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[Ant]

I made a kickstarter (pimp) and it's bombing hard. The biggest problem I'm having is getting the word out, just curious if other people have some experience of this.

I'm now out of ideas, please halp.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

haha, i'm listed there, but i don't remember getting that request. i don't use twitter very often though (i check it maybe once a month) so that may be why. however it's my policy not to retweet random games from people who ask me, i'd have to actually be familiar with the game and like it to do that. if you want me to tweet about your game or something a good idea would be to send me an email (not a tweet) with a build of the game to try out

anyway, you are only doing the bare minimum of marketing, so what do you expect? you have to do a lot more work. many indies say you should spend as much time marketing your game as you spent actually making it. what you listed here sounds like a lot when listed, but what you listed here could be done in the span of a *single hour* -- that is hardly a lot of marketing work

i'd suggest starting here: http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-indie-game-marketing/

[Ant]

Christ, the first link on that page is a 50 minute lecture. If it's expected of me to spend 50% of my dev time begging for footnote news posts then I won't bother at all and instead spend 98% of my dev time actually makin gams. I'll send out emails to indie sites with a trailer when a game is released and occasionally update a blog/twitter, but that's about it. I lead a frugal existence anyway, hopefully after releasing a few games the news sites will see it in their hearts to do me the honour of a one paragraph news post.

Btw I can't blame twitterers for not reweeting random games, I'm sure you guys get a bunch of beggars every day. But there's something very wrong with the indie news sites when the only way anybody knows about your game is through random retweets. It's not like I'm pimping a shitty casual mobile game made in a week.

Thanks for the tips though Paul, but I think I'm done.

[Muz]

Yeah, marketing is time-consuming work. It might be easy (at least compared to making games), but you'd still need to spend time reaching out to people and time creating a pretty marketing pitch for people to get it. The "indie marketing guy" role should probably be as high in demand as "sound guy", since it's something that does take a lot of time and experience.

Also, your kickstarter lacks a strong elevator pitch. The first 30 secs of the video doesn't quite sell it for me. "Shoot pinkfaces and run from redfaces" doesn't sound like an engaging game. The name of the games don't really describe anything. You've got a pretty trailer, but it doesn't actually describe anything.

The reason 'casual mobile games' do so much better is because they manage to grab your attention right from the first minute (even if the gameplay itself doesn't last past 2 hours).

[feminazi]

dont bother with game journalists, jsut keep updating the kickstarter. and add sound to the kickstarter video all i hear is noise

[ANtY]

Reddit: Fucking useless. Made a post in IndieGaming and Gaming, got about 8 upvotes.

lol, it kinda works like this: if it's interesting/funny/cool ppl will upvote, if they don't like it they won't

the same with emailing rps, and everything else

[sublinimal]

Reddit: Fucking useless. Made a post in IndieGaming and Gaming, got about 8 upvotes.

lol, it kinda works like this: if it's interesting/funny/cool ppl will upvote, if they don't like it they won't

Bah, it's less predictable than that. You have to deal with things like trending topics obscuring new submissions or people downvoting the new queue to promote their own posts. Try deleting something and reposting it the next day and you'll notice. The way the system works, the first few minutes decide whether a post is hit or miss.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

there's also the matter of how many people actually see it or not. from what i understand the first few up/down votes matter the most, and determine how many people will have the chance to vote on something -- the more votes it gets in a short period as soon as you put it up, the higher its chances of being seen by people. still i agree that reddit is almost useless unless you're a reddit master or hire an expert redditter to help you. you're better off putting efforts elsewhere

[ANtY]

in the matter of first few votes, just ask ur friends to upvote it when u post ur link, worked for me

[Uykered]

Get Justin Bieber or Soulja Boy to talk about it and you'll cater to the journalist taste better.

[GeoffW]

Reddit: Fucking useless. Made a post in IndieGaming and Gaming, got about 8 upvotes.

The other major problem is that Reddit users don't seem to interact much with the sites that are linked to.  They'll click to view your site, but rather than interacting with it they're usually straight back to Reddit to vote and comment.  Some of my highest bounce and lowest conversion rate figures come from Reddit - so I wouldn't expect it to be a fantastic source of Kickstarter backers.  Though it isn't completely useless either.

Indie News sites: Emailed the Rock, Paper Shotgun dude that does the kickstarter round-up, no reply. Tweeted IndieGamesMag and one of its writers, no reply. Tweeted IndieGames.com and most of its writers, no reply, except John Polson retweeted which was nice of him though obviously would prefer a news post.

I suspect that most news outlets are getting a little bit bored of reporting Kickstarter projects.  I know I'm getting a little bit bored of hearing about them (no offense to your particular effort).  As ANtY points out, you may have more luck if you're extremely interesting/funny/cool ... or I'd add, controversial.

It's perfectly normal not to get a reply from these kinds of places if they aren't interested in your story (and sometimes if they are, I've had plenty of published reviews of The Trouble With Robots where the author never actually told me they were going ahead!).  Remember that they're busy people and they get a lot of e-mail.

[Klaim]

By the way, the guys at Rock Paper Shotgun setup a forum for such kind of project announcement (even if the project isn't finished) both to make it public easily to their audience AND to help them sort things out as tons of people send them game info each days: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?21-For-The-Promotion-Of-PC-Game-Making-Projects-And-Things-Like-That

[waylonflinn]

Here's what I think:

1. Pick one game and go with that. How do you decide? Do a little research first to determine which one seems coolest, then make a Kickstarter for that one. If it doesn't work, try another. I'm voting for the 'Call of the Wild' game in your 'Maybe More' section.

2. Add sound to your video.

3. Get a writer friend to review your text, before you post it.

I applaud you for making games and putting them out there, that's hard. Now you just need a bit of focus.

[Aik]

Your freeware games look quite nice. Has anyone ... y'know - played them? I would expect most Kickstarter money for this sort of project to come from a preexisting fanbase. Perhaps you should be spending time developing your reputation and making sure you can get into contact with people who already like your games (mailing list, or something) for next time you try and fund/sell something.

edit: Just came across this: http://www.appsblogger.com/behind-kickstarter-crowdfunding-stats/

[zalzane]

the only way to effectively take advantage of reddit is to do with with a voting botnet.

the voting system is far too dependent on the first 5-10 votes for it to be effective for any kind of marketing without manipulating the numbers yourself

[GeoffW]

the only way to effectively take advantage of reddit is to do with with a voting botnet.

That's a depressing thought.  Do you have any idea how common this is?

[Sergi]

Should we organize a REDDIGSource voting army? 

[Klaim]

the only way to effectively take advantage of reddit is to do with with a voting botnet.

That's a depressing thought.  Do you have any idea how common this is?

I'd say there have been exceptions to this, starting with minecraft. I think that if you manage to have a core audience first, then they will work for you on the communication. If you provide them ways to generate content too. MineCraft itself is the way to generate content that made people talk about it and show it on popular communication vectors.

[zalzane]

the only way to effectively take advantage of reddit is to do with with a voting botnet.

That's a depressing thought.  Do you have any idea how common this is?

Doing an initial 20-50 votes or something isn't terribly uncommon. Larger stuff like getting something to the global frontpage is uncommon since it's risky depending on how the votes are distributed.

It's not terribly hard to spot those kinds of posts. Usually they'll have a few thousand cumulative upvotes and 20 total comments.

I'd say there have been exceptions to this, starting with minecraft. I think that if you manage to have a core audience first, then they will work for you on the communication. If you provide them ways to generate content too. MineCraft itself is the way to generate content that made people talk about it and show it on popular communication vectors.

And how do you suggest building a core audience?  Infiniminer had the same potential that minecraft did in terms of using user generated content to viral the game, but it was not successful.

Minecraft, as far as I know, was originally popularized by tigsource and 4chan's video game board, not reddit. If notch never bothered posting minecraft on 4chan or tigs, and made a blind post about his game on reddit, he would probably be in the same position infiniminer was.

Even then, building a core audience who will blindly upvote your articles is going to be a lot more expensive than hiring a small botnet to do so, not to mention that the ability to garner mindless fanboys is highly dependent on the genre of game.

Reddit at its core is a horrible platform for going from zero to viral sensation. Its ability to filter content is absolutely pathetic, where I could submit an article to something in one timezone, receive zero votes, post it in another timezone, and receive 3000 votes.

If you plan on gaining any kind of leeway on reddit, either post to very small subreddits so  your post can't be ignored, or find some way to obtain a quick boost to your votecount in the first hour or so of your post being created so that their filtering algorithm won't throw your post out because the first 5 people who viewed it didn't upvote it.

[Klaim]

Well let's define what I meant by core audience first: the people you made the game for. So really it depends on the kind of game and your capacity to touch people that you think should be interested in it. So let's say I make a game about managing a turtle farm. I'll try first to touch people who like management games, turtles etc. Hard to profit from reddit indeed as it's not really a communication vector associated with your core audience. However, what if I'm making a deep tower defense with cats and a lot of lolcat humor? If it's done in a smart way, 4chan and reddit and other media communication will be easier to target.

All that is what I what I suppose, not something I experienced, so take this with distance.