Our game,
Life Goes On, is getting close to completion, and our team has been working on our plan for launch. There are a lot of good articles available about marketing indie games in general, but I wasn't able to find much information about maximizing the impact of game launch. With that in mind, I want to share the plan that we came up with. Hopefully it provide some useful information for others, and it would be great to get feedback, and find out if there is anything missing.
One important factor with our situation is that Life Goes On is largely a puzzle game, so early on we decided to avoid showing beta builds of the full game to players. This means that we don't have Early Access, Alpha Funding, or an open beta.
In the AAA world, launch is critical, and massive advertising budgets are used to build hype and anticipation. With indie games, the big budgets don't exists, and the sales cycle is often drawn out over long periods. But there is still an opportunity to build some launch excitement. Particularly, we are working from the assumption that post launch a game is old news, and much more difficult to get reviews and press coverage after a game has been on the market for a while.
I look at reaching people in two different categories. One is via the connections that we have made with players while marketing the project during its development. These direct channels include our twitter account, facebook page, indiedb page, blog and mailing list. The other group to reach out to is the media, including games journalists, bloggers, Let's Players, and podcasters. Reading about indie game marketing in general, it's often repeated that twitter and personalized email are the best ways to reach the media, so that's how we plan to proceed. We also plan to post our news on reddit, and put out formal press releases.
With all of that in mind, here is the rough outline of our plan:
One month before launch: Announce our launch date and being taking preorders. Preorders will go on sale on Steam, and directly from our website. They will be offered at a small discount in order to give people some incentive to buy early. I'm not sure if preorders will help with additional sales, but there doesn't seem to be any downside, so we plan to offer them.
We will announce via our direct channels, as well as contacting the media via email. For the media, our email will mention that we will be following up by sending them a review copies of the game in two weeks.
Two weeks before launch: Follow up with the media, sending out review copies and asking that they consider reviewing the game. We will also ask that they hold the review until launch date, as the priority is trying to get people to buy the game when they see it. Building hype might work with a big budget, but for us, we hope to convert any exposure we get directly to sales. There is no way we can expect to enforce a press embargo or anything, but we will ask nicely, and ideally we will get maximum press exposure when the game is launched. One benefit of offering preorders is that any media coverage that is published early still has a change to sell copies of the game.
One week before launch: Remind people that they have one week left to preorder the game at discount via direct channels.
Launch day: One more big push via direct channels and media to get the word out about launch.
On top of this, we plan to have a regular steam of screenshots, animations, and information about the game going out via twitter and facebook in the month leading up to launch. Ideally we will have a new trailer ready to go when we announce our launch as well.
There isn't anything super complicated here, but hopefully it covers the basics, and gives people a place to start for planning a launch. It would be great to discuss the plan, I'd love to hear feedback, and I would especially like to know if there is anything important that we are missing. Thanks!
Developer
