›

9 Tips Drawn from GDC

EvanGreenwoodEvanGreenwood
edited in General
http://hub.tutsplus.com/categories/game-design/articles/gamedev-6591-9-tips-for-indie-game-developers-i-learned-at-gdc-2013

Wish I could have attended GDC, but I'm glad there's a lot of folks willing to share what they learned through attending.
Thanked by 1hellojaco

Comments

  • KarujiKaruji
    I kinda ranted at the JHB meet last night.

    Given the position the zX is in right now I really had the focus on how to we get the game out there. It's kind of hard for me to condense exactly what that is but to try and do a point form summary.

    Get your game everywhere.

    When emailing sites make it personal, learn which writers cover games like yours and actually read their writing.

    There are fellow devs who will enjoy your game and advocate it on your behalf, just because they like it, and you.

    If your game is at a show you want to be there. Or have someone there on your behalf.

    Even if your game is famous (like SpyParty) there are still a lot of people who won't know that it exists.
  • EvanGreenwoodEvanGreenwood
    That's a great suggestion about reading the writing of game journalists. It's very easy to think of them as functions of entities like Kotaku, when obviously they're distinct individuals who just like us are looking for appreciation and understanding. I think I'm going to have to do better at this!

    Thanks for the tips!
  • hellojacohellojaco
    A little off the topic of GDC, but in response to the (seemingly universal) marketing conundrum:

    As someone who has been working in Online Marketing for a number of years, I understand 100% how Indie creators struggle to get their game "out there" when the time comes. Doubly-so if you have no marketing budget (what marketing budget?) at your disposal.

    If I could give a little piece of advice in this respect, it'd be that social media is your friend. That, and if you can come up with a R500/month marketing budget, then invest in CPC media like FB ads and Google Adwords. I don't know if this is obvious - I don't assume knowledge about the effectiveness of these things from people outside of my industry - but I see it working for products much more boring than video games every day. ;)
  • ElyaradineElyaradine
    I wonder how effective stuff like that would actually be. I mean, most of the time I think stuff like Adwords works because people are searching for a particular product or service, and Google returns a relevant result. But for the most part, (and as someone who definitely does not work in marketing) I don't think people actually search for "80s action hero 2d side side scrolling game".

    I think people who play games find out about new games they may want to play through friends and through gaming news sites. I could be wrong (I'm certainly ignorant!), but I don't really see how much something like Adwords would help with game marketing.
  • hellojacohellojaco
    I hear what you're saying, and organic stuff like friends sharing links, etc. definitely contributes a vast amount of interest. Which is obviously why social media is important.

    But when it comes to something like Adwords, you need to keep in mind that there is a little work involved - and that's where you'd need to be smart. While keywords like 80s action hero 2d side side scrolling game for instance doesn't show massive popularity, changing that to something like retro action game shows about 10 000 recent searches. Apply to that an average click-through rate of about 5% and you have 500 people visiting your site. Cost-per-click should come in around R1, so there's your monthly budget. R500 got you 500 new people to visit your site.

    You'd need to make sure that when they get to your site, you convert them into sales/leads/shares/whatever, so things like a nice flashy intro vid on the homepage, a contact form or clearly visible 'Buy Now' link, and a 'Share this' button or two are essential - which teaches us that these marketing exercises shouldn't exist in isolation but rather as part of an all-round strategy (which includes all the great tips @Karuji posted here) - but at least that's a solid way of growing a brand.

    Cause let's face it - we can't all release games like Minecraft which blow up almost by itself. For most of us (as with most brands), it's gonna take some grinding to achieve some level of commercial success. :)
  • dislekciadislekcia
    Cliff Harris writes about advertising for indies quite a lot:
    1. http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2012/11/17/cliffskis-2012-guide-to-advertising-your-indie-pc-game-online
    2. http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2010/10/30/re-assessing-adwords-strategies (this is a lot older though)

    I drove a big traffic spike for DD around our free to play promotion during GDC by sending very targeted emails to certain members of the press. I should probably write a thread about that or something.

    I'd just like to point out that advertising when you don't have anything to sell is silly. Building a good/great/amazing game is always steps 0 through 2043.

    I'm also wondering why the other recommendations in the OP link aren't being ripped to shreds here. Are people just not reading them?
    Thanked by 1hellojaco
  • ElyaradineElyaradine
    @hellojaco: Thanks for the explanation! Makes sense. :)
    Thanked by 1hellojaco
  • hellojacohellojaco
    @Elyaradine - No probs. Just sharing what I know to hopefully help the guys who are ready to launch stuff. Like I said, I see this sort of thing work on a daily basis, so I know first-hand that it works.
  • KarujiKaruji
    To give a slight preface to my views here. My goal with marketing is to get zX through Greenlight. So a lot of what is traditionally sound advice doesn't really work. My measure of successful media exposure is greenlight votes.

    @hellojaco actually that was a really big one that I forgot, but also take for granted. Twitter is the most important tool you can ever have for marketing. Just about every journalist and dev uses it. Though from Dev.Mag I don't think adwords are that useful. And possibly less so for games.

    @BlackShipsfillTheSky weirdly enough I got to speak to one of the journalists from Kotaku, his advice was to make the email and subject as impersonal as possible. It's kind of a function of churn rate. More people know about Kotaku so more people email them.

    This is why we have focused on a more grassroots campaign with zX so far. Talking to smaller, indie, sites is generally easier. It also gives you a notch for when you talk to other sites. Also South African sites are basically pointless to talk to. On the day that we had articles on two local sites our Greenlight votes were lower than normal, and there was no noticeable increase.

    The best we did is when a french YouTuber picked up the game. We ended up with 20x our good day on greenlight votes, and we have seen a notable increase in our average daily votes since then.
Sign In or Register to comment.