrate from the actual sales when you release the game to the early access so it won't dictate how the the margin of sales you'll get later does that make any sense yes so and you know I think the point I was gonna make with this slide is you know think about the shape of your marketing plan if you do early access 12 months before you're really gonna release the game you know you have the potential to lose momentum and I think another thing that I like clay was talking about how when they did a react I really access and were successful with

something like don't starve they had a really good schedule and communication plan about how they were doing it I I believe was every month they had a new content release and they told people what they were doing and when they were gonna do it and there's a lot of things that made don't starve successful but I think in terms of how they did early access there's some good lessons learned there I think it's important to think about having a good game experience I think some people might fall down with putting a game on early access that's not represented with their final game that creates a bad impression and so that doesn't work well for them so I think there's a lot of considerations that go into it but I think the ones who have done it well you know they think about their timing they think about updates of communications they think about the experience so I think there's kind of there's pros and cons but when you do it well you've got the opportunity to start generating a revenue before you do the full game release and then can do kind of a polished I mean another quick thing there is if all the content is there in early access then there's kind of nothing to follow-through on when you release the full game so you want to think about that that part of it so when all those

things work well then you can prepare yourself for a successful launch afterwards all right thank you yeah hmm hello thank you thank you for the talk I wanted I feel I don't know how to ask this I feel maybe for some people I'm from Argentina and maybe I feel some of those you know tips are not reachable for us because being on festivals it's maybe this in GDC for us it's really difficult you know and we when we need it when you need your resources to develop your game it's really hard to you know use those resources for marketing and the things is what do you think about Minh talk too much about creativity I think because it's like those are the ways of marketing your game but I think there

are a lot of more ways of marketing that doesn't exist yet no so I could talk about super column is so super common man was a fighter there's something called influencer marketing and we geared a lot of our marketing towards the fighting game community and we got top fighting game personalities to play our game we showed at different fighting game festivals and tournaments and we creatively try to figure out where it would fit within that audience so yeah you definitely while you're marketing your game or anything you got to think of like how to get in where you fit in you know what I mean like so to speak so is that what you're talking about as far as the creative aspects of I mean for example do you know dumb boys today yeah okay the video was something that they created previously but what if it were like the in the other other you know I

have the game dumb ways to die and then I made the video the video goes viral and then I have my yeah yeah I mean always yeah if I'm getting your point I think it's creative content and it's sort of a way of attracting people I mean I'm talking about I've been talking about programs a lot and you're talking about sometimes it's the creative content it my understanding your point correctly that it's like I felt that that the technique of being marketed marketing your product it was out of the talk you know and I think creativity when you don't have the resources is the main thing you have to ask indie developers you know the activities our main strength I think you're absolutely right and I think it's sometimes you have just this incredibly compelling concept and you have something that really resonates and the job becomes a lot easier you know and sometimes you have this incredibly compelling piece of marketing

content you know maybe it's like this great viral video or maybe it's you know a program so absolutely I think there's there's there's tons of value in that and I am thank you for bringing that into the vision if I can just one more thing as game designers in the developers I think we have to ask the game to marketing itself you know like it shows like Twitter or I don't know there's a lot of ways of making your game create content automatically by the user content or other ways that you don't have to work for creating that content yeah I mean I think there's you know there's people who want to believe in the field of dreams you know where you if you build it they will come and and when you're lucky that works but I think depending on that can be a challenge and so I I guess from a marketer perspective I encourage you to you know to think about what else you could do I mean if you're lucky it's great and I and I think also from the outside it it looks easier than

it really is you know you you see these great examples and you say oh that was super easy for them but in reality they might have done like five games before that or they might have done twenty other things for that game before the thing really I'm really fired so yeah so next question hey guys well good to see ya so you talked about all the things that you shouldn't do and we just released a game a little less than a month ago we did all of those things you know we didn't advertise it at all and we built it and they haven't really come the big reason for that though oh by the way the game is called blitz keep it's on iOS and Android go get it right now there you are you're being for assistance that's creative right it's not Matt's a new thing anyway so we work on a totally part-time that's kind of a big challenge I have that I've always been making any games part-time and yeah I've gone to some of your events and stuff and how do you really ever is there kind of like a few things

that you can do when you're someone who's working on a game 10-15 hours a week like to get this stuff rather than you know someone who's got all of their time like would you say what's like the top things or something well I'm in hired somebody like Joel or John there's a lot of people out there now that used to be you know full-time marketers and now want to do it for indie game companies and they will take that off your hands because that was an issue I had I mean I didn't mark it full-time at all you know I wanted to spend most of my time production I was producing full time but I wanted to figure out different ways to implement a marketing without me spending as much time so I completely understand what you're talking about yeah and you know I think part of it is you know having the discipline to just even if you're not going to be spending a lot of time executing just having the discipline to think about what do I want my marketing plan to be like your you have your milestones and development and you have your development tasks and either you're doing yourself for someone who's helping you but having the discipline to say you

know six nine twelve months before launch what do I want to do and I might not have time to do it every week but you could at least think about the content you could think about kind of the big beads some time using another cliche but you could you know think about what are the big beats you want to have and that can help you know it can help drive a program even if you can't tend to spend a lot of time doing it and then you think you know but I'm really gonna like three months before launch community XY and Z you know the previous time I've only got 15 hours a week I mean to be development like 90% of the time but you would say I'm gonna do 10% on marketing and that'll give you some structure and you know kind of an intelligent approach to it even if your time is limited and as just I'm saying at some point you know maybe two months before launch or three minutes before launch day I'm gonna allocate some money to if I can't do it myself have someone help me with it you can also have someone on your team spirit it you know or work with create a plan spend like a week creating a plan for marketing and then have some interns help you with

some of the social outreach work with someone on Elance and or have someone on your team who's really good at that vocalizing that to help you with your marketing campaign cool thanks guys I don't okay okay good how abstract or rigid should your marketing plan be what when you're developing or when you're brainstorming on it in the beginning of development I I was gonna say I think your plan should be really rigid but you should be flexible on your plan if that makes any sense so you create a concrete plan right you could just outline it's just yeah you create guidelines you have to iterate on it's just like game production it's just another aspect of game production when you create your your plan for producing a game you're gonna have an idea and a vision of what you want but you're never gonna stick to that because you know some things aren't gonna work the timing doesn't work the

press that you wanted to to look at your game aren't gonna look at it when you want it but at least you have these guidelines to go by and then you you know it just is coordinating yeah I think there's there's very few marketing plans that I've done that and have held up from like development time to execution time they you know almost all the time you know date shift or detail shift and you know great military quote is you know there's very few battle plans that survive contact with the enemy you know it's the same kind of thing that create a plan give yourself structure but it's just insane be flexible and be be ready to you know adjust it is yeah you would drive yourself crazy if you just create a plan you're like you can't force stuff yeah god I gotta go with the flow and I think development is probably the same way I don't know anything about is a developer but I suspect you know that same kind of mentality soon yeah thank you yeah thanks hey guys great talk I'm currently building a fairly hardcore PC title I find most marketing resources are geared

towards casual and mobile game sort of platforms where I think the educated the consumers are much less educated about the product that way and it can be much more influenced by marketing you talked about super combo man being more on the hardcore side have you got any other tips for influencing the more hardcore market I think that's changing and you know casual was where mobile was and now that's shifting to more hardcore you could see it in the Korean and Japanese markets and you're getting a lot more people who used to work in the industry that want to help market hardcore games you got to kind of figure your your niche and as so I've been working part-time as an influencer influencer marketer and what that means is you know working with youtubers and twitch streamers and people in the vine community Instagram community to help boost up your community for your game so you got to kind of figure the different

chests it sounds corny but different chess pieces that will help boost the visibility of your game and if you create a plan you could work with someone like Joel or I keep like you know me boosting him up but you could work with someone who's strategic that can help that help you with that when I was working with Adult Swim just an example is when I was working with them they were just shooting it out to every twitch streamer and like that didn't really help us so I was I had to i actually formulated a plan that i wanted to work with them on that would shoot it to the right trajectory unfortunately we did it a little late but when if you're even thinking about working with a publisher or outside you should kind of cultivate a vision of where your who your gamer is and you want to connect with that person so you know personality is key and figuring out how you want to relate to them and connect with them with different influencers in

the market yeah so this I'm you know in terms of youtubers there's this youtubers mega list that I've a link from it on the the indie game indie marketer calm so that's a tremendous resource that's got a lot of youtubers by follower sighs it's got contact information you could get and also talks about genres they follow events can be super useful for getting to core gamers you know pax is amazing the indie mega booth at PAX is a great Avenue to get there PR is another great way to reach core gamers again it's like you know can you get through to them I think is it can be challenging but it's important so it's worth the attention but also have other things in your marketing mix that can help supplement you if you're not getting the coverage so I think we might have one last question we could cover and then we're gonna get to the end of our time or are we out of time time or no yeah yeah we have time for the last question what's a good percentage of your budget to dedicate towards the launch you know traditional would be 10

to 15 percent from marketing is your question right yeah just for the launcher the whole year you know I would say well I would say marketing 10 to 50 percent of fear of what u what you want your revenues to be and though is where I would approach like what's what's my target revenues and then car about 10 to 15 percent it's sort of a formula that's used in the marketing world and but I'm sorry before revenue before it's be 10 to 15 percent of your budgets that's why that's why I was trying to figure out when I was working with my marketing plan it really brought light to that I was like oh like from a practical point of view I think there's so many startup Studios that you know they're kind of their bootstrap and they're kind of you know living living day-to-day and week-to-week and I you know the majority of the time there's people just they don't have the budget to support it so that's why the programs that we talked about here and the programs that will often get executed are you know I try

and go for lean lene programs I mean I'm work I'm just working bigger studios and I had to sort of adapt adapt my approach when I'm working with India and and what is the triple a budget for like a launch well again that was that's like the 10 to 15 percent of expected revenues is is the number that I would work on in that world so so same for Indy yeah yeah thank you so I want to remind you to please fill out your evaluations they're super useful to us as well as GDC I think you'll be getting an email like right after this session so encourage you to please do that and we'll stick around for a few minutes and thank you all for coming [Applause]