The Golden Rule of Game Promotion: No One Cares About Your Game

[Music] thank you I'm really honored to be speaking to this audience a room full of the most talented most creative most hard-working game developers and are not also only honored to be speaking to you also a bit terrified of reading the talk of my title of my talk which is oh no one cares about your game there should have been a big like explosion gun sound but didn't didn't quite go off but you get the gist um this is not only I mean the good news is that of course people care about your games and the even better news is that I think this no one cares about the game mindset is one of the most helpful sentences and like mantras I've learned in my marketing career and I hope in the next half an hour I can explain to you how

it's hopefully also helpful to you so how this talk came about is that I think in the recent years generally marketing games marketing has gotten a lot better people just got more professional took it more seriously there's more talks online more resources and there's just great stuff where you can figure out how to set up your steam page that's guides how to plan a marketing campaign how to do tick tocks all of that is getting great I think what's sometimes a bit missing is the qualitative aspect so you don't only do things right you make them good how do you make them connect with people so there was a bit the idea and the basis for this talk like some guidelines how you just get the right quality of whatever communication you put out so it's kind of an attempt of a system that is a quality check for communication and assets my name is Thomas reisnecker I'm the co-founder of future Friends games we are Indie Games PR agency but we're also Indie Games publisher in my career I've worked over 100 games I stopped counting it's probably a lot more um some of our clients are games like

vampire survivors the Forgotten City X1 what they call the best game ever made Rock detective um so a lot of different Indie titles and what we do for these games is quite different I really believe that every PR campaign that is really good is quite tailored for the game and for the needs and for the times so sometimes they do press upgrade sometimes influences stuff we make store Pages we make tick tocks try to go trending a lot um do Reddit posts loads of different things so I hope like that knowledge across loads of different games across a lot of different disciplines is going to be helpful for the talk for you so let's talk about the main topics for today first is The Avengers problem of course and then secondly we talk about how this no one cares mindset is going to be helpful at a micro level but also like on a macro campaign level so let's Dive Right In and not to be dramatic but we need to talk about the Avengers problem um I think it's one of the course why a

lot of communication is held back a little bit from game developers and agencies and it could be better and resonate with people easier and I think understanding the core of the problem is going to be really helpful so we just imagine a game developer a marketing PR person just someone who starts promoting the game and what you do naturally if you start doing that you will copy what you already know very human thing makes sense that's a good starting point the problem with marketing API is the most stuff that you see that is marketed at you is the big stuff it's the Avengers it's the last of us it's the God of Wars It's the AAA games it's the one percent that you see that are really really big but if you think about how those campaigns work they put you put out like a little teaser tweet and people go crazy and then you put on the first teaser trailer and everybody goes wild and then you have another trailer and everybody knows every scene and analyzes it and then the next one if you build up hype and more hype hype and then you launch and it's like a big explosion and that's really

great and that's just not how it works for like 99 of all games so I think understanding that you unless you work on those games or those big things you're just gonna have a very different experience promoting your stuff and to put that a bit more into context and I think to make it easy understand if we imagine we're at a music festival and we're trying to reach this person that's our customer um and in the festival context is someone we want to make friends with because they look cool um we have a quite different position than the band the band is like the AAA games because the people in the audience they show up for them they already know a little bit about what this band does probably they're gonna watch them do a five minute drum solo because what else are they going to do there here anyway they get bombarded with that information no matter if they want they're going to pay attention if the band wants to charge them or make them turn they're going to go along with it because they just have this real power of being in the spotlight whereas you again 99 of all definitely

all indie games for probably a lot of double A games as well or smaller triplet games they really have to work from a quite different point of view because you just like a random person in the audience and you try to reach that other person so if you want to get their attention you probably have to stand out immediately you probably have like when they look over you've got like one second to do something that's not worthy or funny your catches their eye they might turn around and forget you again immediately um so you really have to just start from a different point of view and and work different to get the attention on you and the other problem is once you've convinced them and once you've got their attention you they maybe tell their friend that's next to them or two friends but then there's still the whole other crowd that has like never heard of you and you still got to convince so I think that's kind of the mindset how I approach PR marketing for indie games um and now we look how we can make that work on a micro level and what I mean by micro level is basically everything you put out it could be a Reddit post it could be an

email it could be your trailer all form of communication and I hope those four rules that we're going to go through the no one cares about your game rules they're going to help you whenever you do those things kind of like as a checklist to keep those things in mind um and make sure your communication is Avengers proof so you make sure you treat it like the person in the crowd and you don't treat it from a triple a perspective the very first rule is get to the point quick and that's probably not a big surprise you've probably heard this in other marketing talks but I think it's really really important and as running an agency a big part of my job is just telling people this get to the point quick it happens all the time you probably heard it indie game makes a trailer it starts like you know with a logo and then another logo and then it's environment shorts and then 90 of the people are gone so front loading most of your assets and communication makes a lot of sense you show immediately what you have within the first few seconds you want to get your point across

um what I've also like observed and learned over the years that for some games it's really easy some games have a really obvious gameplay hook and you just show them the beginning and that makes sense but there's other games that have interesting Concepts interesting books that are maybe not gameplay driven but you still want to get a point across in a few seconds so here's an example of the launch trailer for detective free it's a gif that we made out of the trailer but it gets this one point across and it's going to start now that's it you just zoom on the Frog it zooms out it goes on the scooter Rock detective jumps away it looks a bit weird it really gets the point of this game across immediately if you like like quirky humor if you like that art style you probably don't need to know straight away that it's a narrative game or like an adventure game that's also interesting but like the big selling point of this game is just the humor of it so we tried to get that across in the starting scene and of course like you know no opening nothing it's just like

zooms right in sometimes you want to get a point across that is Maybe a bit less obvious and then you need to not get to the point straight away but you need to have something that keeps people hooked long enough so this is a game called Chrome drone VR it's like a robot sword fighting VR game and we made a post about a new loading screen in the loading screen got 300 000 views and how we did that was we said we added the most useless and best feature to our game yet so that gets people hooked immediately and we showed a nice gameplay in the background so we tricked people into like staying on there obviously the tick tocks it also goes with the sound which is not on here um and then we show the loading screen bit success um you also see a lot of the examples I'm going to bring today are tick tocks uh the reason for that is Tick Tock is really really good in telling you if people are interested in your stuff because their main metric is watch time so as soon as people swipe away and don't watch your post you're

out but those posts that have a good watch time they go trending so it's a very good indicator to test out footage or gameplay Hooks and see if they're interesting if you want to like see more how tick tocks are made and learn more about that there's two really good talks one is from Grace cards there's some future friends as well and the other one from Jared 10 was from this TVC about how the cult of the Lamb Tick Tock so I can highly recommend if you want to more more about just Tick Tock specifically getting to the point quick is also essential on store pages I always say steam steam store Page eShop page your store Page is your most single important marketing asset 90 of all people that ever gonna see your game doesn't matter how much marketing you do they come through a store Page they just randomly stumble upon it it's a really big user base this is how most people find your game so getting a lot of things across really really quickly is extremely important here we see townscaper for example it says Instant town building toy you immediately know it's not a complicated game you know

it's a toy it's a very short sentence it indicates it's a small game a small price so you get a lot of information across quick but sometimes also getting to point across quick meaning getting the point across slow so if you look like at a strategy game or like a crafting game that is really mechanics heavy and deep you often see on the successful one on the steam page they have a wall of text that's obviously not getting to the point break but that just immediately makes clear that this is going to be a really deep game so I think just keeping in mind like what point you want to get across and what format you want to use is really important the second rule make things work for newcomers that's probably like the most underrated the most often forgotten rule again I think that comes from the whole Avengers thing I think indie games or general game developers are really good at talking to an audience that's already on board with them because you're used to that you know how to update people and keep them in the loop but making things that work for newcomers constantly is quite hard and also can just be a bit boring if your

game developer you've already made this for seven years but keep in mind there's still so so many people that have never seen your game so one example I want to talk about here is vampire survivors where we help making the launch trailer and this of course was a quite specific problem um because remember survivors wasn't Early Access and then went into 1.0 but it's already sold millions of copy into Early Access so I think a quite natural thing a lot of people would do is to really focus on making clear what's new in the 1.0 update but for vampire survivors we knew that on launch day there's going to be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people there have never heard of the game and they're going to find it on Steam that very day so it was really important to make this like two-folded message that works for existing and new players so what we did here is we start off by saying 120 000 positive reviews zero vampires beat a bullet hell if you're an existing player you see the number for use you're like yeah I'm one of them like hit you see the zero vampires which is an intro

there is no one person vampire survivors you probably get that and you think it's funny hopefully and then also in the background you see new characters from the 1.0 updates so that's great if you already played the game if you've never played the game you don't care about the new characters well you probably see the number of reviews and you go like okay that must be a good game you see the zero vampires you probably have no idea what that means but you probably get that it's quite big quirky it's probably funny and you know that's going to be indicating some kind of humor in this game and then be the bulletell explains the gameplay another example of making things work for newcomers again really important on Tick Tock because 90 of your traffic on Tick Tock always come from new people is clone John and VR again there's a post with 900 000 views where we cut the robot's hair so we're just taking apart a little bit and this is like a fake post now with the text um where it says hair cutting this robot and this is how I see a lot of developers how they would post it and that is perfectly fine if you talk to existing players however if you talk to people who have

never seen your game you need to do a lot more framing so what we did here is we say guess I will be our sword fighting game is now robot haircutting Sim so with this short sentence we make clear for someone who has never seen this that this is not a let's play this is not a mod of another game we say it's a VR game we say it's usually so fighting game and we say it's our game so they know it's the developer account and then we show the developer playing it on top so immediately also visually to be our game so just with a simple sentence and a bit of extra visuals you have set so much more context and really get people in that don't know your games um you lose people immediately if they don't feel included and they feel like this message isn't for them then they will just move on the same principle also works in emails this is the launch uh the announcement email for a game called Europa that we work on and again because it's completely new we just try to establish context and get people on board so we say it's from X1 publisher similar game

we say it's Ghibli inspired in the headline um also really important on all the links we say this is new I can highly recommend that if you email press influencers also players that may be on the newsletter they often miss stuff they often didn't read the last email because they were on holiday or they just missed it or they just skimmed over it so just making like really clear what's new it makes a lot of sense to feel people more included of course there's nuancities like to most things like how much do you need to really explain everything to newcomers if it's your steam page if it's on Tick Tock it's like super important if it's for your Discord or a newsletter people have signed up to that so they probably know a little bit what your game is um so there's new ones but again today I really focused on the other side of it because a lot of game developers are quite good at talking to existing players but I think are less good of talking to new people the third rule is think of the environment that doesn't mean the planet which you should also do but in this context it means more that whenever we

make any kind of asset any kind of communication I really try to imagine who is going to watch this and how I think it's really easy to fall into trap like you know you make a trailer you put it in your big 4K screen you press play and you watch every second perfectly nobody watches trailers like that how most people watch anything it's like sitting on their sofa they probably watch Emily in Paris at the same time they're like on their phone they switch between Twitter and Tick Tock they maybe talk to the partner on the side and to think about what they're not to order so if you make any asset emulate communication I think like making it visually and like text wise easy to read is essential here we see example for goodlets which I think is great like a really short small looping video like it's really straight to the point um what I also really try to do for really important assets is that I put them in my Video Edit to my iPad and I just came through them I I try to look if I look at them really quickly and in a small screen does it

still read nice visually because this is how most people are going to see this before they actually pay attention to it also thinking of the environment makes a lot of sense in terms of what platforms people use this is a game called figment too I think they were like okay successful on most social media did a great job well one thing that really really took off for them was Tick Tock and the reason for that is because it's a game with musical boss fights where the boss bosses are singing which you're gonna hear in a second and that's of course Grace this is the one social media platform where people watch with sound so if you know something like that and then honing in on Tick Tock makes a huge difference to keep the environment in mind when people watch it everything is rule number four is know your next step this is a sales funnel this looks boring this is boring but it is helpful

um you may be seen it it basically means first you try to get awareness and then you get the interest of people and you try to like funnel that down then funnel and in the end they're gonna buy your stuff or wish list or however you want to make them do um and I think it's really really important that you always know when you put something out what is the next thing a person should do you know should you wishlist should you find more info should you share with your friends and where they can do that stuff so I've seen it like too many times that you see a trending post but there's just no link to it or no more information to find however this is a really good tweet from ublet's launch and you see no call to action because it's in the next tweet because I think call to actions can be really cringe especially a lot of marketing people could push for that guilty happens but I think it's really important on socials that you are aware was like an acceptable amount to like push information also like on Tick Tock if you ask people to like hey there's the link and you put it on screen like

they're not going to do it just have to link in your bio just make sure there's some more information to find but be a bit more subtle about it and just see how it works on this specific platform so the micro level checklist does your communication get to the point in the first few seconds does it work for newcomers keep the platform and environment in mind and also does it Point The Next Step and now we go to the macro level now that we go to the whole campaign campaign planning and think about how did no one cares mindset can be helpful again just showing your game is incredibly helpful and I think something people don't do often enough millions of copies every day there's new people finding this game every day you see new people in the steam forums you if you go through GDC and ask people there's going to be loads of people that have never heard of this game it's one of the biggest indie games where the games developers conference like I can't overstate how big the pool of people is that don't know your game even though if it feels repetitive to you to just basically introduce against them again

another example is x01 where we had like loads of trending Tick Tock posts five six posts back to back all millions of views half the comments what's the game called it always reads new people this is another few examples of games you've worked on one is called The Last clock grinder the other one sick is Cosmic Adventure they both had trending posts before and multiple platforms when we started working on them the first thing we did was just like let's just make two posts that just introduce the game and they've been trending again the reason for that is again the people on Reddit that saw it this time maybe were narrated months ago maybe they weren't honeymoon maybe they didn't check Reddit there is so many examples where people just come to a platform you have just missed it um where's the game developer I think it can just feel like you know you've done Reddit you had five trending posts and you think everybody knows it absolutely not there's loads of people who will not know it that's also another good example of a game called shotgun Farmers which I

think is one of the best tick tocks accounts out there I can highly recommend um and they've got loads of different posts that really go into the community talk to them introduce new features really cool but you will also see loads of posts that just introduce the game or just like the history of the developer how he quit the shop to start up making this game and again every time this post goes out they can go big and they can reach new people that have just not been following you a bonus rule know your money shot I think knowing what is the one shot that is really really good for your game can't like change your whole campaign um obviously you then should use that one shot you know for your store page for your launch email for everything you put out that's important and I think what we've done recently is use tick tock kind of a way to beta test and find out what this good shot is for clones are in dangerous they're not extra one we made like 50 tick tocks posts and you suddenly notice like whenever we use this certainty you know a very similar one we always go trending because the tick tock algorithm is so

good of like keeping track of who keeps watching or who swipes away so we kind of with that figured out what is our money shot what is the thing that the shot that people really want and we purposely put them in launch trailers we purposely start I'll launch tick tocks with that and they see by the Numbers it did pay off two million views nine million views so it can really help to select use tick tock as a beta test for for your best shots now we're going to a PR campaign of evolution where I think a PR campaign can look like with this no one knows a game mindset firstly you've got to make a game that's pretty hard but once we're over that we look at a regular PR campaign that's actually a slide from one of my older GDC talks and it's quite that's basic like you Reveal Your Game you do some PR stuff in the middle and then you launch it and I think the next step in the direction is rinse repeat make sure you keep repeating what your game is recycle trailers you know change a little bit put them out again try different platform we also had examples

where people launched a game on Xbox and switch and then they go to PlayStation and all their marketing just talks about the new features of the PlayStation version but that doesn't make sense because the PlayStation people have never ever seen your game for them it's a completely new game so you got to treat it like that again just explain them what your game is and the fourth step is adapt and I think that's the whole of a really really good masterful PR marketing campaign I can't overstate like I think doing like step one two and three is incredibly hard like just doing the stuff repeatedly is like 90 of the work and it's hard to pull off and well done if you do I think if you want to go to 100 and make it perfect just keeping an eye open what works and honing into that can make a huge difference with campaigns where we tried loads of different things and suddenly imager really takes so we did loads of interposts we put out a demo kind of not thinking much about this demo takes off it's like cool let's do another demo and a preview version and push the demo on Tick Tock so just like planning your campaign great link being flexible

really really big plus and the last kind of like micro level learning for today or like recommendation is understanding the reach of multiplayers because no one knows about our game we want to make sure more people know about it so we need to reach as many people as we can and those are all multiplayers probably know most of them and they all have a ceiling if you post on Tick Tock you can post quite a lot you can get millions of views to your um to your account and probably like high thousands of like people to your to your store page if you press outrage it's great for profile building but maybe it's going to be less thousands of people that actually then go to your store page so all those things have different ceilings um don't assume that's not scientifically proven that's just like gut feeling from working loads of different games um and they all have a different importance but the main point I want to make on this slide that's one thing that has a lot more reason than anything else and that's your store Page can be a steam page can be a PlayStation console

page it can be a VR page whatever it is the store Page is the one thing where you have incredible reads like way better than the others so that that doesn't mean like you shouldn't do the other stuff because the other stuff is super important to get featuring on store Pages if you have lots of social media followers if you do great press Outreach you maybe get better featuring from Nintendo you maybe get into a Nintendo Direct if you have loads of wish lists to trigger the steam algorithm so you've got to do all those things anyway but I think just like being aware that the store Page is the one thing that can make the biggest difference it's important if you have to prioritize if you have only a day left and you can decide if you send another press release or you could improve your steam switch please improve your steam page so I think that's the point I want to get across here know what the main multiplayers are so the micro level checklist show your game show it a lot on the campaign planning keep reminding people forever there is no such thing as Vibe it's really almost impossible to build hype

for an indie game because most people keep forgetting about it that's why wishlist is important so they get an email on day one reuse recycle rinse repeats release your assets record them again show your games as many times as you can show as many features as you can don't feel like you can spam people it's almost impossible for an indie game it's it's possible with military multi-million dollar marketing budgets it's not possible if you're just like a person that puts out stuff embrace the chaos and adapt and figure out your multipliers and then prioritize accordingly thank you very much for listening um I should remind you to fill out the evaluation forms I'm also going to be taking questions and I also want to wish you a really nice rest of your GDC thank you [Applause] if anyone got questions you can walk up to the microphone and otherwise I'm also

going to be outside later cool hi uh thank you for the talk it was actually amazing and I've learned a lot here but one thing that I wanted to ask was do you think there are like some type of advices you can do to integrate the design process of your game to better Market or I guess like try to like optimize the marketing process as a whole I think I mean it definitely helps if your game kind of like markets itself like it's not for old game types it's going to be hard for narrative games but I think you you're gonna give yourself just like a way better chance if you have something that's easily marketable so I think like building a game with marketing API in mind is extremely helpful thank you um I have two questions I mean thank you thanks again really really nice talk to the pre-reveal I mean once you have not revealed the game yet could you have two one two insights there is it just finding out you know like what are the

right visuals what will people pick up and the second is is there a way that you you say show your game show your game but is it is there a time where you put up your steam page too early I mean all of a sudden it takes one like you know what I mean it's like is it one year is two years too much is it one and a half years like that's your experience there it's a really good question and I think it's also something that like changed over time I think what we see at the moment is game announcements that go big in the beginning and you get a lot of traffic straight away you get something that we call wish list velocity so your daily wish list sudden really really high um so with that in mind I think it can be too early but if you have a really small game that probably you won't have that big reveal anyway in that case I think I would just go early and start building from there um especially with store pages is more tricky I think on socials it's like pretty hard to be too early because you can always say I'm just working on that

it's just a prototype so I think as soon as it's interesting and you communicate that this is not all finished or you might be trying out things but you just start building an audience I think you almost can't be too early for that I'm great I'm grandfather and lovely to meet you all thank you for the the lovely talk it was really useful and really practical um I really like that message about the fact that people you know don't really care about your game and I think that that really resonates um do you have any good examples of like things that you've done where you've kind of got people really hooked in that maybe they started to kind of come you know care a bit more about those games and really kind of brought them in close and maybe could you go into a bit more detail with some of those yeah of course like accept before if there's loads of examples where once you get people hooked in they want to know more and they're really super interested like just like again on vampire survivors there's it's a massive fan base you have a lot of really really hardcore fans and

they look for really like inside jokes in the games in the codes like they just find everything so there's obviously a certain point where people get interested and they they do care um but I think often that's not the problem for the game developers because again that's that your experience how you as a consumer usually interact with those things once you're interested you know how to keep up to date but the big majority of people just getting them on board is to challenge hello there I have a question for you that I first of all I enjoyed your presentation but I'm thinking about how we as a team can develop our game our game is free and it has educational resources as well but how as a team and here in America how can we really target market this as a free game for educational purposes yeah I think that's like obviously a

specific Niche where a lot of those like more classic gaming channels are maybe like harder to to reach the interact with I would think there's definitely Avenues if you find the right subreddit I'm sure you could have success and again Tick Tock I think is a a great platform because it's so specific how it targets people and if you're a bit personal I'm sure you could find people that are interested specifically in that kind of game more than like traditional like YouTubers or gaming side so I would probably look into like social media that's good at targeting for your case thank you very much cool I think they were all the questions and yeah I'm going to be outside if anybody else wants to have a chat thank you very much foreign [Music]