(Opportunity) Cost Effective Marketing & PR for Indies

[Music] okay uh hello uh this is opportunity cost effective marketing n PR for Indies uh my name is Chris DWI uh and I don't know I do a lot of stuff um so what to expect from this talk um it's kind of a different talk from most marketing talks you're used to uh this is kind of a more of a mindset and emotional talk um so yeah who am I uh is going to be the first thing I talk about uh what is marketing and PR like whatever we all know but I'm going to talk about it a little bit and then uh also my approach to marketing and PR um there's going to be no stats uh during this talk and there's going to be no [ __ ] charts uh so no steam spy ones um so this is me uh I don't know like a couple months ago um and this is what I used to do um I used to be an account manager and brand strategist for Consumer packaged Goods

so uh the algra allergy uh Brand Packaging uh I'm pretty responsible for a lot of the strategy behind um you know kind of those USB descriptors and so on uh Philips colon Health if you look at the back of the box I've written some copy about digestive probiotic caps um it's very exciting stuff uh but I didn't find it was totally fulfilling um so I started doing video games and uh over the last two years or so this is what I've been up to uh I've been working with gone home for consoles uh the wonderful Folks at Fini um n++ Thumper and currently the signal from tolva I also work for the best video game distributor in the entire business hiio uh so marketing and PR um it's weird and it's kind of dumb uh so basically

you have a player and you have your thing um and theoretically there should just be a straight line between getting the player to purchase your thing or find your thing there's this kind of weird thing called marketing and PR in between there uh that happens in between and it takes the form of press articles uh trailers screenshots gifs uh copy on your steam page anything uh so it kind of looks like that when you zoom in a little bit but let's zoom in a a little bit more whoa okay uh it gets kind of really screwed up um so yeah marketing's really complex and weird um these lines can represent anything you know your game getting announced and then being quiet for a while or having a screenshot or maybe you release a trailer that doesn't get picked up um a lot of weird things can happen over the course so what can you even do about any of this you can start early uh with

basically before you even make a game there's a talk in an article by Adam Saltzman and Ryan Clark who are two vastly more intelligent human beings than me uh about how to decide what to make um if you're not designing the game already you should be uh looking at these articles to decide what to make and basically find something that is kind of the in between between your creative uh and Commercial desires um so the second thing you could do is you can do everything um so you can register a brand uh and brand Twitter Instagram Tumblr website Big Cartel twitch Channel Discord Channel titig Source threed you can create a mailing list and write in-depth content for it that's bi-weekly that's syndicated on the blog you should probably do some screenshots maybe like pick some fan art blah blah BL blah uh send press releases and coordinate assets for these big announcements months and months and months in advance uh you should feed the press a d distribute link so at every chance you get so by the end of your development

cycle you have this huge list of people who already want to play your game uh you should go to every single Network this or uh every single event this includes PA West Pax South PAX East indic indic East E3 GDC and all the stuff in Europe I don't know about uh you need to network you need to push the brand you need to get feedback uh you need to do gifts like tons and tons of gifts um you need to do also a podcast with your staff and have developer guests and you like talk and talk and talk whoa okay uh you need to be making a video game okay like that's hard enough uh and you totally can't do all of this so uh it's time to like kind of realign yourself uh using my idol Patrick sesy um how do you waste as little time effort money as possible uh with this huge checklist uh the first thing you could do is pass it off to someone else you could hire a marketing and PR person uh you could hire me or one of the other great individuals who

do marketing and PR you could have a publisher um but that's not what this talk is really about this talk is about you doing it um game developers are some of the most creative most intelligent hardworking individuals I've ever met and they say to me a lot well I can't think about Marketing in PR that's something you do uh and I definitely believe that you can do it on your own without me so I'm trying to put myself out of a job basically uh so the first part of what I do is I immerse myself in a video game um for a developer this means you have to get out of your own way and get out of a developer mentality uh this is kind of weird but first thing is like kind of immerse yourself in all the things that you did when you first started making the game look at old design docs prototypes notes uh you know just basically go through your Google Drive have someone interview you about your

game you'll find and but make sure they're like somebody outside of the industry they'll probably ask you a lot of interesting questions like oh where did this game come from or uh why did you make this game and basically from that a lot of interesting nuggets will come out that you don't immediately think of as a developer who's working on your game every single day uh yeah this is weird but you should read some video game forums uh maybe like neoaf or something read the comments uh which kind of sucks but you should you should kind of see what everybody's saying about your game or anything around your game go to GameStop I don't know like just go hear what consumers are talking about and how they view games because a lot of times developers start to forget as you're in the middle of a very very heavy development cycle throw out your assumptions um I know you really really think that that like procedurally generated Terrain that you

spent weeks and weeks and weeks on is really really cool but it might not be so cool to the consumer so you have to kind of divide yourself from these things that you've put your blood uh sweat and tears into and kind of throw out your assumptions so the the chunk of what I do uh when I start a project is kind of this understanding phase um and this is basically arming yourself with a ton of information that you just aren't thinking about the first thing is a visual and verbal brand analysis uh this is a really fancy way of talking about putting all your cards on the table uh this is basically looking at every single node of you know press uh your own personal marketing it could be copy from your steam page um it could be tweets that you sent it could be something on your blog all this stuff uh kind of creates a visual and verbal brand image so here's an example of like

a really simple one I did for Thumper um we kind of looked at the key visuals and some screenshots and the copy that they were using um as you can see like Thumper is like a super angry looking game so when we were kind of talking about the social media voice for launch we kind of thought like it might be fun to have like kind of an edgy uh Voice or tone that kind of fit with the brand uh so you know we were doing stuff like saying hey we've gotten some reports that people's thumbs are bleeding from Thumper too bad uh and it kind of came from a lot of this kind of copy that was already written and this brand image uh for n Plus+ I kind of was this is for their steam launch uh n++ was a game that launched on PS4 previously and then later came to steam uh I kind of looked at their visual identity and what they were putting out there um and also their verbal and basically so what we found was in every single point of uh

you know blogs copy we were talking about the game in different ways uh so we were wondering if people could really like kind of grasp what the game was about so we knew that we had to kind of come up with a new uh consistent verbal identity so it was kind of a really helpful exercise to pick apart every single part of M plus Plus's verbal identity uh the next part is a competitive audit I don't know if that's spelled right oh well um but uh this is going to feel weird but it's totally okay trust me uh so your competitors are a lot of times your friends your colleagues people you respect um it's totally okay to look at them as competitors um and it's weird uh but so basically what I do is kind of like take objectives so in this case for gone home for consoles we were looking at a sub brand stry and a sub brand is kind of a

uh secondary uh you know descriptor for a game so for gone home we finally landed on console edition uh for the console version but we kind of did like an analysis of all these different competitors uh which were indie games that had previously released on Steam that went to PS4 um it's a very simple exercise but it was extremely helpful in understanding how consumers and how developers see games as they're re-released uh for Thumper we kind of looked at uh Ryan your game Crypton The Necromancer um and a bunch of other VR games cuz we wanted to kind of see how people were seeing the uh the uh like music genre um and obviously like Thumper is a thing of its own um but it was still really helpful to kind of understand what had released and what was coming out um and then for M plus plus we kind of did a a three-fold thing we were looking at what kind of genres that M Plus+ could fall

into so Platformers time attack minimalist Graphics uh we were looking at different prices and by looking at the competitive set we got a good idea of where we were going to be stacking on the steam version so uh the next thing I do is a SWAT um and it's not Keo Reeves from speed though that's awesome movie as well uh strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats um this is a basic exercise that I use to kind of uh just basically analyze a game uh from a marketing point of view so this isn't really a gameplay uh or design exercise so much as it is thinking of like as Adam salsman has talked about kind of this tip of the iceberg that only consumers see of your game that little tip of the iceberg that they see how do you uh identify what each of these things are so uh I felt a little uncomfortable like sharing me like ripping apart a bunch of other

games so I'm going to use Bubsy as an example uh I don't know why you're laughing it's such a good game uh so yeah so strengths uh Bubsy has flight exploration this is something that like was completely pretty much unseen in the platformer uh genre as of main 1993 um this was a competitive difference between Mario and uh Sonic um attitude and voice acting um Mario and Sonic were both silent Bubsy had awesome onliners uh World building there was like a really weird alien world where they were stealing all the yarn and Bubsy was a bobcat and there's all this weird stuff it was cool um and there was a multitude of death animations um this may seem super lame and weird for us like in 2017 but back in 1993 I could totally see that on the back of the box um weaknesses was like the game was like really floaty and unpredictably hard um

and kind of bad sometimes but whatever um and we were kind of like living in a posts Sonic World so you kind of think that people are going to make these brand associations between Bubsy and Sonic and direct comparisons um opportunities though uh it was on the SNES first only um you know you think of like all these kids that are buying Mario and they go to their friend's house with the Genesis they see Sonic they can't get it cuz they only have SNES it's kind of like a it fills a gap in the uh Marketplace and there was also a release Gap during the time that Bubsy came out um I don't know some other game like day of the tentacle or something came out around them but I don't know um threats uh so yeah so like on the flip side though it could be seen as just like this kind of Sonic uh ripoff on SNS which might be a detractor um and also Sonic CD was coming out later in the year so it's just a really uh simple

exercise of kind of compartmentalizing uh different ways of looking at a game from the outside so we kind of come back to this list and it's still really ridiculous and seems like a lot of stuff but now instead of just crossing off everything we just cross off some of the things that we don't feel are right for our game after we've looked at our competitive set and we kind of understand what they're doing after we've kind of understood our consumers and what they need um and you can kind of eliminate a lot of these things so that you have the actual mental and emotional bandwidth to do it uh yourself without hiring me uh so like some results of this are things like this uh so like for the night in the woods team they identified that their characters were probably some of the most memorable of all time uh so they created a May plushy which is going to be sold out for the for able future in Forever um for Overland we created a

first Access program that basically enlisted players to buy Overland early on hiio and get involved and get involved with the forums and have extra content uh but we branded it and marketed in such a way that it engages people to the brand strengths uh for brigador they identified that they had like a really cool world so they actually uh had a novel written and then an audio novel uh made from that novel uh for thimble weed Park Ron Gilbert has like an incredible following so he decided that like a development blog was like a really good outlet and he's kept up that development Lo blog since uh their Kickstarter launch years ago uh then for gone home for console edition we were kind of thinking of uh interesting ways to pitch it to the Press um and what do you do with a game that's been out for like three years so uh it was mostly Steve but we we uh pitch basically the

first ever Cho on gone home and then had him do a speedrun uh in office at IGN um and these are all things that kind of I think really only come from an exercise like basically looking at your competitive set and looking at your game in a different way um so yeah so basically to recap you immerse yourself and kind of prepare yourself to get out of development mode and get into this weird psychological marketing mode uh two you understand your game objectively so you start to learn ways to look at your game without a kind of bias and three you execute on what's what makes sense and uh what you have budget for um and that's really it and if you're interested in talking to me ever about marketing or PR or whatever uh that's my Twitter

to mic oh uh if anybody has any questions uh feel free to come up to the mic in the [Music] middle any questions anybody want me to do their marketing plan on the spot that's that's fine I'll do it hey my name is odad cheron I'm speaking on a similar topic on Thursday at 300 p.m. uh ultra low lowbudget indie game developer so this is my Shameless plug and there's a round table about uh lowbudget in the game development and marketing I'll be happy if you join us and speak with other developers about this would I yeah Thursday at 3 4 p.m. yeah yeah probably yeah I think so cool thanks hello um a lot of your talk was about console or PC do you have any tips on mobile marketing or no I'm sorry like

I just uh like I just um I don't touch mobile like it's so like this is the thing that I want to also uh kind of leave with you is that I was marketing for baby Therapeutics eczema creams and for tampons and now I'm marketing for independent video games I use the same exact theorems and they seem to be working so far so I think like there's intricacies you need to learn about each Marketplace um but if you follow a similar template I think that you'll um you'll be okay with the same path well thanks yeah hi there um hi the I feel like in the current NDC in um a lot of times the hook or the unique selling proposition is sometimes just seen as a crutch especially if you're using lowbudget Graphics or inexpensive Graphics do you have any um uh any ideas on how to Gap that hurdle get get what herd the US

USP well specifically uh the USP is often seen as a crutch as um instead of a hook or something unique it's like oh I get it's this plus this or whatever as opposed to something that's may maybe has um unique game play or a unique experience for the player so I think like a helpful exercise uh and I think uh the question is he's asking about like a unique selling proposition and I think as I understand it like kind of talking about a game comparing it to other games and how do you get like a oneliner that's effective um and I think like a oneliner is really effective for when you're talking to the press or you're talking to other developers um or you are just you know somehow getting your message to Consumers um but you wanted to feel like the thing that you're saying so maybe your game is a mixture of final Fant tactics and uh like Kirby but you don't

say that you want to get that feeling so I would kind of like take each of those elements of your like fake oneliner and then kind of look at the elements from that and look at how you can make it a unique spin on your own I don't know if that answers the question but cool thank you yep hi so you talked about um marketing the game really early in the process but for example I just have now the game as like the World Generation character movement and not much going to thei and all of that so to me it feels like is it too early now to promote my game when there's not much to show in the first place so uh the question is uh like about uh marketing your game early and if there is a point where you're it's too early to promote your game uh I think that like there's a difference between marketing and promotion or PR um and you don't want to be uh promoting

your game too early uh but you do want to be doing marketing so marketing is a lot of kind of the brand thinking and core principles behind everything that you're going to push later on uh through your promotion um PR there could be an entire talk on basically PR timing and promotion timing uh it's incredibly uh critical in when you email press uh like are you emailing them one day before the conference are you emailing them 4 days before the conference when are you giving them assets and review copies um so I think like you shouldn't be promoting your game when you're just starting out um and I think like it's a little addicting right now for developers to share everything that they do um and that's totally okay and it's like one principle of promotion which is like hey I made this prototype I made the Prototype again the Prototype has better graphics look at the physics engine now um and I'm not as big of a fan as that kind of iterative approach as keeping it uh closer to your chest

but everybody has different preferences so all right thank you yep hi how's it going I'm posy it's it's kind of okay yeah it's a um uh I wanted to ask about leveraging uh the development team for marketing and PR purposes um usually when you do do not have any marketing special marketing resources you kind of have to work with the the team to create stuff and the teams tend to be somewhat negative towards marketing and PR um have you found any good ways of leveraging like ex existing activities and like going with the flow trying to find a way to work with the team that's natural to the uh development team to kind of for marketing ends I uh the question was basically how do you uh motivate like a design team to approach marketing and PR I feel like it

was kind of lobbed cuz Ryan and I were just talking about this right before maybe it's like a plant or something but basically like uh it's a design problem Marketing in PR is a game design problem um you are you kind of have your objective which is getting the player to the game uh and you kind of have to figure out how to Veer them in the right way so if you kind of approach it the same way you would approach any other design problem uh I think you can motivate your team to do this um furthermore like I think that like it's it's mostly a mental game and that's kind of what this presentation was hopefully a little bit about is getting yourself out of the mentality that marketing is this super scary uh professional thing because like if I can do it like all you people who are so much smarter than me can definitely do it um so I think it's about framing uh is kind of the answer cool thanks hello um so my question is for the case

of the oneman shop type of situation for the complete single man in the game uh case U do you have any tips around how much you PRN market for the game versus the person as a brand itself uh the question was basically about like a oneperson development team uh how do you how much do you balance basically marketing the game and marketing the developer themselves uh it's a really tricky uh really tricky question and basically I don't think anything can be templated out and copy and pasted from any game so if you look at something like a stardew valley with concerned to ape um I don't remember his name at the time but basically that's kind of a success story right with one developer who yes they were published but they made that game all on their own and they are the uh Figure Head it doesn't always work for every single game that has one developer um so it's

kind of you kind of need to look at different examples and maybe even look at things that have uh failed look for games that have had one uh developer teams that it's just not that in like when you look at it it's not that interesting to you that they're talking about themselves um I think that that's probably a good place to start um and then you can kind of do some soul searching so to speak and kind of evaluate your own personal brand and figure out whether that's right to you know be the thing that you're marketing thanks yeah so I'm curious if you have any quick tips or thoughts on continuing to Market your multiplayer indie game to kind of keep it growing after launch so the question was uh tips for uh marketing a multiplayer game after launch um I've never I think actually worked on a multiplayer game uh worked on like maybe 10 to 15 20 games at this

point um but never a multiplayer game um but I have talked to some people about it and I think that the multiplayer games that are really successful right now um are utilizing content updates and drops um that are consistent uh having a clear voice with your players um and a clear Avenue uh for communication is uh definitely something that's really successful I think if you look at you know kind of a competitive right you look at people or like uh yeah people like Dota 2 right um but you look at games like Dota 2 or any of these big multiplayer games you could probably take that kind of mentality and pair it down for your own um so maybe like if you have like a big content update that you're planning maybe you release different parts of it in like drips rather than one big update something like that I don't know thanks let me know if you want to help out on a multiplay game cool thanks hey man how's it going also still okay I

think yeah um I don't know I guess a couple things one I actually really love that vegan mayonnaise that you marketed it's super awesome the the what the vegan mayonnaise yeah it's so good the vegan oh uh was it naon yeah yeah yeah really um no that was that was a weird project um so my question is uh when marketing and doing PR do you kind of do a dry run where you send it out to a smaller Community or to just close friends or just you know throughout or like what are some I guess tips to better leverage your marketing and get feedback any tips on that so I think the question is mostly about uh like feedback in the early stages and how you utilize that feedback to Market your game um I think like with everything uh it's such a lame response but everything is so uh individual and nothing works for one

developer that would work for another um I think you need to look at your kind of game and the kind of content you have um and kind of do like a similar analysis that I'm kind of putting out here today um and then kind of evaluate whether the feedback that you would get like it depends also if your game's announced or not right like um maybe you you like have some weird kind of like ambiguous mark marketing thing and sorry I didn't catch your name but I'm just going to what's your name uh my name is Ryan Ryan uh so like your friend might be like uh hey I just tried Ryan's new prototype and boy oh boy is that uh crazy like that kind of thing you know like I don't know it's a it's a weird thing I think you should be thinking about marketing always and as I said look at Adam and Ryan's talks to kind of evaluate what you're making and whether it's a thing that is uh viable um that's probably the best at that

stage cool thank you thanks hey I'm Martin we have a time for one more all right thanks for the talk um so I pushed my game on greenl just now and let's not talk about green light because that's a whole other thing but I spent all of the nights before coming to GDC working on a trailer and I kind of want to know what's your process for a trailer because that doing that is damn hard and it's [ __ ] important wait sorry can you repeat so what's your process or what's your thoughts on trailers like how do you go when it comes to coming up with a trailer concept or whatever uh I think like uh the question is about trailers specifically and how you decide what should be in a uh content trailer um so uh I was working on a game that was actually cancelled um and then the publisher picked it back up um so it kind of had this thing where people were really hyped for it we announced it we said we're like you know six months for release and then uh it got cancelled so uh we basically

were like okay this is done then it kind of resurged um and we're like okay well how do we reann this thing in a way that is interesting that people uh won't feel betrayed again because they got excited for it the first time so what we did with the trailer was we did a really personal message um we had the developer get on camera and speak directly to people and say this is definitely happening we gave them a definite release date at the time of the trailer and showed them some gameplay of it and then that was the trailer um so I think like every trailer has very specific needs um and I would just you know say to everybody for everything Beyond trailers always look inside uh sounds so Cory look inside yourself and think about like what what what your game needs uh and then kind of tweak what you're going to do uh based on that all right thanks thank you [Applause]