No Booth, No Problem: Showcasing Your Game on the Go

[Music] right so while the final few file in uh thank you all for coming at this uh ungodly hour uh I've been at this thing for 5 days and I'm tired I guess most of you are too uh before I get started just a quick show hands who here is working on their own game or on an indie game all right excellent that's most of you and that's sort of the audience for this thing as am I I am an indie I'll get back to that in a second all right let's go started if you're an indie you may have seen this but you don't want to end up with that that it's still it's still so good like just just the timing and the pacing of it is perfect and it's so sad and you want to avoid that we all want to avoid that and I mean if you want to avoid that what you have to do is you have to sell your game that's basically the heart of it if you want to make money you have to sell your game but if

you're an indie or a small team it's not really about selling your game it's much more about selling yourself you are usually your own marketing team and you're a key part of the game and its story and its development story so you need to sort of figure out how to sell yourself but it's not only just selling yourself it's actually you know selling yourself to strangers people that don't know you and don't know your game and probably don't care so that's pretty scary so hi I'm Martin uh I'm going to spend the next couple minutes diving into all of that before I do that though a little bit of context I'm a German Indie uh I've been making games since the early days of Quake one doing some modding uh I've been in Industry since 08 I've been working on my being an indie since 2012 and I've been working on my current project no profit which I'll use as a bunch for a bunch of examples I've been working on it since 2012 back then it looked like since 2014 back then it looked like this then like this and now like this so 24 to now

that's almost four years so that's a lot of time for conferences and a lot of exhibitions uh and one what I want to do is in the next couple minutes I want to help you sort of find your strangers and talk to them so that's it you have a game yeah that's a big that's a big pile of work that's hard to do but what do you do next you want to get it out to people you can do social media marketing all this kind of thing but if you want to really meet them the first thing that comes to mind is yeah let's get a booth and booths are awesome there's a lot of opportunities for Indies to get on a booth there's a lot of joint booths like the Indie Mega Booth or the Indina Booth uh this joint showcases like the day of the death which is here at GDC or like Dutch courage and these are all really great they have huge advantages in the sense that because you're constantly physically present on site you have a lot of exposure also because they usually these joint Affairs it gives you a sense of credibility like you're part of this larger thing and also so another

sort of really important uh Advantage from going to these things is you get to do networking with all the devs around you you know you sort of in the trenches together spending a lot of time just crunching and standing there next to each other and that's a really valuable thing but I mean you're here you've read the session session description sorry German so all other things are going to be jumbled um you know I'm not going to talk about Booth but I want to talk about the downsides of having a booth and I mean the obvious one is it's going to be expensive uh these things cost upwards of 1,000k for like a small kind of thing in sort of a joint booth and runs you to 3 to 5K for like a bigger area um obviously longer events usually cost more and shorter events May cost a bit little bit less but it's going to be expensive it's going to take some money um that's the obvious one but also if you're a small team in India God forbid like me you're doing the solo going to a conference or to an exhibition and man a booth for 3 Days 5

days it's really really exhausting it's hard work you stand there for 8 hours 10 hours on your feet talking all day shouting over the speakers that are next door by the end of this you're going to feel like an old man I feel like an old man you will feel like an old person uh your knees hurt your legs hurt your feet hurt your hips hurt your throat sore it's really hard and also Booth aren't really for every game some games benefit more from Booth than others especially multiplayer games that that sort of have visuals that attract people more easily if you have a very slow game it'll be hard to pull in people I have a card game no we profit is a card game so what I have to do is I have to pull people to the booth and go like oh do you like card games come on take a look because the game isn't as flashy and visual that it's just being played attracts people that much so expensive exhausting and not for everybody so then uh I found myself you know sort of draining the budget and draining my energy levels but I still

wanted to get my game sort of into the hands of people uh I had a sort of made some serious changes I just wanted to sort of have people play so what can you do I mean you can just have no Booth it's it may be it may look a little bit lonely but it's it's a lot of work all right so what's what's the benefits of doing that I mean the obvious one is it's cheaper you don't have to pay for the booth you don't have to pay for like roll up banners or like I don't know custom t-shirts though that you may still want to do uh but the important part is it's flexible you don't have to do 10 hours a day you don't have to do 8 hours a day you don't have to stand in one place all the time and that's that's really the key to this thing you can do as much as you want and you can do it where you want and doing it where you want means you can go to where your players are so that's wait oh no I'm looking at the wrong thing and if you look at this one um so you can go to where your players are this is one of my terrible selfies at Gamescom I don't know why but most of

the Selfies have this very serious face I think I guess I have resting bit face I'm trying to get better I've started instagramming and sort of upping my selfie game um so nowh profit is a digital card game I'm at Gamescom where the hell are my players um the good thing about these really big events are uh the players sort themselves just for your convenience so I mentioned it's a card game uh so my players are probably people that play other card games so what do you do you go to the big Booth of the of similar games and you talk to the people there so what I did is another face selfie it's hard to tell cuz like the lighting is all terrible but that's Hearthstone uh and you you meet people there that are standing in line and they'll probably stand there for 30 minutes an hour depending on how long the line is and they they don't really have anything to do like they're bored they would like to be entertained they would like to see something like to shorten the waiting time and that's they welcome you like they're really looking forward to somebody to entertain them so

that's what I did I went to Gamescom uh I talked to people in the cues for card games and talk to them about my game and that's that worked and that's what I'm going to talk about so you can show off your game without a booth you do not need to spend thousands of dollars into and getting this huge setup it has its advantages but sometimes it's not what you want to do so let's get into the details okay so I've sort of split this apart into three things first one is the goals the sort of things you should think about before you get started the preparation the sort of things you should do before you hit the show floor and approach what you do once you're there break for a drink so the goals um it basically Al to why do you want to do this so you don't have a booth but you still want to show your game and it's still going to costume like this isn't going to be for free you still have to travel you have

to get the ticket for the event you have to pay for accommodation um it's going to cost you time energy and money this is all stuff you could invest in your game so figuring out why you want to do this helps you sort of uh understand why you do this investment it'll also help you be more prepared uh once you're on site there's a limited amount of time you have on site and you want to make as much of that as possible um and if you have sort of multiple goals it help you helps you to prioritize so you know which ones you can go first while you're still energized uh the this is going to be a sort of strenuous draining experience you're going to talk to people all the time for some that's easier to do than for others but it still requires energy I'm going to come back to energy a couple times I think all right so I'm going to go over a bunch of example goals I've sort of um seen myself and sort of heard from others uh that's not an exhaustive list so if you have any so you want to talk about please do come up to the mic afterwards the first one is sort of obvious we want all we want exposure we want people and players to see our game so press is a good multiplier and that's a good idea um there's a fch bunch of

things you should consider when you want to you know Target press when you're at the event first of it's probably a good idea to reach out beforehand uh if you've been to the talk talk prior to this uh reaching out to people beforehand will make them remember you and sort of feel like they're more familiar to you however if you're just just a small Studio you're very unlikely to get a lot of feedback from like big name uh sort of news outlets still you should try also for press really large event are really good because there's going to be more press more different people to meet uh and also uh these large events usually have sort of specific press days or sort of specific press areas that you can sort of hang out at um when you meet press it's also really important that you have something they can remember you by they will they go to these shows to see a lot of games and yours is just one of a lot of them so try and give them something that they can remember you also you should definitely have a press kit in place uh there's a lot of solutions for press kits sort of like do press kit or different L and making a press kit is

sort of its own talk um just know that it's easier than it looks but you may want to consider investing more energy in making a sort of custom thing um because it may make your game stand out a little bit more but again it's more work but in the end when you want to go and meet press keep in mind press are there for stories do you want stories about games and game development so you have something interesting to tell about how your game was being built how you how you relate to your game why are you making this that is interesting to the people in The Press audience all right another kind of people you might want to meet are influencers streamers YouTubers all this kind of uh new the new way to sell games and again sort of like press you want to reach out beforehand again like press if you're small and they're big you're probably not going to get a reply but it's good to know uh sort of which kind of uh influencers play similar games similar to yours and which ones will be at the event so you can then at the time of the

event sort of see if you can reach out for influence it's really important that you bring something playable you they want to play games they want to see games uh they want to see a pitch deck or anything and also if you can if you're far enough along bring keys to to share a uh it'll make them maybe play the game for you and stream it or take a video of it but it also uh gives them something they can give to their followers they have something to share with other people because in the end influencers want content for the viewers all right another goal to go which was sort of my chief goal when I went to Gamescom is play testing um conference is are really good to get a lot of people that are sort of in your target audience to play your game in quick succession and see them play it u a booth is sort of really good for this because you'll get a consistent stream of players um but on the other hand in my experience after about two days of this you've gotten so much feedback that you just want to you know step back work on the game and then get in another couple days instead of being

there for a long time and sort of keep hearing the same things over and over again and if you don't have a booth it allows you to be more flexible in that regard um if you want to do Place testing it makes sense to be aware aware of what you want to test so do you want to specifically look at the UI or are there some some things in your comment system you want to look at uh having that in mind is useful also in in that regard um if you have something you're not sure about bring multiple builds I had uh in an earlier um showing I had a different versions of an armor system I wasn't really sure which one was easy to understand which one was sort of fun to play with uh so I just brought multiple builds and you know switched them out over time just watch people interact with them also um you should have a conference specific build um I'll go into the details in that later uh but it makes sense to sort of have a special version set aside and in the end remember players want to be entertained the game should look and play well and look decent even if it's short it

doesn't have to be like a 30-minute experience you probably won't even have time for that but whatever you're going to show them should feel like a game and don't shouldn't be like gray boxes all right another goal making money yeah and uh no that just doesn't work uh if you think about how much a conference is going to cost you um and depending how much your game is going to cost you're G to have to sell upwards of 10 copies a day and that's a lot you know that's if the conference is uh sort of 10 hours that means selling one copy an hour and I don't think that's doable um you have to consider conferences being an investment they're not about making money they're more about making friends uh it's not business context this is people that want to be invested in you and the thing the things you do so what you have to do instead instead of trying to sell people on your game uh you have to get them interested in what you do try to get them to stay in touch if you find somebody who oh that's interesting that's cool I like these kinds of games try in some way uh have

them follow you have them sort of subscribe to your newsletter newsletters are great um we're trying to hold on to them and if they stick around long enough they may convert into fans because the people you meet at that point they're just casual acquaintances and getting sort of you know getting your hook in them in some way that they're not lost to you is really important all right so that's a bunch of goals another time for a drink next step preparation what to do before you actually hit the show um what you should do before you hit the show is you should know your game um you know she you need to know what's unique about your game and your game story um I've seen the talk from Tom Francis creator of gunpoint in heat signature in earlier this week I had this great quote uh ask yourself uh about different parts of of your game can this be a bit Bland or will the game suck if you find the part that can't be blanded that's probably a really important part of your game maybe something that makes it unique I mean

these two games that slime Rancher and death thrash they're very different and they'll have as a result of that will have very different messaging different sort of handouts different way you play uh talk to people pitch it to people and for uh nowhere profit um I try to figure out what that is and what it is it's it's a single player card game it's so it's not free toplay it's not multiplayer it's not collectible and that sort of makes it unique but at the same time it's also a challenge when people see card game they think ccg they think trading cards they think multiplayer so that's always something I need to communicate clearly this unique thing is also a challenge for me to overcome it's also a r like deck building game these aren't as unique as they used to be anymore we have slay the Spire monster Slayers and like the Hearthstone dungeon run which sort of all go into the same Niche and it's sort of a mixture of Indian culture science fiction and post-apocalypse which we always try to really communicate in uh very simple images like this character here he's got of Science Fiction arm and

gun uh the beard and the clothing clearly communicate uh sort of Indian culture and hopefully some of the post-apocalypse also shines through uh in the kit bashing of sort of the the gear he has all right so if you know what your game sort of is at its heart what makes it special um next thing is making handouts I said you want to have people you want people to have something that they can remember you buy giving them something physical is very good for this um this is the key idea of merch um people play so many games they see so many things that a show you want them to remember yours and one really important thing is never do Flyers they're they don't work the issue with Flyers is they're sort of this big size and they tempt you to add too much text and text is boring you see if you ever had a text Heavy game I have a text Heavy game and you see players play your game they just click through the text the same happens with the flyer you look at it you trash it um also Flyers are often sort of very light and cheap and

of crumble and you if somebody hands you a flyer what do you do you fold it neatly and put it in your pocket no you probably just sort of go squish it in there or if you have like a bag just throw it in there and at the end of the show it's going to be crumpled mess at the bottom you pull out everything you see this thing and you'll go like GH so don't do that don't do Flyers instead make something more high quality make uh postcards stickers buttons anything also focus on artwork over text if you have something that looks pretty people want to grab it don't forget to put your url or the game name's game or The Game's name there we go uh on it that'll help um so that's really important have something cool you can give to people like oh that's my game there you go um also if you do a lot of you'll do a lot of pitching going to people telling them about your game it's good if you prepared visual material this can be actually physical things you then can give them if you have like if you make like postcards and different type things of your game on them or you could like have a tablet and have like IM on it but it'll help people you know follow the

words you're G you're using and it'll make um them remember your game more easily because when they see your screenshot later they go oh I've seen that somewhere and that'll help also if you have time money and or a team uh do something fun I've seen people do a reward wheel uh go do high score competitions do costumes all the sort of things can help but again it sort of ties back to messaging you'll need to know what your game is to figure out what makes sense for you uh for no profect what I did it's a card game so I made cards these are sort of business card sized cards um and they focus very much on the artwork and had some little bits of the story and the world on it because that's one of the things that makes it unique and uh what really worked well is that they're different there's different artwork on there and then it always allowed me to play with people and go like oh which one do you want and you have this interaction suddenly it's not just you have this thing but it becomes this okay which one do you want want to select or maybe people play along Long play for a long time and I'm like all right you can have two you know and it sort of becomes more interesting and but that works for me

because I'm making a collectible or not non- collectible card game but a card game where there's lots of different cards so it sort of ties back together all right so messaging handouts and then preparing your game build that's really important that's probably the most important thing um and right away make sure it runs on a mobile device even if it is not a mobile game if you can get it on a tablet if you can't get it on a tablet uh use it sort of convertible laptop but you'll be running around you need to show this to people you don't want to Lug a lot of gear um around and sort of carry lots of things um Noah profit is a is a desktop focused game but I have a tablet build because it's really good for con conferences uh the second thing about your build is you will have a very short play time if you go up to people in the queue and ask them to play you'll have 5 to 10 minutes if you can Target your game to be the short even if it's normally longer um because then there this awkward moment if the game is very long and people play for like 5 10

minutes and they sort of like the que starts moving again and they want to leave but they sort of have to abandon the game and give it back to you it sort of is a an uncomfortable experience for them so if you can give them an easy answer they've played a month uh they're done you reward them visually or maybe with like oh you you finished you get a sticker um that's a lot sort of better ending experience than just all right I I just here please also H you cannot rely on audio it's going to be loud and there's going to be lots of people around and you people don't want to put on headphones here hold this tablet I'm just going to put my headphones on you that just doesn't work and also I mean that's true for all games but um doubly here as self-explanatory as possible if you have like a booth you can print out uh as as your controller scheme and put it on the booth so people can sort of look at it or whatever uh if you're doing this on the go people are not going to look at anything I mean I thought about sort of doing something like printing it on a shirt because that'd be funny um but you want to have people you want to give this thing to people and have them play immediately and I've mentioned earlier having a

specific conference build is a plus um it is useful for making a shorter experience rewarding people making it easier yeah because people don't know the game they want they want to have a good experience maybe you're just going to you know tone down the difficulty a little bit um always triggers the tutorial resets automatically after a while maybe you want to put your pitch material in s of the game so you don't have to leave the game and go back to the game uh if you have images in there so there's a bunch of things you can do uh it makes sense early on to put this uh in your build and maybe just have some cool some simple flag to turn on and turn off uh to get your conference build always up to date and always sort of carry that forward because it's going to come in handy a bunch of times and the last one is uh you're going to talk to a lot of people and a lot of people are going to watching because you're sort of operating in this queue if you can make people laugh that's a real good plus it'll make approaching more people easy because oh they're having fun and then you come to them and they're interested in what you're doing um this may be sort of hard if you have a serious game like nowhere profit which is this do post-apocalyptic uh um experience thing

um but what you can do is you have If you're sort of earlier you can have temp graphics and have them be funny so what I did is I had these mustach carrying dudes they're obviously temp like I don't need to explain to people that these are not the final Graphics but they're fun like whenever they appeared people had a good time so it's be possible to add some levity even if it's sort of a serious game you have to decide if that's something you want to do all right so that's a quick overview of the preparation let's get to the approach but before we do that let's take a deep breath because once you're going to hit the show floor um you need all the energy you can you can get you can have you need to be excited but first you need to find your people uh what you can do is you can look for people for games that have a similar genre similar mechanics or a similar setting so if you make a shooter just look for people that play as Shooters if you play have a card game look for similar card games if you have

a postapoc postapocalyptic game I can never say this right postapocalyptic if you make a post-apocalyptic game look for similar games and then um you approach um and approaching these people is uh is not as hard as it sounds again you sort of have to be in the right mood I think I'm I'm slightly extroverted but still it's it always cost some energy which why we need to be really refreshed when we get there and then be friendly that's what it comes down to hi uh I have a game do you want to see the game be excited about your game if you're not excited you will not be able to get anybody involved they don't care then but also be excited about the game you're at because you're at somebody else's booth and people are there for that game so if I'm at like the Hearthstone Booth I've played HearthStone for way too long uh research um but then I was excited I could tell talk to people about Hearthstone and sort of lead from that to my game game so hey you like

hearstone uh I'm working on a card game and something about hearstone that really bugged me is that you sort of have to grind for cards and sort of makes the deck building very restrictive so I made a single player card game that fixes that are you interested and that sort of worked really well for me to tie in sort of my game to the game I'm at um as mentioned be friendly be doubly friendly because you're at somebody else's Booth you're not trying to get into any trouble you know you're just a guest as everybody else if somebody asks you to leave or stop it then you probably just do there's going to be enough players around so that's the approach uh to get people to play just ask them if they want to play u hand them the thing let them play 5 to 10 minutes um and after you're done keep it simple ask them for one thing only uh hey thank you for playing please um uh follow me on Twitter or check out the game wish list on Steam whatever it is give them one thing to do and give them something to sort of remind them where to do it um what I tried to do uh in the

beginning is to ask for newsletter subscriptions because I like newsletters and I had this clipboard with me and I had like I wanted to write the all the emails on there and that did not work at all because it make me made me look like the pollster like one of the guys you see in the mall who ask you political questions and nobody likes those guys um so that you know went in the bag real quickly but try to give them something to do all right and those again as I said earlier in making friends if any of them are really interested try and hold on to them maybe ask them if they want to be better testers maybe they can get a key if they test for a while whatever you're going to do try and grab them and hold on to them so there's a queue you can approach the queue you can make the queue play and you'll have 5 to 10 minutes of play time but if that's not long enough um you may want to look at the stragglers these are sort of the people that are around the booth you're at say around Hearthstone but they're not standing in line they're just waiting or like watching the screens uh and these people have time for longer sort of play set they're not sort of moving and going to get somewhere

specific um so you can approach them hey hstone my game let them play if they're interested you have a longer session and you have more time for questions afterwards and usually because it's sort of a relaxed uh more relaxed environment uh it also works a lot better to sort of get them uh to sort of subscribe or get them to do something on the spot instead of sort of given them something to do afterwards and also it sort of seems to be easier to give people the headphones here CU they're not moving they're usually sort of standing somewhere specific but that sort of depends on how you run it I guess all right press so we're on the go we have everything mobile uh we can talk to press um on the big events you can look for the Press badges uh here at GDC there this little media stripe for Gamescom they have a sort of like slightly pink badge uh if you know what it looks like you can spot it so if you see some from press you can just go hi I'm making a card game are you interested in card games and then sort of give them the the pitch um here again stay friendly stay

professional um you don't have to if they're like no I'm in a hurry or no I don't care just I'll be we're sort of on the on the time um all right so be friendly be respectful and try and get their contact contact details try to give them something but they may have gotten so many cards so many seen so many games they may not be doing the followup so if you get their contact details you're in charge charge of the follow-up and that's you know more value um influences um are sort of hard to spot cuz they don't have special badges but if you know who's there and what they who what they look like you can reach out on social media and go like hey I'm around I can come to where you are and show you my game that's really useful again they want to play something so give them something to play and if you can give them something maybe some merge you've got a few t-shirts you can hand to them they can raffle off whatever you want to do uh but uh that's all the goals I've got so far so once you've done this you've talked to

players you let them play you talk to press you talk to influencers you're done well not quite you still have the wrap-up to do uh as mentioned you need to follow up with your contexts say hi thank it was great meeting you um let's stay in touch here's a build of the game maybe send press people a key whatever it's going to be uh if you have people subscribe to a newsletter uh send out a newsletter say hey welcome new fans maybe you've taken some good pictures of the sort of of the event and sort of the fans you played you can put that in there that'll make people more likely to share um or you do something like this and make a talk about it um all right so to wrap it up because I sort of have to race through this um find out what you uh find out where you're going and prepare accordingly make sure your game and all your materials are of good to go on the fly yeah have your cards in a pocket and know which pocket they're in have the cards you get in another pocket so you don't sort of go like wait where where's everything um and approach no way your audience go and be excited that helps be

just loving a game and being excited sort of infects people so and uh that's it I'm at the end and I'm going to finish with one clear call to action follow me on Twitter [Applause]