Marketing on Zero Budget

[Music] hello oh god she could hear that hello [Music] hello hi thank you very very much for coming I'm really tired so you're gonna have to put all with that so yeah I'm I'm surprised as this many people here on a Friday afternoon I would be in my hotel room asleep by now so good on you my name is micros I have been around for too long I used to write about video games many moons ago and then I moved to publisher called tiny builds and we did a whole bunch of stuff and then I decided I could do this myself like a egotistical bastard and so I did last year I started my own publishing label called no more robots and the idea is for anybody who

has been following me for a while you know that I I love numbers and I love trying to apply numbers and maths and all that kind of malarkey to making games sell so that's what I tried to do and our first games called descenders it was released last month and thank God for me it has done well which means that you know I don't look like an absolute lemon and I'm announcing a second game next week which is massively exciting and tiring so so this talk is a version of a talk I gave earlier this year sorry earlier this week well technically it was earlier this year and and this talk is focused around the facts that basically on descenders a big part of my

my plan was to spend as little money as possible because I think there's this perception you got to spend a whole bunch of money on marketing now and if you if you don't do that no one's gonna care about your game and I've seen people plow like tens of thousands of dollars into marketing their game and honestly not get a great amount of payoff we I was trying to work out how much money because we didn't spend zero just to be clear that was a flippant title but we spent close to zero I think I basically paid a monthly subscription to MailChimp which sends out email addresses it's probably about $50 a month or something for the last seven months outside of that we've not really spent anything everything that I have done to make the sender's sell has just been me just hard grafting basically and screaming at people until they finally

listen which is a thing you can do as well but maybe not with this accent so so so things I'm not going to be talking about today are these kind of things now the reason I'm not and and sorry that's what you came for you can leave if you would like and I won't cry too much I will but things like writing a press release getting in touch with youtubers all that kind of stuff it's been done absolutely to death if you go on the GDC vault you'll find plenty of talks on this stuff even from me I have done talks on this so you you can see me talk about this if you on on the GDC vault there's this plenty of stuff that I think is honestly more important than this that the I ended up focusing on for descenders and I think that hopefully you'll are going to be able to apply it yourselves as well here are the six

things we're going to talk about today the everything here I'm going to explain in horrible excruciating detail but a lot of this stuff might sound quite simple but when I actually say out loud you below haven't thought to do that let's just get cracking because got lots of words the first step before you even start doing anything is actually working out what is exciting about the game because as I tell so many people the thing that you think is exciting about your game you are wrong is not the thing that is exciting about your game well it nearly is all right your the problem is you're focusing on the wrong thing though slightly I keep saying you if you're wrong but I mean that most people I talked to who are making games they are focusing on the wrong thing when it comes to actually talking about their their game publicly and from a marketing perspective I guess

a lot of the time you're you're focusing on this thing because you think people are gonna care about this and it turns out that yeah that's pretty interesting but it's not actually the thing you should open with so so I've been calling it like in my head I was calling it this and then I started saying it publicly and it sounded really dumb but I've stuck I'm doubling down I I call this like the Hulk and the kicker so the thing that I think you are probably focusing on is the kicker you are probably focusing on this thing about your game which yeah sounds pretty cool but actually if you open with it and say hey this is what my games about a person might be like okay sounds all right but they're maybe they'll drift off and find another game what you need first is the thing that's actually exciting about your game that is then going to link with this other thing let me let me give you an example so with descenders from the from the very beginning we were

talking a lot about the procedural generation stuff in it and for us that seemed like it was going to be really exciting people were gonna care about this but here's the thing loads of games do procedural generation now you know like it's it's cool procedural generation is cool but it's but it's not like a publicly facing thing that whole marketing campaigns are sold on so we needed like the thing that procedural generation could actually follow on from it turned out that it was literally just telling people from you know kind of trying to describe the games to people in many different ways it turned out when we actually just told people that it was a downhill mountain biking game that was enough to just grab them initially because no one's really doing downhill mountain biking games when we then followed up with oh yeah and it has procedurally generated worlds in it that's the bit where they'd be like wow how does a mountain bike game have procedural worlds that's not right

so so you can see how like go it taking like procedural worlds which is and then actually making it sound like I want to know more about this you you take this one part and it elevates the second part but the second part by itself possibly isn't exact same as you think trying to work out your own sort of wine for your game like this one at the bottom is really important you can do that by just trying to describe your game to different types of people over and over again in different ways until you finally start getting the reaction that you deserve it's it's a really important thing to do because it will it will kind of you can take it into a lot of other things as well especially even when you're just designing the game if you've worked out exactly what it is that people find exciting it might start to sort of show you what directions set your game in as well so I a this is

another thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is so important I see people all the time they'll you someone will put out a trailer for a game or they'll put out our website or I'll put something on Twitter and they get a ton of retweets and that's great but then then they go off and they make the game and the people there's a hundred thousand people you got on your trailer whatever they go off and they play all the games and then by the time your games coming out they've basically forgotten about your game and all that work you did in the first place was kind of for nothing because because you know we know how fast games are moving now in like six months they probably don't remember your game anymore so a big question is if someone is showing interest if somebody if you are announcing your game in your bring out trailer or anything like that and someone like thinks hey this is kind of cool I'd like to be more involved what exactly is it that's that they can

get involved with where you can kind of hook them and keep them until the game is available and hope that they will buy it for us I think for and I think this would work for a lot of people its discord I started fiddling with discord a couple of years ago and at first I didn't get it it seemed like it was just another Skype but it was purple it was it seemed very strange I mean you know I everyone's used every chat based thing under the Sun but but the but the cool thing about discord is that I mean it's it's it's it's a slick system but also they just got kind of lucky really and they've managed to just get loads of people joining and they're all people who actually buy video games so so what we did was we started a discord 4 descenders now when people ask me how you start a discord you don't just make a cool place where people could chill

about your game because no one wants to do that no one wants to just come and chill in your in your discord until the games out it's not a reason you've got to actually have a reason why they're going to come and hang out in this little chat room and the main way that we managed to do that was that we ran the closed beta for December's in the through discord so when we announced the game we said hey if you want to be involved in the closed beta for this game you are going to have to join our discord and thousands of people did that when we announced the game they'd watch the trailer and then the link will be right there under the trailer or when a press a press place talked about it they always say oh hey if you want to be involved in the in the beta here's a link for the discord and we got thousands and thousands of people coming through there and at that point then once we once we had them we then started giving them things to do so I set up the discord using a variety of bots I made

it so that when someone first joined the descenders discord they only had access to one channel that was called picker side and in the game there's three different kind of teams factions that you can join and we made it so that they had to pick one of these three teams before they were allowed any access to the discord and this essentially caused like a tribe mentality where then like on a weekly basis we gave them tasks to do against each other you got to come up with the best one of these or the best one of that and then we start giving them things to actually design for in the game let's design some kits and let's design some banners and all this kind of stuff it meant that by the time the game came eventually came out we were pretty damn certain that we had at least X amount of people who were going to buy this game within the first 24 hours because they were all just like feverish for it they in fact when we when we launched the game we were going to launch the game at

sort of four o'clock and at twenty minutes before we we were just like hey hey let's do this let's just launch it twenty minutes early and we'll only tell this score just to say thanks to these guys and then we'll officially announce the launch at four o'clock so we we launched it but what I didn't realize was that the launch discount of 10% wouldn't kick in until four o'clock so I run into the disco I'm like oh god I'm really sorry everyone like they're you know just wait just hold off - I know it's available just hold off twenty minutes we sold like a thousand copies in twenty minutes from all the people in discord because they didn't give a crap that it was that there was no discord they needed it now they needed the game right now and it and it's been incredible it's been absolutely incredible for a game because it's the the kind of longevity of the of the tail of sales as well has been amazing people who kind of see the game and finkle I might be interested in this they joined the discord just to see what the community is like we've got this super

active community they join and immediately are greeted by a bunch of people and within a very small amount of time they decided yeah all right cool and then I want to be involved in this as well so so like I honestly I can't stress enough like doing this discord stuff I I have plans to do discards for every day I dunno it's probably gonna become a logistical nightmare but but but it's it's honestly something you should 100% walk into so so this one is an interesting one because I think probably a lot of people don't think about this when I say the right vibe I mean when people are seeing your game what is it that they are perceiving it to be in terms of those horrible things we don't like to think about what value are they perceiving the the way that you present your game I think right now especially with so many games coming out is incredibly important your game needs to

be perceived that it is more interesting than all the ones around it your game when it comes out that day is gonna be in the middle of 40 or the games right when it when it drops why are people picking your game out again we've descenders when we announce that we I we've been originally talking that oh maybe people would pay you know sort of $15 for this may you know we honestly had no great idea about how much people will be into a mountain biking game but we wanted to just try and give off this perception that it was sort of this double a game you know somewhere in between like an in a traditional in detail and and and triple-a and so we worked incredibly hard and trying to make this image there the the trailer we tried to make we made like over two dozen drafts of this trailer for the

game over and over and over again for about three weeks just to try and make it look as triple-a as possible all of the assets were doing all the ways we were talking about the game the way we were presenting the game we spent an incredible at a time on this and when it did come out a lot of people accidentally thought that it was like this this max again made by this massive team there was comments on the YouTube video that were like well I'd only pay $40 for this which was in crowd for us because there's three guys making it so so it like that the fact of the matter is that different games have different images right by the next game I'm announcing next week is is is definitely more towards like the more traditional indie scale so we're working out then what image we're building around that but the the the value that is perceived and we hate talking about

like well how much is my game worth what should I price it and all that you can really help those kind of conversations by deciding how do I want my game to be perceived what value do I want my games we've received in and then just starting from there and if it turns out that maybe people don't buy in for the image so much you can go down from there right but you can't if you start off with it it's not worth as much and then it turns out that maybe you know people would have been more interested in an idea sort of looking at it in a and a higher perspective it's more difficult to come back from that all right we have a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about and a lot of the stuff that we did it's it's about not relying on lock I I think that with the vast majority of the games that come out now and it's been like this for a long time but I think a lot of developers rely on unlock and rely on

you know sort of saying all right I've done everything I've tried to put pressure releases in these places I've done some tweets hopefully the day that my game comes out people are just going to buy it and you can't do that you absolutely cannot do that you need to make sure that on the day your game comes out you're pretty certain you've put enough stuff in place that it's going to at least do a baseline well there's plenty of stuff you can do to do that the discord stuff I was talking about early for example is a great example of that right like like I told you we had thousands of people in the discord we could see how much they wanted the game they were asking for it on a daily basis before we launched it so we were pretty confident we were at least getting X amount of sales from that there was other stuff we were putting in place as well you know we were we were talking to different platforms different communities we've been talking to we've been talking to steam a lot and just hounding them about what is it we can do

to make sure that on the day our game sort of does as well as possible there's there's plenty of ways to actually not guarantee success I'm not going to tell anybody in here that can guarantee success but there's a lot of ways to at least guarantee a baseline of success in that you're not just like sat there like scared out of your mind on on launch day where your fingers crossed there's plenty of stuff you can put in place unfortunately to put a lot of this stuff in place you you have to do some horrible things that the vast I mean that I found the vast majority people don't like doing you can probably tell just from the way I talk and and from my general demeanor that I I don't mind doing the stuff that's all I am I am

very much a person who who will just sort of ask for everything and will just go in and just and just feel it's not that I believe you know like that I deserve any of this it's more that I know that if I ask I have a chance of maybe getting help from from people and from platforms and if I don't ask I definitely don't that's that's the absolute bottom line on it so asking for stuff is honestly just one of its I've been saying it for years and I know there'll be loads of people in here will be like I can't do that I can't email people or getting such people just asking for stuff every single thing that I have put in place for the sender's I asked for no one came to me Xbox didn't come to me and say hey we've seen descenders can we can we work out all this stuff I went to them and I

sug dissenters in their face and said what can we do together not a can we do something what can we do together can we do this can we do that and now I've put deals in place with them with discord I started setting up the discord stuff and then I shook myself in discards faces saying I found a contact I just worked out or who can I talk to here finally found a person to talk to and now I'm sort of working out a bunch of stuff with discord that we can do with them another platform we're mixer so if you're not aware mixer is essentially Microsoft's version of twitch that also is on the Xbox dashboard I I started streaming on mixer just because I like to always just try and be ahead of the curve so I try everything that's new and then just stick with the things that actually work and and with mix I started streaming a lot on mixer and then I emailed them just saying hey is there any if I can

get involved with and they go back to me saying oh yeah actually we do developer accounts on mixer do you do you want one of those like yeah okay hey I'm like a couple of days later they'd verified my account on the next time I streamed I was from page of mixer and now I'll randomly be from page of mixer whenever I stream because that's apparently a thing they do but I only found out by asking it's it's this kind of thing where if you're not just absolutely just asking and talking to everybody nothing's ever gonna happen the worst thing that's going to happen is you're gonna ask someone for something and they're not gonna respond to you and then you'll feel a bit crap inside but but who cares because at least you ask asking for stuff is it's just an incredibly important and when I was when I was saying this earlier this week I was talking to a guy who who just said to me I just can't do that I can't I just can't ask it feels so like reckless and harmful and I I just

said to him just try it for a month just try asking for stuff for a month and if at the end of the month you're like oh that was so horrible and now I feel dead inside then alright fine else to do it for you instead but but but but really honestly you be surprised you be surprised at the times when I have just out of the blue ask someone for something and they've gone oh yeah cool let's work something out it's easier than you think you've just got to get over get over that little voice in your head that's saying this is the the final thing is that out of everything that's happening you just got to be realistic all right and when I say that I mean you you need to have a plan in your head for if your game ends up making you know sort of the average or less than the average of what a game is making on Steam right now is that gonna

be okay for you in your situation or are you going to have problems and if you are gonna have problems what you're gonna do about it you need to be able to take those numbers and and actually have plans in your head for what's going to happen I mean when we were when we were doing descender stuff we we did this we we all sat down and we were like okay so what if descenders tanks because you got to ask yourself that question you you know you I I was I was optimistic it was gonna do well but this is video games so I had to be really realistic and say all right if it tanks what are we gonna do we had plans for all right if it only makes this amount of money then we're going to have to scale back scope we're going to have to aim for roundabout this day and then we'll work out what happens then if it does well then yeah we can kind of stick to these more longer-term plans you got to ask yourself these

questions as well because anybody who has launched a video game knows that no matter whether it's done well or badly you still feel depressed and awful after it so the situation you don't want to be in is that you launch a game and it does badly and then you don't have a plan and then you're just like a husk of a person at least having that plan in place means that it becomes this is slightly more bearable I know this is kind of a slightly lower note to end on but that's just the way that I structured this talk so I apologize for that so so anyway kind of just to wrap up really really think about what it is that's actually interesting about your game talk to other people see if what they think is interesting about your game try and work out that exact thing work out ways to to keep people interested once you have

started talking about your game things like discord things like mixer there's bound to be all the platforms that are popping up as well anything that's new just try it out you never know it might actually do the kind of do the works for you and and like I said just try to just try to start just gritting your teeth and asking for stuff and trying to hunt anything down that you can it might be you know though the people who are sat in here and thinking like well these this platform holder and that platform holder and this company they're they're not gonna care about the thing I'm making they very well might do you just gotta ask them and and see because you might surprise yourself right set a bunch of words thank you I have no idea if we've got time for do

we have time for questions three I get one question whoever gets to one of the microphone plaid sessions over all right I'll make sure one asked about the disco because I know everybody's going on my side so she farad and I see it sings that is most suitable for those like strategy games that call began there's like lots and lots of our discussion but for us we have like a very nervous very culture again and then we don't think about like doing like a better or like good like a demo so I know how I can work with disco supermodel game so like that so I'm so I'm gonna like I said I'm announced in another game next week and the the game I'm announcing next week is a very niche single player experience and so I for a while was struggling to

like think well descenders made more sense for discord if I feel like if I'm gonna do this code with this next game I'm just gonna be just kind of ramming a circle into a square but then but then the thing was when I when I started to really think okay well what actually is possible with this thing I started to realize that there's when you when you really have an explorer of what is possible with all the kind of bots and stuff that are available and discord there's some crazy things you can do I'm setting up this dis code server I'm kind of putting the finishing touches on it right now that is way weirder than the descenders discord where people join the discord and they essentially are given a channel where they live and that's like where they start off a it's like a base channel and then they have to work in the in the discord to earn money to then be able to buy their way into better property in the discord and they have to

go to work when they go to work home disappears the home channels disappear and all the work channels disappear all the work channels appear and they have to then go there and work in places and do this loop and then the pit every week the top 10 people who have the most money and the most standing in the server then become these like gold players in the in the server and are eventually going to have their names in the game this is just the stupid stuff that happens in my brain but but you can but you can see how like essentially creating this kind of miniature meta game in discord I I'm hope I haven't launched it yet so maybe no one will care but I'm hoping that it will at least give a small subset of people a reason to stick around even if you know it's it has no real them playing this thing has no standing on what the game

that eventually comes out is so I think there's I think there's plenty of possibilities even when it seems like there's not but yeah I guess I'll have to keep trying it for more and more games see what's possible I dunno the something discord are doing is they are they're kind of revamping how BOTS work in discord right now and trying to support a lot more people making these things so I reckon in the next year there's gonna be a whole lot of additional kind of interactivity stuff that's going to come to this good so I imagine in a year's time the discord servers we're gonna be seen and gonna be just ridiculous so you know you might start exploring it now so you can be one of those ridiculous people thank you alright cool

you