The Marketing Money Talk: How to Budget Your Indie Game's Promotion Campaign

[Music] thank you so much for coming especially because there's a Zelda talk next door so if you're here I feel very honored um I'm sure we all going to watch it on the world uh let's talk about marketing money okay let's Dive Right In today's talk is about how to budget your Indie Games promotion campaign um and the main reason why I'm giving this talk is because it's one of the most asked questions when I talk to indid devs to self-publish for the first time to talk to Publishers they w't understand budgeting and also people that just make their first commercial game um to be honest when I started writing this talk I pretty quickly figured out why there isn't that much online resources about that specific topic um in my research I found a picture that pretty much like summed up what it feels like trying to make a talk about Indie Games marketing budgeting and not to be dramatic but it's quite similar to that because really when you ask what is

a good marketing budget you might as well ask how long is a piece of string it's a question that's super hard to answer and it wasn't easy to you know give like a default cookie cutter solution so I hope in this talk I can give you a guideline that you can follow but all I would say like take it with a grain of salt those things really depend on the game um before we dive in further just a reminder to please fill out the aviations after and also please turn off your phones okay the second reason we giving a talk about a budgeting isn't that easy is money is weird and you probably you probably know those things but I do want to like highlight them again um money really depends it's usually different it gets you different far depending where you are like if you talk about the salary in a Bay Area compared to like a remote island it's super different um especially in India you're going to wear a lot of hats you there's people that can do their own Tik toks they can do their own press Outreach you maybe have to pay for that if that's not

your cup of tea so there's like a huge spectrum of like budgets that can result from that also money changes you know pre- pandemic inflation goes up all that kind of stuff probably by the time this talk is over the numbers are outdated so like you know I want to give you a rough like guideline but those things will change over time the table of content for today some housekeeping then we talk about free spice it takes about indie game budgeting rules the main part of the talk is like a 10 step kind of like hierarchy where I would recommend to spend the money on it's kind of your best return on investment so you start with the first one spend your money on that and then once it's done you move on to the next one and the next one the next one and then we've got a summary in the end who is this talk for it is for developers that make premium indie games for PC and console like your classic5 to $20 games um it's not meant for you know big investment companies that maybe publish quite a few games that publish 30 Games per year they're going to budget differently or like like bigger

Publishers their budget is more going to be like allocated and to see what sticks and what works this talk is more aimed at people that do old schooled game developments they make a game they put some money in and they want to get more money out so it's like the goal being profitable um and it's also not super aimed that people that make free-to-play games or mobile games they work quite differently because you have to buy a lot more ads um and also to bring it back to the analogy from the beginning often when I think about Indie Games I think about them they're quite similar to a restaurant or a kitchen how they run especially you know that the people that make the food the food is your main ingredient if the food isn't good the restaurant's not going to work if your game isn't good it's not going to work but there's a lot of stuff around it like you can have staff you can have a nice ambient you can have nice C you could have online bookings you could have more parking space there's a lot of stuff you could do to get an advantage there's also a lot of potential to overspend and I think it's similar for indie games there's so many things you

can you could spend money on but not all of them are going to get you the best bang for your buck and I think especially in Indie Games if you're self-funded you need to be super super careful to not overspend and then don't have a return and I think it's also the classic thing if you would see a restaurant or a night club that looks always busy and then suddenly goes bu I think that same thing can happen to Indie Games they look like it doesn't apply to like super hits that make millions but like in the mid-range where they're like oh they got like a few hundred reviews to look decent but maybe if they spend like too much money they they not super profitable still so this talk is really aimed at people you know where you want to get the most out of your budget if you make a small indie game um also how to include in a talk like that is like hidden death costs for example if you make a demo to be in a steam Fest obviously that's kind of a marketing expense but it's also development time so those things are quite hard to quantify so I would keep those in mind those will occur as well if you make the game yourself a few words about me my name is Thomas risener I'm the co-founder of future Friends games I did account and I worked on

around 10 million games I think like I've been in the industry for over 10 years we do a couple of different things we do publishing which just published a game called summerhouse we work on Lara exo1 omo but we were also a self-publishing provider like we help with different services with like press with social media um with Consulting we make store Pages we work on stuff like vempire so what the goal so we do also work on different indie games which was kind helpful for this talk like the data the knowledge in this talk comes from my brain like experience from the team just working loads of games over the years I also did an online survey where about 30 people provided extra data and then big big thank you to a lot of smart people that helped me out with more Hot takes um especially shout out to Derek glue guiltin IO Partners player tupia pop agenda racon be rocker play Shu media and yours truly they were like super helpful with sharing data so I get a broader picture of you know what budgets look like okay let's Dive In threee indie game budgeting rules to live by

that might get me into trouble let's start with number one I think like taking a certain percentage and saying that's my total marketing budget you know that's the budget is 100,000 20% is your marketing budget that can be like a rule of fun you would often hear those ranges being between 20 to 40 sometimes it's more sometimes it's less I get it as a big company it can make sense to get some kind of idea I think for a small company you just need to see what you actually need and then don't spend more than that and don't spend less than that and that's what we're doing today like go through a checklist what you might want to spend your money on I think planning your budget is great I think sticking to it terrible idea there was so many instances over the years where we had a real win or made game successful because we were flexible because we had a little bit of extra room to like take up opportunities for example that's a game we published called xo1 um and that game was right in its promotion main promotion cycle when Tik Tok for games started becoming a thing so suddenly we shifted loads of resources to there because we got

millions of views and then we had to delay the games a few times because of technical difficulties and that randomly got us a Game Pass deal because suddenly there was a window open so I think like being open as an indie and then being able to change your budget once you figure out what works is super important also I feel like when people say with enough marketing budget every game can be successful I think that's just not very true I would always see marketing as a multiplier and what I mean by that I can show you here let's say you've got a highly marketed game that people really like you announce it and you know your following goes up your wish lists go up it's great and then you put marketing muscle behind it you do social media do press all that kind of stuff and it's a multiplier and suddenly you grow even faster but then let's say it's a bit more unlucky you have a game that doesn't resonate so much with players you're going to announce it it's going to be a bit more flat and then you put marketing money behind it and obviously it's still a multiplier but the curve is more this instead of this so I would always keep that in mind marketing can be really helpful it's not

going to be like you're saving grades if the game just doesn't resonate with players okay let's get into the main bit let's get into the budgeting hierarchy so the idea is making a list of what's the best return of investment where do you get the best value for money um start at the top work your way down there's two ways how you could do it one that's actually in real life how we see it mostly people have a certain amount of marketing budget and then they work their way down until they run out some you know sometimes you come to number three sometimes you come to number eight you might be a bigger company and you run until 10 and Beyond and the other approach is if you start out and you don't know your budget yet you know take notes for each of pH and see how much you would need and that might give you an idea how much money you should raise for your marketing top 10 points let's go number one is first party support what do I mean by that if you open your PlayStation you go to the PlayStation Store you will see different games featured and sometimes it's indie games and that's great because there a lot of PlayStations sometimes you can get social media

support from first party like Nintendo and Xbox and steam or you'd see different steam features like being the popular upcoming list getting a popup Banner on Steam those things are super valuable and I can't overstate how valuable they are this is different multipliers it's not super scientific but that's like roughly what reach different channels could get you and you see on the very right the first party the stores they've got a massive reach and actually in real life it's probably more like that they have crazy reach there's nothing else you can do to match that which sounds great well now we talk about how you get first party support Which is less great because it's not easy because it is so good there's a different approaches you could take number one you could do it that means you generate wish wish list you try to get them you talk to Sony you talk to Nintendo you email them when is a game announcement you ask if you can be in a showcase if you can get social media support you could also get an agent or a publisher to do that they probably will take a ref share or a certain amount of payment or you could be like and just

make a really good game and hope that works and that sometimes work but usually doesn't so I wouldn't recommend that so the main thing here this is a Super H want to put money on because it could be zero if you do it it could be infinite if you know your publisher takes most of the money and then you don't recoup um I think the important thing is here just do it make sure it's covered if that's like the one thing you shouldn't ignore like don't do loads of tweets but never like email Nintendo or something if you make a switch game um the second thing you should definitely do super high list is the steam the steam store Page or like any console store Page even if you do nothing else this is going to get a massive amount of traffic um and most people that will ever see your game they will just find it in an online store again that's why first party support is so important what you're going to need on your store Page let's go through that you're going to need a nice key out capsule out that really communicates what your game is sometimes done in the house if you do it with a freelancer or an agency it can cost between $500 and $5,000 again don't sue me if it costs

less or more if you want to work with a specific expert it will be more expensive or like a famous artist if you go on F and pick the cheapest option it will be cheaper but obviously the quality will vary a lot the second thing you're going to need on the store Page is a trailer and that's a few clips from trailers and that should make clear how different trailers can be you know just gameplay it could be animated it could be a VR trailer where we actually see some like real actors so there's a huge range what a trailer could cost but they are super important they're one of the main things that people look at in your store Page and you're going to need them for loads of other marketing stuff as well here's a few different prices what trailer could cost if you go super duper cheap they can cost like $500 to $1,000 that usually means you do your own capture you write your own script you just bring it to someone who knows how to edit a video and they put it together for you often for indie games we see like the second one the second range the simple trailer it's often like in the three four $5,000 range where you will probably get some capture they will help some will with the script you probably work with them and get like a quite decent trailer it goes up if if you go to experienced trailer editor that makes

like a more premium trailer it can go into like A5 to $110,000 range that means they will do more capture they probably provide you know more marketing insights they're going to help with the script they're going to help you pitch the game you can more hand it off to them and if you go for super fancy trailer if you go with a pro where you just you know they give them the game and they just give you a great trailer back or a big agency they can cost a lot more it can cost 10 to 50,000 even more if there's actors involved with mixed reality and stuff like that so there's huge range but to give you an idea what a trailer costs how many trailers do you need usually one to three for a small game usually one bigger Indie Games often have an announcement trailer a release date trailer and a launch trailer or in the middle a Gameplay trailer maybe um some games that a lot of showcases are bigger have five six trailers some even more obviously at some point it gets a bit of silly territory because you can't show that many different things about your game what else you're going to need on the store Page is screenshots super important but I don't know anyone who just paid specifically for screenshots

so it's usually done in house or the trailer person helps you or your marketing person does it or you do it you're going to need a store description um again this is something that's often done in house by the writers it's often done by the marketing team or yourself if you wanted to get freelance help prices vary a lot but what we've heard a lot is like you know cheap going five $100 real experts that maybe do like a bigger branding write you more stuff it can cost a few thousand dollars to get this done nicely we also going to have taxs and backend stuff on the steam page on the eShop and so on um again usually done in house a lot of people read really good newsletters especially game discover go and how to Market a game are really really great for that highly recommended um if you get an expert sometimes you know they will just give you a little bit feedback sometimes to write the whole thing prices can vary for like the low hundreds to like a few thousand if you want to get support with optimizing your store Page and the last thing on the store page that I would really Rec commend spending money on is

localization super super important if your game's localized localized store page as well can make a huge difference especially in China prices can vary if you go to AI fan translation Google Brave could cost nothing could backfire a lot if you go to localization agency you often see like prices with like 6 cents to 21 cents per word super depends on is do you have a lot of PS um how many words do you have a game what's your turnaround time what languages do you need but that's kind of the range uh I would say like a bigger premium indie game often at these days aims for like eight to 10 languages again big disclaimer if you've got a Nar massive narrative game you maybe can't do that because it's going to cost thousands and thousands per language if you got a racing game which just the words is press start and select car you could probably do all the languages the next thing I would spend money on is ongoing marketing planning support um so now we've covered like the super Basics the first two points now we actually want to plan what we want to do actively to promote a game and setting

the right goals is super important there's two things I would like avoid at all cost to miss this is event deadlines for online events we're going to talk about in a minute they can be a really great multiplayer and first party deadlines if you miss them you've just missed them there's no going back this can be really expensive mistakes and again I would also recommend being flexible there's a few ways how you can go about this you could do your own marketing plan you know you read the newsletters you talk to Indies you try to figure it out you could hire a marketing person you could also have an agency on a PR retainer usually costs low thousands to like 10,000s or you could do some Consulting with an expert this will hugely depend how often you want to talk to them how much input you need it's again of one of those things where just make sure it's covered make sure you got enough input so you know what's going on number four attending online events it's a really big Trend at the moment it's a great multiplayer like I can't recommend this enough we're talking about like wholesome direct PC gaming show the mix Indie world the first party showcase is being in those events is a

huge reach boost they often get a great steam feature they have good social media following they will be on IGN on Gamespot they really good value for money um Simon car did a really good list of like different TI of what those events are and how much reach they get and they also really vary in prices so one thing they usually need is a new trailer so you need a trailer that costs money and there's different admission fees it might Bel low hundreds mid tier is often 2 to 10,000 if you go to a big one it could go 50,000 to 300,000 to above that the prices vary a lot depending on if your game's cool if they wanted to be in there how long your video should be or like your asset that you have in there um and also at what time and what showcase you want to be in I would say to all of that they all have editorial slots as well so if your game's really sick you might get in for free so it's definitely worth trying I think it's also a really good indicator if you're like on to something if you get into a PC gaming show for free it means probably your game is pretty sick

if like you getting no showcase even the small ones where you have to pay and you get in nowhere that's probably an indicator that people don't really like resonate with that game um how often should be in events I think how often you can um most games that we work on where we like apply for loads of stuff they will get like in three or four per year if you get into more grade just you know at some point you maybe burn yourself out with not having enough new trailers or beats for those events next up is social media management this is like the first thing on the list that has a way higher ceiling like you know you can only do one steam page there's only so many events social media you could do one Tik Tok per month you could do one per day so there's a lot more you can do a lot more leeway um one mistake we see here a lot is people say oh we should just like hire someone like Victoria Tran he don't know she works for Among Us for like inner love she's really good at all social media Community Management stuff please keep in mind like it's an umbrella term there's a lot of stuff that people do in this field you know video creation filming time front of a

camera customer support it's a quite complex field and it's easy to take it for granted um we looked at some numbers from the games industry career guide how much salaries are in that range again depends hugely you would maybe look at 30 to $125,000 depending on where this person is based if it's someone fresh of University on another continent it might be less if you have super senior it might be more um we also asked Freelancers what their rates are the moment we got a lot of$ 20 to $100 per hour um I would recommend you have it could be yourself it could be someone in the team or someone you hire I would recommend for any IND get at least a part-time person for this if you can a full-time person if not more organic influencer Outreach that means you send codes to influencers and they play your game and you don't pay them for it there was like a online debate recently that people were like oh it's not working anymore it used to be easier to get organic coverage it's still super profile I think it's not like it used to be that you get like

loads of loads of tons of big videos but that's absolutely potential to get free influencer coverage um some things we worked on recently you know you still get your videos with hundreds or like 50,000 views and they can really move the needle this can be a really big driver of wish list and visibility how much it costs to get an organic influence Outreach depends a lot how big your game is how much code management is evolved um if you go with a freelancer if you go with someone who covers this globally different countries I would say roughly $2 to $5,000 per Outreach most Indie Games will have one to three outreaches at least one at launch maybe one for a steam Fest and then maybe one for like a preview a demo version organic press Outreach means you send news and codes to press and you get coverage from them we do hear a lot hey this doesn't have the impact it used to have that is true but I think it still has good impact you see often wish list increase from Big sides more importantly though it's still like you know it shows up at Google we worked on a game called eye of the temple if you Google that game you got like loads of great

headlines you know who googles games influencers people have man to store Page other press people so I think there's a lot of like secondary value that helps raising your profile from press Outreach um also Metacritic store are still important on some online stores a typical press Outreach per beat would cost you a th000 to like maybe $5,000 in the Indie sector it can easily go up to 10 if it's localized in different languages if your game's quite big and code management is complicated or it's multiplatform form but that's roughly what you're looking at I would say Quantity I would say at least three PR beats are great one is the game announcement one is the release that announcement one is the launch it can be more steamfest preview Gameplay trailer and so on again 3 to five is usually what we're working with bigger gamees six to seven after that it goes a bit into silly territory at some point unless you know make a really really massive an ongoing in the game [Applause]

if you made it until here it's pretty sick that's like most gam people are like nice that's a good budget like that's a good way to Market an indie game but obviously there's more money you can spend on if you have it what you could do is attend events like GDC what you need for that there ticket recommendation probably your travel this will depend where you live and where you want to go I would always say local events are great investment for networking meeting platform holders meeting publish and all that going overseas depends sometimes I definitely wouldn't say you should go to all the big events like Gamescom GDC packs every year for the sake of it like I think it's it's an overspent but if you pick carefully I think it's a good investment paid influence coverage so paying people to make Tik toks YouTube videos twitch streams this was like a super Hub want to figure out I talk to agencies we do it themselves everybody was like oh it just really depends so it really depends I try to figure out some things I can give you so it's a bit more tangible I think it's a super easy way to

overspend it can be really good if you pick carefully it can be a great return so it's a very Case by case P stuff most games we work with small Andy games don't pay for that or pay in the low hundreds Big Andy games often you see like 15 to 50,000 bigger games this budget can go way up and can keep going I got some help this slide from a friend MJ from y Julie they do a lot of influencer stuff um I just wanted to figure out what's like a price range and they're huge like I can tell you when we email people and say like hey I want a video rice the price ranges it's wild w is all over the place so it's a lot about comparing if you're looking at a YouTuber for under 500k Subs you would maybe look at $600 to $122,000 huge range you could look at another another metric which is cost per few so you could look at how much does me a few cost I think a pretty good range if you manage like two to 4 cents it's great if it run seven still pretty good if it goes beyond that it would need to be a quite specific influencers so it makes sense for twitch streamers there's a

similar Big Range if you look at a 2hour stream for a channel that has under 1 million Subs you would maybe look at $600 to $6,000 if you look at really really big twitch channels those numbers go like infinite like it's crazy you can spend a lot of money here um we also have a cost per you range on Twitch it's more that you aim for like a 1 cents paid social media ads similar quite difficult thing it's not easy to measure there's a lot of games we worked on tried to do that and then didn't have a good return if you figured out how to you know get a Tik Tok Instagram ad and they get money back from it great some people can do it this also works surprisingly better on crowdfunding than on released games a lot of games we work with don't spend money on this or like in the low hundreds a lot of experts I talk to it really helps if you have $500,000 per channel to optimize it so it gets a lot cheaper so it's better not to spread too thin but you know focus on a few channels but figure them out well and like once you know it's running and you make money back forward obviously

this budgets are quite of infinite and keep going until they don't work anymore also interesting a few people buy AdWords to get more wish lists to get a better steam ranking they would often look at $12 per wish list if they buy ads again talk to people that have half of that talk to people who pay double depends on your game depends on the country but it's a rough guideline some closing thoughts some of those things I talked about are easier to Outsource some of them are harder to Outsource for example social media you can work with an agency we do that but it's often something that's good if it's kept in house you're quite close to it because you will be involved in development and a lot of it happens that's interesting social media PR and influence outreach are super easy to give away those agencies they have the context you explain in the game to send it out so there's different things that are easy and hard to Outsource everything in the middle first party supports to a pat marketing planner I would like probably keep in house but maybe get professional advice if you can what about the other stuff physical press kits super animated trailers making off videos why are they not on

there because I think for me at the moment they just don't have that good return of investment that being said we've done all this stuff on different games and it did work it's just not on my default list so I would take those you know not super high up the list but it can work if your gamees right for it other regions this is very focused on the US and Europe if you want to specifically Market in Asia I think Lo finding a local partner super helps it's quite common that you don't take payment but a revenue share so in that sense you know you're not spending money but you get less revenue from that in the end we've got a summary of our check list what to spend money on obviously it's a tier list because video games number one um steam store Page console store Page most important thing and first party support talk to the platform holders see if you can get featuring other after that I would make sure you've got a good marketing plan a good marketing planner to set the right goals of where you're going afterwards I would invest in digital showcases in social media and Community Management

followed by organic press and influence Outreach then I would say attending event and then see if you've got money left for PID influencers PID that and at very last is the rest that could make sense if there's budget list in the f I didn't have one but that's what the chart looks like so it's wor the rest um thank you very much for listening um again thanks so much for coming while selda own and if you got questions I think you've got a little bit of time so you could just come up to the mic and ask thank you very [Applause] much okay hey um thanks for the talk that was great wanted to ask you specifically about Reddit have you had experience with that as as a platform if you can expand on that that would be great okay specifically Reddit um specifically yeah I would say on an organic level there's usually two ways how we tackle Reddit one is if somebody in your team loves Reddit and they're

really good on it they're actually part of the community it can be super strong but they know the rules and it's quite complicated and then there's like Reddit light which I would recommend every indie game um to go into nice subreddits like Indie gaming subreddits made in unity subreddits they are a lot more chill on self-promotion they're not as big but it's still pretty good value for money and then paid Reddit ads can I've heard work quite well depending on the genre like strategy games and stuff like more hardcore gamer things can work well on Reddit thank you hi this might be a little eccentric of a question I was just curious so these are all a lot of the stuff you're talking about makes sense within the ecosystem of gaming itself I wondered if you had any experiences in all of these experiences that you had like in other cultural Realms or like Oddball strategies you had tried that had worked or not worked just I was curious about that idea I I think it's something we get a lot when somebody makes a racing game they're like oh can we be in a racing on a racing website in like car website or like can we have a crazy Gorilla Marketing stun and I would

usually say those things are great once you've done the top 10 I think like this is the easier one to get it's a lot harder to convince someone who doesn't play Steam games but likes cars to buy a PC download Steam sign up download a game get a controller there's a lot of steps to convince people so I think it can make sense as a secondary thing but I would focus on games first of course thank you hey uh thank you so much Thomas amazing talk also big fan of your talk from last year uh no one cares about your video game I watch that all the time but um yeah specific question in terms of social media channels and what has the biggest Roi for ads spend I guess I'm curious because you know I do like the Twitter Tik Tok Reddit Trifecta I'm not sure really where my money is best spent I'm sure that's game dependent but you know rough rule of Thum if you had some yeah I would say like I'm not the Super expert on PID ads um from what we've tried and people we've talked to I feel at the moment RIT

Tik Tok and then meta so Facebook and Instagram work quite well okay like stuff like Instagram stories I think have quite a good return we do had we do had did have some good success on Tik Tok but mostly for games where we've made loads of post so we've already made 50 posts we know those two went trending so we boost them you know you beat the test the post first but that takes a lot of upfront investment to figure out what's a good Tik Tok for you right okay that makes sense so figure out what works and then kind of double down on that yes I think it helps a lot it's like you know social media is ruthless but it's really good it's really good testing because people only make post pick and they inact with them if it's interesting to them right all right thank you so much thank you so you mentioned this talk was for um you know PC games console games and not for mobile games but what about those of us who are creating a VR game is there any difference in spend anything else you would add or change um for a VR game yes we do work on a lot of VR games I feel like they are in a quite

similar category a few things that are different is like there is less press I think it's still relevant but there's only two or three big websites so you probably go lighter on the spend there um other than that social media is qu is a little bit different in that Reddit is a lot more excited about VR games than other games so I think Reddit is more important also Tik Tok works surprisingly well um other than that campaigns can be shorter because wish lists and all that momentum doesn't matter so much so it can be like you know two three month campaigns are more common in VR um but a lot of it is quite similar in terms of like organic Outreach for pressent influencers the marketing plan so I think like it almost applies it's pretty close I think mobile is quite removed from what we talked about V is pretty close to that great thank you very much yeah thanks for the presentation um I was wondering sort of a meta question how do you measure whether you know some form of Market is actually performing better than others are there certain

very direct metrics you can actually yeah I feel like we get this question asked a lot what's our kpis and usually our kpis number goes up I know it sounds simple but I think it's really helpful you would see your social media following growing you would suddenly see wish lists increasing you see pre-orders going up just really keeping like an eye on those really quite basic numbers is quite good got it is there a way to tie that directly with uh installs or um there's people they do like you know link tracking with UTM links um it it can give you an idea it's not always super reliable like if you got a tracking link on Tik Tok a lot of people see a game on Tik Tok and then they go to the PC and wish list so that didn't work like that tracking thing um I feel like for us it's a lot based on just like working a lot of games and getting a gut feeling you know we do something but nothing else happens and then we see how the numbers go up but they don't so I think this is what the talk is mostly based on it's it's quite hard to track I think tracking links is probably the closest you would get thank

you hi thanks for your talk do you have a point of view on um social media accounts being um developer owned or individual to each game um it really depends if you want to make more games in the same Niche I think if you stay like in narrative games in racing games definitely like I would make a studio account instead of a game account what we also do quite a lot is just like Rebrand them as we go you know we would have the studio name on Twitter SL the game name and then when this next game we just exchange that and update the accounts um generally the more personal your accounts can be the better if you have a small game especially on Reddit um but it really depends on a Case by case basis cool well I think time's up thank you very much [Music]