Marketing and Promotion
This page is intended as a quick summary of the various different methods that you can use for marketing & promoting your released & work-in-progress games. Please take this guide with a pinch of salt as I am only providing you with my own personal knowledge, as well as some theoretical solutions.
Google is your Friend
Well, not just Google, but all search engines in general, such as: Yahoo, Bing, & DuckDuckGo, etc. Instead of immediately asking for help on a forum or reddit, consider checking out a search engine like Google, or a video service like YouTube, because more often than not you will find a load of other people have already asked the same question before, or someone has posted a video about it. The same thing goes for research. Search engines & YouTube are just king when it comes to finding out information about most things.
Social Media
Most marketing & promotion involves the use of social media these days, via platforms such as: Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, & Youtube.
| Quick note: yes I consider Discord as a social media platform as it can be used for both marketing & promotion if used correctly. |
Discord
Discord is actually a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) & chatroom app, but it's actually so much more than that because of all of the features it contains. It's a really powerful marketing & promotion tool because you can use it to provide your potential consumers with updates on the progress of your game, host Q&A nights via stage or voice channels (the latter allows you to stream your desktop or specific app windows, &/or your webcam, etc. & engage in voice discussions with your consumers). You can also ask your consumers questions &/or setup polls to get feedback on what they think of your game project so far or to find out if they like specific ideas, mechanics, puzzles, etc. Just think of it as a more hands on approach to interacting with your consumers & a way to make them feel like they are a part of the creation process of the project while getting some feedback on your project in return.
Personally I absolutely hate Facebook, but unfortunately it's one of the most used social media platforms on the planet (*sigh*), which means that it's also a great place for promoting your games & work-in-progress projects. They have the pages feature which you can use for setting up a page for promoting & sharing news about your game/project, & they also have plenty of user created groups related to game development & promotion that you can use for promoting your game.
I am not super familiar with Instagram myself as I don't share photos & videos of myself online - actually I really hate having my photo taken. Anyway, you can use it for sharing screenshots, videos, & gifs of your games & work-in-progress projects. I have zero clue how effective promotion would be on something like Instagram, but it's another platform you can use to let people know about your product.
Reddit can be a bit of a toxic place, but it does have some useful groups that you can use for promoting your games & work-in-progress projects like indiegames, or gameDevClassfieds for promoting your freelance game development related services.
Twitter can be really useful for promoting yourself via, but it can be hard to promote yourself if you don't know how to correctly use #hashtags. On Twitter, it's all about impressions which are the amount of people who have viewed & potentially interacted with your tweet by liking it &/or retweeting it. The biggest problem with Twitter is that it has a 280 character limit & hashtags & links are also counted in the character limit, which means that you need to plan out your tweets before creating them.
The reason why hashtags are so important is because people & bots actively monitor for specific hashtags & may like & retweet your posts that contain specific hashtags. A bunch of those accounts have a decent amount of followers which means you potentially could earn a few new followers yourself each time one of your tweets gets retweeted by one of those accounts. As they say, or as someone once said... "every little helps".
| Quick note: NEVER generate random #hashtags for your tweets, because you have no idea if anyone is monitoring those hashtags, & thus could potentially be wasting precious character space that could be used for verified hashtags or additional relevant content. |
Here are some things you should consider doing for your tweets.
◻️ Only include relevant information.
◻️ Only include relevant hashtags.
◻️ Include a fancy image, gif, or video to make your tweet stand out.
◻️ Consider using a well-known URL shortener to reduce the amount of characters the link is taking up.
Here are some popular hashtags that you can use: #gamedev, #gamedeveloper, #indiedev, #indiegamedev, #pointandclick. You can feel free to include those hashtags whenever you like. & now below are some hashtags that have enforced rules & can only be used under specific circumstances...
◻️ #madewithvisionaire - only use this for tweets about your released or work-in-progress Visionaire Studio developed games.
◻️ #adventuregamefriday - friday only & must include an image, gif, or video of your work-in-progress game (used to generate interest & potential followers).
◻️ #screenshotsaturday - saturday only & must include an image, gif, or video of your work-in-progress game (used to generate interest & potential followers).
That's about all you really need to know about Twitter, but before I move onto the next subject I would just like to give a small shoutout to the Tweetdeck provided by Twitter themselves as it's much nicer to use than Twitter itself. You can compose tweets, or like & subscribe other peoples tweets too, but the reason I like it is because you can create columns that show tweets from specific users or that contain specific #hashtags & in that regard it's super useful & makes using Twitter so much easier & faster because everything you want is listed on a single page.
Youtube
YouTube can be used for promoting yourself via video content for your released & work-in-progress games. You can upload & share game development video logs, game trailers, teasers, news, or even do live game development streams if you have a decent enough internet connection & pc.
| Quick note: you need to be careful when you upload your videos that they do NOT contain any potentially copyrighted music in them - this includes music playing in the background or another room in your house/flat as any sections of your video containing copyrighted music may be muted by youtube themselves if your video gets reported & flagged for having copyrighted content in it. Having said that, youtube provide a load of free music that you can safely add to your videos. |
Live Content Streaming
Live content streaming is very popular these days & is actually one of the things that makes up for most of the overall internet traffic each & every single day - well, technically it's watching videos in general, but streaming is a large part of that.
There are multiple streaming platforms available to you, such as: Discord, YouTube, Facebook, & the grand daddy of them all Twitch.
Anyway, I'm not going to tell you how to stream - you can use Google to figure that out - but I am going to give you some pointers, on the sort of content you could be streaming. <hr
| Quick note: do not expect to have millions of people watching you when you stream - even if you promote yourself to the best of your ability you will still more likely than not only have a handful of people watching. All of those popular streamers have spent a long time cultivating their viewer count through marketing, promotion, & collaboration with other streamers & most of them tend to have big personalities or personas they put on while they stream. If you are boring, then you are just boring. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |
Arts & Crafts
You could consider streaming the creation process of your graphics, animations, music, sounds, etc.
Development
You could consider streaming how you take the resource files that you yourself or others have created & show how you put them all together in the game engine & turn a bunch of random files into a playable game.
Questions and Answers
You could consider doing a live Q&A while you work on your game, or even a live interview.
Blogging & News
Forums
Final Note
