The Mystery Behind Marketing with Starlight Skyes | GDuX.me 2020

[Music] hi guys my name is starlight skies and this talk is about the mystery behind the marketing but i actually don't think there is a mystery i think it's pretty straightforward and logical but i just wanted to say real quick that every game is different and could require a different approach so what works for one game doesn't necessarily work for another game so just keep that in mind whenever you're doing a game that you can't just copy what other people do some games may sell very well but their social media may not reflect that success like you know that maybe you you played a game and you really like it and you're like i want to you know see what their social media is like i want to see what they're doing hold on i'm gonna minimize my talk real quick okay you maybe see their social media and you're

just like wow this is a great game why haven't more people thought about this why you know why aren't people getting what i'm getting it's because they may not understand how they can get an audience through social media so that's what i'm going to do today so i have many clients i do consultations and as i'm doing them with both solo developers and companies i have the same conversation over and over again which is that they understand the technical aspects of how a game works but they don't necessarily know like how to take what they're making and give it context to sell to a larger audience basically what they're telling me is i know what i'm doing but how do i show it to other people so we've heard it all before that having a great idea is just not good enough saying to people uh will play it it's that it's fun it just doesn't work anymore but what i wish people would talk about more after that

is that the fact that it needs to be marketable and i'll get over that in just a second but i just want to say that there's always exceptions to this for example if uh here we go just moving my screen over to a second okay so basically i want to see if there's always exceptions to this as in some games basically uh are not marketed at all and become really popular but i wouldn't rely on that um i would definitely have a strategy to whatever it is that you're you're going to do because people that i've had like hit games have had experience with this before and they kind of get a sense for like what's going to sell and what isn't going to sell so we've heard this all we've heard this term before developers wear many hats but people outside the industry may not understand how this works because they don't do game development they don't understand that there is a like there's all these nooks and crannies when it comes to development and you have to kind of fill in

a lot of them and marketing is like basically one of these hats and i'm saying this right now because a lot of developers think it's just an add-on that they do towards the end of development but it is a mindset and you should think of it as its own skill it's just like with how long it takes programming how long it takes to do art or design it takes time to do this and it's not something that's just like attacked on towards the end in my opinion all right so uh many times people want to know shortcuts they're like my game is going to come out in a month what do i do and unfortunately uh you gotta have to put in the work and earlier the better in my opinion uh so basically uh that one thing is going to make everyone hear about your game and it's like the myth of overnight success so what i mean by this is that you may hear about something that's coming out right now and you're just like wow this you know i i love this this is so great

and you have not seen the years that it took to put together whatever it is that you're looking at that you really like so if you think that just like one facebook post is going to do it or one streamer is going to play it or like just one pr email it's usually not enough you usually don't see all of the the work that marketing uh marketers have to do to get eyeballs on whatever it is you're doing so try um to do what you can alright so now i'm going to go over a little bit about like what is the market like where do we get this term like marketing coming from well it's how the public sees your project product objectively it gives an honest indicator of how well your game is going to sell so the reason why i'm bringing this up is uh because a lot of developers think that the marketing is like shrouded in mystery there's a fog here like they don't understand it and they don't get it and they don't even know where to begin with

the idea of it they just know that they they want you know people to play their game they want people to like him but how do you do that so it's by putting this perspective of the fact that they're going to see your product for for what it is and your friends and family love you very much but they're probably not going to be honest with you because they're when they see their game they're mostly seeing you in it right and they like you but and also like you playing your game yourself it's really hard to be objective unless you have like a lot of experience uh shipping games and you can kind of get what the market is a lot of times you're not going to be very objective to your own product so what i tell developers to do is if they want to see if they're like people are interested in the game they have to show it and i don't just mean like a local game dev group i'm talking about with social media and if people are not engaging with your social media just like a couple of likes um then that it's probably being a good indicator whether it's there but sometimes

sometimes uh your game is wonderful like your game is good and you just have to make a another context to it so like maybe you can improve the art or maybe you could explain it a little bit better make it a little bit less confusing um or maybe like you could just like dedicate your twitter to just the game itself and not have like other things that are cluttering up that might confuse people as to like what your account is about so that was just an example uh but basically the market doesn't lie to you if it wants your game it will tell you just what i'm gonna say right here all right so um i believe that there's a lot of like really good accounts out there that are like they have good games but they're just not getting that traction and i think it's because they do the same things over and over again and they're not just they're just not putting enough variety of whatever it is they're showing to people and people get bored with that after a while like maybe they like in the beginning but they don't want to see the same thing over and over again so definitely want to try to show different

aspects of the game to see what people like about them is it your characters is it your environment is it uh maybe even your voice actor or how you do that and um believe me people will definitely let you know when that happens and in fact you can use that uh for later on with the marketing because you can kind of like have a temperature of what people are talking about uh for example real quick uh the guy who made a short hike he noticed that people really liked the gif of the character jumping off the cliff and like kind of gliding away and so when he made this trailer that was the very first thing that you saw in that trailer and i thought that was really interesting because you only have a few seconds to engage with people on trailers or on social media so you want to kind of get the quickest reaction that you can that should always be your goal all right so knowing how to use a tool is not the same as mastery knowing how to use social media is not

the same as creating engagement so i know this is kind of the same thing repeated but basically what i'm saying here is that i think uh technology now is amazing and it's meant to be it's designed to be user-friendly and so anyone can probably learn how to use any of these platforms really quickly the problem comes with people like not understanding how to use these products platforms to sell their games so i wouldn't yeah just because somebody tells you like i know how to post on twitter that doesn't mean that they know how to create uh i guess engagement like getting people to care about whatever it is that you're selling and that is incredibly important so make sure that when you are want to hire somebody like a peer company or whatever that they they don't just tell you that they're posting and they can do analytics and and things like that that you actually see that they have a track record of having people actually

care about what it is that you're doing and and they know how they can take whatever it is that you're doing like your game and and say it in a way that gets people interested all right so next up we have brown brand accounts should have a focus so there i just want to pause real quick and just say that brand accounts are very different than personal branding so i like companies are different than personal so your personal brand is like you your personality so if you like like cars or certain movies or um like any interest really like that is that's who you are and that's your personality and that's what you're saying to the world that is very different than a company brand because a company brand you're like an umbrella for like all all those people that are represented there so you have to be a little bit more careful with like how you say things and i feel like a lot of times people are actually a little bit too careful with what they're saying and they end up making accounts that are just like really stiff and robotic because

uh they don't know how to like become relatable and show through with their personality um uh really quick so you want to post videos screenshots and gifs of the game as often as you can i cannot tell you how many times i look into an account of a game and i don't see the game like i'll see a key art i'll see a screenshot of a character but that doesn't tell me what the game actually is like i want to know who is this person what are they doing in this world what is going on here uh like as quickly as possible i need to kind of get this information so if you cannot say that and uh like consistently in a few tweets people are going to go to your account and like that's the first impression impression that you're giving them is that you you don't know how to show that so i put below this fan art cosplay tattoos merch what this really means is whatever it is that your whatever it is how your customers or your players your audience like how are they engaging with whatever it

is you're doing and i know that doesn't work for everybody because sometimes a games don't have things like this and i'll i'll go over that a little bit later about characters but uh you basically want to show if you're if you people care about your game and they're talking about your game you want to showcase that to other people uh next up we have updates and studio news and then reviews articles clips of let's play so this is just basically examples of what you can do that it you know and i have like a whole like long list of different like i break these into like smaller categories of like what exactly i want to post onto an account depending on what the game is but as long as you kind of keep it somewhat variety but also focus on whatever like messages about your game yes uh also i put below here culture and trends you want to pay attention to them you don't want to pretend like you're an island on this huge sea that is you know the internet and if you

seem like you are you know someone have a personality relatable and you're like you know what's going on with it people react to that better for example when doom and animal crossing was kind of come out on the same day people loved this crossover of uh you know the two like genres kind of coming together and there is a lot of memes about isabelle and the doom guy and and yeah that was so the fact that both of the brand social media accounts talked about this was amazing and the internet loved it and i got a lot of reactions a lot of engagements and so if you're making a game about like dinosaurs and then a dinosaur movie is going to come out you should definitely talk about that because that's on brand um even though it's slightly not what you're doing like people will appreciate that you're paying attention uh next up i say talk to your audience and so we've we've all heard this before at some point which is that you shouldn't try to appeal to everybody and that's definitely true for so like i know everyone wants

everyone's money right they want everyone to buy their game but obviously that doesn't happen you need to have your super fan so i in my head i picture it like this as a metaphor that you have like a bonsai tree and with this like bonsai tree you want to cut off the things that don't matter uh so if you post something and nobody cares about it i'm like okay that didn't work what will work you know what will your audience care about and you keep growing it and trying different things until you find that thing and then you can like roll with it you can um how do i explain this momentum you gain momentum when when you find something that you're is both like talking about your game and people what they like about your game so it's it's like the idea of trying to create your super fans or the people that will tell other people about it instead of just trying to talk to everybody so if your game is about like cyberpunk then you think about that culture that is around that and uh what they would you know but if you

are if your game is about cyberpunk but then you're talking about like i don't know flowers or something like that that doesn't necessarily go in together so make sure that you are talking to the people that you want to talk to uh be very careful though like i've talked about a little bit about how when you're doing a brand uh we all know that like a lot of these fast food restaurants like wendy's and stuff like that they've started doing that and they create a lot of engagement with having a personality but you can take it too far as well so like either you're usually pretty robotic and stiff and you're just like announcements after announcements after announcements and then your audience kind of gets like you know less interested because you're just doing the same thing and then you have over here which is you're too quirky and two like you act like an actual person instead of a company that's trying to sell something and then people feel like that's disingenuous and they don't like that so it takes it takes a skill and it takes time to kind of figure out that balance

all right so i want to give you some choices right here uh when it comes to marketing the first one is learn it yourself but you all know that time is money but what you can do you can't create systems and automation so that it makes it easier for yourself like you create a formula of what you can do to to market your game um but also time is money so it takes time to create these systems i wouldn't just yeah i wouldn't just say i'm just going to do a bunch of busy work and just post a bunch of times because you like are not really paying attention to what you're doing so i would actually learn about marketing all right second of all is hiring a community manager so i you know going back and forth with this you shouldn't just hire somebody because they know social media and then just kind of leave them alone be because i've had this a lot with clients whether just like i don't know about social media i don't know about community that's what you're going to do and then they they

kind of like walk away but like when you have when you're a community manager you need to know what's going on with the game or the studio or the company you need to know like what you're going to talk about like how to create content and stuff like that and so if you're not including them on what you're doing it's a little bit harder also you should learn you should learn a little bit marketing for yourself so you know how to communicate with your community manager of whatever vision that you have and you should have a vision and you should have a goal is it to sell the game is it to get followers is it for discord is it to to get people to come to your booth at an event like have a goal and share that with your community manager and then maybe come up with a strategy that you can do don't just like say market my game and just kind of push them off to do that and it's definitely more collaborative than you would think all right another thing you can do is outsource to another company uh so there's amazing companies like aval pr that can do that but unfortunately not every pr company is the same because what works for maybe another studio

may not work for yours and so i would definitely ask around and say like hey your game is similar to mine use that pr company what did they do for you did you like what they do and definitely do your research before you do that because when you're outsourcing they're not in-house and so they don't maybe quite understand what it is that you're trying to do um and i mean they'll do the best that they can but sometimes it's a little bit harder if you know they're doing it from the outside but it's your choice the option is there next up i want to say you can get a short time consultant to make you a guide so this is something um i mean i've done all of these before but uh this is what i've done a lot as a consultant is people like this is how it works i'll do meeting with people and then i have them tell me what their game is about and then i have to ask them a ton of questions and basically the questions are there to kind of give them a framework of how the public will see their game and then after that i tell them like

basically critiquing them of like what was confusing like what didn't work or what could work and things of like what i would do so a consultant can give you like a guide or a plan or create that system or automation and then you do it yourself so you you have several different options uh all right so next up when do you start marketing i get this a lot and obviously there's no one size fit all for this just like everything else here uh again marketing is very experimentational you have to feel it it's intuitive and it takes time and experience to get to that intuition but to answer the question when do you start marketing for me it should be the idea and i know that sounds crazy because you're just like star i don't like how do i post on social media about my game i don't have a prototype or anything yet well marketing is not just posting on social media or media or like getting a discord or

going to an event marketing is again that mindset it's that hat and so when you have a game idea and i know a lot of developers have many game ideas um think about the game idea and how other people are going to see it so it's not just uh like this is the game i want to make sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't it should be like this is the game i'm going to make and i believe that people are going to find this interesting because of this which brings me to what is the hook and we all know when we're watching a movie trailer like they have to have that hook in there of like what's going to get people into the theater and the same thing goes for game development and there might be different answers to this out there but this is how i define it which is something familiar but with a twist and like this is like the quickest way i can get into people's heads of like you need a hook and and this is what the hook should be now again like this is not all the time because some games are like really out there and weird and not familiar but

still might do well like the truly innovative games but most games are you know just the same thing we've seen before but a slightly different i know ryan clark who like from crypto necrodancer brace yourself folks has said before it's uh like you're going to two restaurants and one restaurant is like a generic restaurant that you've been to and there's a lot of restaurants like it and then there's this other restaurant that sells really weird food and you don't know what you're going to get from it well you want to kind of combine these two things all right next up is practical ideas for you i'm gonna drink water here's some practical ideas for you first up is again have systems create automation don't just wake up every day and be like huh what am i what am i going to post today because then that that's what starts to make it stressful for you is that you have to think of these new things every day i do something called a content bucket uh

for something that i call maintenance mode again like a lot of companies call these different things but this is just like how i do it and like maybe the company you've worked for might have call in it something different uh but basically what it is is i take like two or three days and all i focus on is the whole month of like what i'm going to talk about in social media and then you can schedule out ahead of time and and obviously like maybe get some approval from people to make sure that it's okay before you send it out um and i call it maintenance mode because a lot of there's some studios out there that like they know they're making games and people are excited about it but then they get so wrapped up in development that it might be like four months before they are you know say anything on social media and people are like hello like where's the developers i haven't said anything there's no updates on steam forums like what's going on here and so maintenance mode is basically what i do is i do things ahead of time so i don't have to think about it

and then i can like put my focus into other things um and then that way they know that you know that the company's still alive you're still doing things they're still listening to their audience uh but you can also also focus your attention on other things because you can't do everything in one day so yeah definitely definitely want to do automation make it easier for yourself all right and then the next thing is the opposite of maintenance mode which is the big pushes so are you about to do an event um about to do like a big pr update about to port your game to another system and announce that you know whatever your big pushes are you should think them through so sometimes people are like oh no like we're about to like put our game on switch today we better tweet about it um it you know i i would take the time and really think about how like what can i tweet that's gonna make the most people want to retweet it like what about this is the most exciting for it besides the fact that it's going to be on switch right so i would think like think it through and

i would try to do ahead of time like on on a if you're looking at your pipeline and your schedule of like when things are going to come out uh try to get those marketing beats as much as you can okay below that is don't get caught up in busy work this is super easy to do and this happens a lot with us particularly cm's that get really into a routine and they just kind of do the same thing over and over again i've told before that that becomes really monotonous to your audience and um it gets boring for the whoever the person is doing it as well and it also like the goal should be to to get more engagement and to grow your audience get more followers that sort of thing um that also goes into quality over quantity so back in the day uh there wasn't as many people in social media and so posting a lot people would engage with you more just because you posted a lot because you had things to say but these days i believe this is like to me the new trend that's happening is that developers

should like not tweet every single day but they should be like have the quality tweets that they know is gonna get more engagement than just than just tweeting just to tweet right um i think sometimes that's okay if you you're in the middle of a development cycle and you're doing something really tricky you don't have anything much to talk about you can do some of those like low ball tweets but in general i would focus my energy and my time onto things that people i know people are going to really like okay so really quick i want to talk about the fact that you need to be flexible so again earlier if you just do the same things over uh it gets boring for both sides and so how do you get this flexible mindset how do you become experimental uh always be researching because first of all the industry is always changing and and how people do things five years ago uh may not be the same way as they do them now so be paying attention to what other people are doing to this industry and what's interesting and what's working

for them and also i don't just look at the game industry i look at the fashion industry i look at tech i look at uh beauty i look at maybe yeah did i already say fitness you know whatever whatever is out there cooking content creators like i just want to know what are the trends what's going on what is the culture saying and how does that relate to whatever it is i'm doing um and if i can find some correlation there um i will do that and again see if people respond to it and again if you make a tweet and it doesn't has little response people don't like it or people actively don't you know are not then just delete it like it's just a tweet it's okay you know it's fine um if you don't like your trailer redo your trailer right all right so i just uh i think examples are really good i wish i could like show you the individual accounts and what i like about each one of these a really quick pokemon animal crossing rgg studio who does

uh the yakuza games kid fox uh frog detective new blood no more robots wholesome games and adult swim games i know that's a lot uh so that's good that means like a lot of people are doing amazing content out there that you can take from and these are what i like like it may not as necessary but what you like so when i talk to again a lot of developers um i asked them okay so you want me to do content for you you tell me what companies like you really like that they're doing just because and a lot of times they're like i don't know like i just follow my friends on social media uh so again they're not really having like an objective perspective of just like the content of what companies are doing they're like looking at the games and like steam and sales and stuff like that which is fine um but i kind of give them a few examples of what i like and then i say is this something you're interested in or is there another angle that you want to put on it again it's like it's getting that mindset it's getting that framework for your game and that context because

with development you have to be really close to what it is you're making in order to do problem solving and then for marketing you have to like kind of be far away from it and look at it from an outsider's perspective looking in okay so what do i like about these accounts well i feel like there's two ways to do content creation one is education which is like you're telling people things so i feel like no more robots what mike rose does is fantastic he's telling you things about sales and the things he's tried what hasn't worked uh that sort of thing and education is really valuable so people will follow you for that because you're giving them value the second one is entertainment and so i think instead of just posting announcements all the time you should be telling a sorority story you should be telling a narrative so i for example animal crossing they have tom nook the character tom nook is talking on that account and so it feels like the character is talking to you um for pokemon they just showed a different pokemon and their

and they basically show off the personalities of them and for igg studio what they do is that they kind of have like inside jokes so if you don't play the games you may not know these characters or why they're doing the things they do but for their core audience that knows these games and loves these games they will create uh you know engagement with it and that makes other people curious about it so again you're not trying to get everybody out there but you're trying to get the few people that really like your game like understand how they're thinking and talk to them and respect them alright so i have two takeaways that i wish you got for my talk uh hopefully the first one is marketing is integral part of success for games now so again a few years ago marketing could have been just an add-on towards the end of a development cycle you just had like an article and a newspaper you just showed your game at an e3 you know a trailer uh but with the oversaturation the things are now it's becoming more and more part of the

development process uh number two not just any game will be successful have a strategy again when i think of marketing i start with the idea of it like i need that that pitch that concept needs to be really strong uh for for people to care about it so uh yeah don't just take any idea and think it's gonna come a huge success all right that's me i'm sorry lights guys thank you so much this is who i am in all the social medias yay all right well thank you star uh for for for doing that so far and uh it's one of the i feel one of the uh biggest misconceptions with marketing as you kind of stated that uh game developers have always used that as like a last resource and in a lot of situations a bit too late um and uh and it wasn't until recently where i i finally kind of

got away from game development and started to kind of dive into kind of telling people about what i do where i realize holy crap this is a whole different world uh aside from making games you pretty much have to kind of treat marketing as if you're developing a game you're developing a product there's an audience at the end of it uh and you know whatever you tweet about whatever you promote is it interesting is it something that people not just about the product that you're promoting but like what you're saying does it command an audience so i definitely want to hear a little bit uh on is this something that that you went through uh like a formal education or is it more like surveying the industry i mean how did you come about to developing these skill sets uh where for me it sounds like it makes sense to you but for a lot a lot of us other people like game developers you know it's still a very new grounds

i'm so glad you asked that i have a lot of a lot of thoughts about it uh well so i'm from ohio which is kind of like i talk to other people in other countries and i feel a kinship to them because when you're not on the you know the west coast a lot of times you feel isolated from everyone else and you're just like i don't know what to do but i knew that i wanted to be a community leader as soon as i graduated from college as soon as i joined my first game studio i wanted to run a community because i wanted to help other game developers and as i was doing it like there is so many programmers a couple sprinklings of artists out there but uh there was absolutely nobody that was marketing so like this community had all of these games and nobody knew how to sell the games and i was like hmm this is really interesting like i actually started off in industry as a 3d environmental artist and i totally thought that i was going to be an artist and i didn't know i was going to go into marketing but i took it as a challenge and then as i did it like i realized like whoa like i really really like this because i thought of it as a game in itself like

with social media and um i will tell you that when when i talk to other community people because i have a discord uh full of people like me that do marketing and we share ideas and thoughts and tricks and trips to ah tricks and tips yes and basically what they tell me is a lot of times they did marketing and community stuff but when they were hired they didn't have any gaming experience and it's kind of seen as an entry-level position however you do need to have some experience and skills of doing this and companies just don't know enough about marketing in order to vet people who are are going to be effective to whatever game that they have and so like how i learned how to do it uh just like a lot of these other people had did it was just like pure force like just like brute force researching studying um i watched a lot of like youtubers things like gary vaynerchuk and even like tony robbins and people that were not in the game industry because it nobody

was going to let me go into their company when i had no experience and like teach me everything and so i just had to do it myself and the benefit of this by not just doing whatever every other studio did is that like my marketing became uh more interesting unique because i was coming at it from a different perspective than what i saw other people [Music] do i think every developer does uh like every development like like exactly i was about to say that yeah like every developer very very much like in the game industry we're we're at least the best one the ones that that you don't want to mess with are the ones that are self-taught and are driven and are not being told what to do because they they just genuinely are very passionate about it and uh even though there is a formal education to go through marketing

and there are some relative things that you can carry over i do feel like the industry our game industry is very unique and there's a very uh there's a very s there's a very specific language kind of talk to gamers and game developers where we tune in and listen because we kind of tend to move away from something that sounds too corporate or looks too corporate and we just have this this this this certain a detachment when it automatically sounds that way so i think your messaging has been really great in in the way you you kind of been expressing how how you came about is very relevant to any game developer out there it's like oh man all right so you know let's just bust out the books let's do some research let's treat this as a discipline as a skill and with respect as something that will carry forward for my future uh essentially if there's anything that i want to do uh to brand myself so i'm gonna hit the questions right now and i want to remind everyone you know we do have a discord channel open but within the social chat

channels to go ahead and ask them we do have a moderator in there to kind of pull these questions in so this first one is from russell campbell uh the question is perhaps are there ways to appease the algorithm to bring adjacent audiences into your target audience um okay so i feel like there's this approach here to marketing that i understand where it comes from that um like you want to use numbers and that sort of thing to to figure out where people are going to go but unfortunately that only takes you so far like because and the reason why is because these social media platforms are always changing and discord is changing and and people and their trends and culture always changing so numbers and things that might work like before may not work for even like two months you know like just like with what happened with the virus you know people thought they were going to go to events this year and then all of a sudden we're doing more online

conferences and so things change so i would not depend on algorithms i would depend on my intuition and i would be on the lookout to see like what are what is some what are people that are doing something similar to me and how are they doing it and how can i if i was to do what they're doing what would i do better so you need to come up at it as a human perspective and you need to come up with of like what i care about this and i know that can be that's hard to do but that is a muscle that you can train yourself and like all the studios that i i hope you people screenshot at that those other studios and you check them out and you can kind of see what i'm talking about yeah i mean that that's actually a perfect segue so we are collecting all the slides from all our presenters that will be uploaded on the website so shortly after this conference uh after three days because i'll be online the whole time i will upload those and you guys can get the information so this is uh a question from i force uh if i'm a new game dev should i

start to promote myself as an individual until i start promoting a game in a brand fashion or is that not necessary oh dude i definitely say uh personal branding and this this goes to everyone here okay so i'm not just talking about games here a lot of things i'm talking about because you know i'm a twitch streamer i i was like i've been streaming for five years and i'm a partner and like i did that on purpose to see what is it like for a content creator and so i wanted to get into the minds set of like how they think and and what they want uh so that i can as a game developer can better like give them that and so i definitely think you should do personal branding here's another reason why you should do personal branding it's because a lot of these companies don't care about you like they're not going to help you propel your career right and so if you just do work for them you're giving them your time and your energy and you're creating them money but that doesn't mean that they're going to take care of you

and your career so definitely have a personal brand um and keep it focused just like i would do a company brand and uh i rely on that over and over again because like when i whenever i need a new job or i'm looking for something or i want people to care about it i have years of me building up relationships with people that where people actually care about me because they know what i'm doing that makes sense no matter what i'm doing they're going to care about it yeah definitely and i totally get that too i think people tend to uh i think the opposite problem is happening right now where people market too late so i feel like just getting the practice in learning who's your audience um what works what doesn't work while you have a smaller pool of people where you're okay to messing up and having blunders uh it actually works for you and you kind of in my opinion it kind of builds up in a natural way so this uh this question is from for sebastian

what's the best social media to promote the games and uh two questions what kind of advice we could get for the automation process of sharing content about our game all right i'm gonna answer the the first question uh definitely twitter right now i'm not gonna say it will be forever but that's where a lot of journalists are on and you want journalists pr people to look at your game uh um for gamedev you both have texts and visuals it's really hard to sell games on instagram because it's really they need a particular like square format when it comes to video on instagram and it's harder to upload because you have to do it through a phone you can't upload on a desktop and so when it comes to game development that doesn't work as well with facebook um it's better for like if you want uh older audiences or like people outside of america because more of those kind of people use facebook and so a lot of times it depends on where your audience is if you're if your game is for kids uh

tick tock tick tock you can grow really fast really quickly on tick tock right now and it's not going to be like that forever and i know it's kind of scary because it's a new medium but if you're if i'm going to have a game for kids that is where i would go i would just sit down and figure it out uh so what was the second part of that question uh second question is what kind of vice we could get for the automation process of sharing content about our game i don't know if i understand that what kind of advice yeah i guess they're trying to look for a way where they're not constantly waiting to tweet uh whenever they have a thought and like whatever ways that they can get rid uh i think in a way to kind of um uh to do the process in the morning and just let let it kind of be the week's worth of social tweets or whatever i think that's where they're what they're asking yeah okay i was gonna say i'll just i'll just make it super quick okay so basically um it's like training

your brain of like what tweets work well and so after a while you're like okay if i say things in a particular like direct way uh also like i just want to say real quick hashtags don't work please like it shows that you don't have confidence if you use the hashtags like you want to take online [Laughter] um i'll be right back when you're doing an event i think like hashtag like gdx.me i think that's okay because you want you're like hey people use the hashtag so i can see the tweets right it kind of unifies the tweets but if you're trying to get people's attention with it that doesn't work so yeah but on instagram and like that works hashtags works on instagram so again it depends on the platform but on twitter yeah you also want to be short and sweet like you don't want to waste people's times and so the more direct you are like the quicker you can say something for example the marketing brands of like mac mcintosh said think differently milk had like the got milk nike had just do it you know like having these like taglines these like really quick like you get the idea of the company

really quickly like soon i'm sorry i know that makes sense um yeah um if you have an idea for a tweet write it down like right away and try to have a collection of them um like i have like a hundred different ideas i do for content whenever i'm struggling for something i go back to my own resource that i've created and i'm like oh yeah i can do something like this okay cool and then i put it through all right so i have another question from ross fifield have you got an advice for a studio who may have finished alpha on the verge of wanting to give or outsell early access keys and want to go for a beta release how would you build that audience and reach prior to getting to finishing the alpha so getting some noise during alpha um i would create art assets as soon as possible like i like that's why having like a vertical slice is super like everyone says super important not everyone needs a vertical slice but

creating art assets creating key art creating like and things that you can reuse over and over again um but also have a strong tagline so there's this game called uh this war is mine i think that's the name of the game and their tagline for the game because it was a really hard game to sell it visually wasn't it was like a dollhouse game like you you could see inside like a cut view so it wasn't like a dynamic like breath of the wild kind of visual game and so what they did is the tagline was in war not everyone is a soldier and that right there tells you the game it tells you the narrative like you know what it's about so the fact that like they were focusing on this idea that um about the civilians of war um they could do that so again it's about being a human understanding context uh knowing what appeals to people and if you don't know then try it online like do because a lot of uh publishers will be like hey guys you know we're looking for our next game you know give us your pitches and so

i see like hundreds of developers well like to raw fury or devolver will show them the game and if nobody's liking your game or interested in it or don't want to hear more about it like try to figure out why and also i want to say you know the idea of like fail faster that should be for making your game too like not every game idea is going to be successful so if nobody if you're putting work into it and nobody's caring about it i would just like x-nay on that game and start all over again with another game because we all have we all have like new ideas right we all have different games that doesn't go for everyone but so this uh this is a question from feinstein i recognize the name he's actually one of our presenters for day three ben uh so a fine spline i don't know if you wanted me out him it's too late uh have you ever experienced an ad that you thought would tank but it ended up doing really well ooh

i don't know if anything i've done has actually tanked um i think one time i tried to do a poll about like where people got their indie games and a particular set of people like an eastern european thought it was too american-centric and we're complaining about it being too american-centric um but a lot of times like um i started off small and nobody cared about it so i'll get i'll go i'll go i'll just tell a story so i'm an artist and i was struggling with art like nobody cared about my art it wasn't good because i was always pushing myself and always like putting it to the limit um so one day i couldn't sleep and i was like i just want to do art for fun and i'm just going to do something really quick and it's going to be really simple i'm not going to think about it and i posted that online and that did super well and i was like oh oh i was putting way too much effort into this like i need to just like take a step back and make it more simple uh and people react to that better like

you don't want to like act like you're trying too hard and that's what i was trying to do with art so i wouldn't say i had anything tanked now i've had people not like things but a lot of times that's out of your control you know like for example um they don't like there's a bug in the game and they're complaining about a bug in the game and you're here posting about uh something else and like they just want to complain about that like i've gotten that a lot definitely so this is uh a question and again to remind everybody feel free to throw those questions in there this is boan if a strategy isn't working for at first how long should i stick with it before trying something different that is where intuition comes in um i'd say if you make about 10 tweets in a few weeks and nobody's saying anything that's when you need to reevaluate again how you're explaining their game

how you're showing your game or if the game itself is even something that people want and it's good to try yeah again fail faster try it again um yeah and the more things you do the more you learn as like you know there's that story about angry birds how they made like 50 failed games right before they made angry birds and angry birds was obviously a shock to them and everyone else but uh that's that's how it it does sometimes um and also some games require like some people want to make like realistic aaa games and that also takes a long time and so in those situations if you're trying to push a games like graphics to the limits i would wait to do marketing until it gets to that that time uh even if it's like closer to the end of development and then show that it's a lot of smoke and mirrors we're like magicians yeah i mean it's pretty relevant to to again like the similarities i mean we are

within the same industry but anything that's outside my cubicle anybody i always relate them to like too far out of reach and marketing department have been something that you know i never really mingled with and never really learned from you know i never really talked to on a day-to-day basis even being a lead at a major studio um the interaction is very very minor it's like can you provide this to do this we're not sitting down and they're not walking us through what they're planning to do with this piece of artwork right they're just kind of i really i really hate that too because i feel like a lot of companies are just like you community person you're off in that corner and you can't sit with us cool kids you know we're developers and i've gotten this so many times and i'm like no i need to know what you're doing you need to know what i'm doing because we're collaborating here with aaa company obviously that's not necessary you have uh leads but uh it honestly every developer should learn a little bit about marketing so that they

know what the goals should be right yeah i totally agree i wished i had um paid more attention to the company meetings when they had the slide decks and explaining with numbers i genuinely just never really paid attention until it was too late where it felt like finally the knowledge started creeping back when i was applying it um to my own own work and i feel like honestly a huge upgrade has been just talking to you for the last couple of months finally you know paying attention to it so definitely hit up star and and hit it up on the twitter to kind of seek advice because your advice really woke me up in a way where i was like oh okay finally all right i gotta roll up my sleeve and do some stuff because you know what you say is it makes a lot of sense but it's just one of those things where i got to pay attention right i think a lot of that is just people need

need to pay attention and treat it just like anything else especially like their product exactly so this is the question from go ahead oh god i was gonna say really quick this is why it's not a mystery like developers act like this is such an ambiguous thing that they they can't possibly figure out it's like that fog in dark souls like you have to get through this wall to see what's going on here yeah uh but in reality it's actually straightforward and logical and if you understand humans and you understand like how you like things you probably can understand why somebody else likes something okay that's all right well i have uh one last question here and uh this is from nightwolf for your games media can you post your own let's play along with others or would it be better to have a secondary account for let's play to try the distance youtuber from the indie company um i would have to see what you're saying but i generally like to put things as

together as much as possible some people like to create different discords for every single one of their games or different accounts for all the games that they have and i like to make things easier for myself so sometimes it depends on like what that is but um yeah if you're if you're trying to build a personal brand and a game account at the same time just be very careful of like what you're doing and uh make sure that your game has something to do with the let's plays that you're you're doing um i would say like new blood is a good example that studio because they they're really good at showcasing their games but also how their personality reflects how their games are so um definitely would want to probably check them out and see how they do it yeah it's an actual problem that i've been struggling myself it's like i do like the idea in uh consolidating my social media efforts because it is with every new account a whole you're taking on a new kid right and you gotta put a lot of care in

it to kind of see the fruits of that labor and it can be very exhausting managing like two or three or five twitter accounts and multiple discord channels and facebook channels uh i mean like you mentioned before it becomes a full-time thing and uh needs that attention to to kind of build a community in each [Music] so uh yeah i mean that that pretty much sums it up star i want to thank you again for for coming on and giving us your knowledge and and spreading the love of marketing because it is something that i feel finally uh that people are finally appreciating especially i think a lot of it has to do with um there there have been more and more branded uh at least self-branded uh developers out there uh coming out to kind of seek uh how to promote themselves so at the same time i feel like just like myself

uh there's a tension finally given uh to a very beneficial aspect of game development which is telling people about your game who would have thought it's not yet it's not evil yeah it's not evil at all yeah thank you so much i appreciate you having me and giving me the chance to talk about this and i hope the rest of it goes fantastic well thank you so much bye everybody well i'm still on bye star what are you doing i don't want to log out again oh my god all right [Music] [Music]