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[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Think its better to spend more time on your game, and less time spamming people.

what nix said. promoting a game doesn't mean spamming. it means working on the game's website, making good screenshots, making a good trailer, sending review copies to reviewers, doing interviews, updating the game's facebook page / twitter page, holding contests, sales events, and other events, making design videos, making blog posts about the game, keeping an email newsletter, emailing journalists, going to meetups (GDC, PAX, etc.), doing affiliation with other indies (package deals with their games or things where you sell each others' games on each others' site), approaching portals (steam, etc.), and so on and so forth; there are a million and one ways to promote your game that aren't spamming

the AAA industry can rely on the AAA game journalists to market their games for them. no matter how good or bad gears of war 3 would have been, it would have gotten millions of free dollars in marketing from games journalism. we can't rely on that

[leonelc29]

*downloading Mr.Eres knowledge*

i don't know about meetups(GDC, PAX, etc)stuff goes, as not all people can afford traveling.

[eclectocrat]

working on the game's website, making good screenshots, making a good trailer, sending review copies to reviewers, doing interviews, updating the game's facebook page / twitter page, holding contests, sales events, and other events, making design videos, making blog posts about the game, keeping an email newsletter, emailing journalists, going to meetups (GDC, PAX, etc.), doing affiliation with other indies (package deals with their games or things where you sell each others' games on each others' site), approaching portals (steam, etc.), and so on and so forth

TODO: Promote Game...

I like posts with substance.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i don't know about meetups(GDC, PAX, etc)stuff goes, as not all people can afford traveling.

it wasn't an exhaustive list and most of the things on the list are optional -- nothing i said is absolutely necessary to promote games, but all are helpful. well, perhaps screenshots are absolutely necessary -- if you do not make screenshots (or if your screenshots are bad) people won't bother to try your game. a trailer is also up there in importance

[moi]

I would like to know how many tigsource members are on steam.
I know there is vvvv and that game with goblins building a castle or sthg.
Probably less than ten I think

[Manuel Magalhães]

Aquaria
Eversion
VVVVVV
Gish
Super Meat Boy
Saira (nifflas has an account here methinks)
NightSky
Tobe's Vertical Adventure
Inside a Star-filled Sky
Time Gentlemen, Please!
Ben There, Dan That!
Eufloria

I could have missed some of them though.
Edit:

I would like to know how many tigsource members are on steam.

Oops, I reed that as games made by tigsource members, so nevermind my list. From it there's nine TIGS members.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

a lot of the people who made those games have posted fewer than 100 times on this forum (are level 0) tho

also you forgot dangerous high school girls in trouble, bullet candy, and a few others

[turgoz]

Also SpaceChem


If you are interested in supporting yourself and maybe a few others in order to make games you love getting the word out is important. Making a great game is a good start and word of mouth is great but sometimes that customer base could be limited to a certain group. As many have said before, marketing an be a full time job and it is only limited to your creativity. The post above only mentioned some of the most basic avenues.

 For instance PETA advertises themselves with a lot of uhhh.... creative ways.


Steam's been great for us and we didn't sacrifice any creative control, but we would never have gotten Steam's attention if we hadn't worked really hard getting the word out to news sites who picked us up. It's kind of a snowballing effect.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

how specifically did you work to get the word out to news sites, out of curiosity (do you mean just emailing journalists with your game, or something else?)

[gambrinous]

promoting a game doesn't mean spamming. it means working on the game's website, making good screenshots, making a good trailer, sending review copies to reviewers, doing interviews, updating the game's facebook page / twitter page, holding contests, sales events, and other events, making design videos, making blog posts about the game, keeping an email newsletter, emailing journalists, going to meetups (GDC, PAX, etc.), doing affiliation with other indies (package deals with their games or things where you sell each others' games on each others' site), approaching portals (steam, etc.), and so on and so forth; there are a million and one ways to promote your game that aren't spamming

the AAA industry can rely on the AAA game journalists to market their games for them. no matter how good or bad gears of war 3 would have been, it would have gotten millions of free dollars in marketing from games journalism. we can't rely on that

+1 to this

[Reives]

I think it's also important to take marketing (not "advertising") into consideration before even starting to develop the game; not many people seem to be doing that unfortunately.

Inserting a bit of high-concept to it goes a long way; keep in mind that journalists are people with jobs too and are just looking for interesting things to write about to make their work easier. If you keep in mind their perspective and make something quirky/odd/even controversial enough that they'd want to write about, it goes a long way.

A lot of the time I see absolutely amazing games around here that really shine through when you get into them, but feel bland when you simply describe it to someone. I'm definitely not saying it should be the other way around (which would probably be even worse since it'd be bombing after raising the bar), but just remember to keep in mind the need to catch someone's attention, hopefully even at face-value, when conceptualizing the whole idea.

[CEDE]

I think it's also important to take marketing (not "advertising") into consideration before even starting to develop the game; not many people seem to be doing that unfortunately.

This is more apparent in my mind now than ever. We tried to lay out a few ideas as we began production of the game we just wrapped. And having just finished something and moving onto pre-production for the next thing I am making it even more of a priority.

Having as many angles as possible to attack, marketing wise, is important.

Think of is this way. The minimum would be 'game'. One. So you try to contact a bunch of game journalists. But if you also have interesting art and music you add 2 extra directions to market in. Three.

Also this whole self promotion situation in general makes me wonder about the resources available to indies. And I am going to take a random shot in the dark with an idea - maybes its been done or maybe its bad or maybe it could be something.


What if there is a private hub that existed online. A place sort of like a forum / wiki / database that collected all the best resources for marketing and press. The reason why it would be private is to avoid spamming out information and making sure the right people had access.

It could be invite only, or reviewed registration. And not for the sake of elitism, but quality control and respect of privacy.

I personally am really wishing something like this existed for us right now, to the point where founding it sounds ideal. And I would be happy to share whatever resources I have collected, but doing so out in the open is kind of rude to the contacts - albeit they were all dug up through public means.

What does everyone else think?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

things like that have existed for years actually. you have to realize that a side effect of something being private is that it's not generally known about and isn't available to just anyone, and become invite-only, so new indie developers often don't hear about them

[CEDE]

things like that have existed for years actually. you have to realize that a side effect of something being private is that it's not generally known about and isn't available to just anyone, and become invite-only, so new indie developers often don't hear about them

And exactly the boat I am in. I have been working for a little bit, but am only just now really trying to make my ratio better than 99% work 1% marketing. Its totally necessary if I want to actually keep doing what I am doing.

[J-Snake]

a lot of the people who made those games have posted fewer than 100 times on this forum (are level 0) tho

Isn't it that Notch just disappeared after Minecraft? By coincidence I saw some of his posts about java vs x, so I assume he was active.

[st33d]

They all leave the nest once they can fly.

Mind you though, Terry will post his two cents every now and then. Cactus popped up in my dev log. And Derek is still the Final Boss on TIGSource.

[leonelc29]

st33d is still here. i can't really imagine the situation if Derek were to disappear.

[st33d]

I still haven't finished my bloody roguelike. Of course I'm still here.

[J-Snake]

They all leave the nest once they can fly.

So this is the attitude. I see.

[entropyExplorer]

long int success = game quality * marketing;

game quality = ((game design * refining) + art quality) / flaws in the code;

game design(quality) = (genre + innovation) * time spent prototyping;

flaws in the code = difficulty of project - coder quality; //could be a negative number... weird

marketing = something i don't know, but assume it's important.
===================
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Basically you need a game concept that will be better than 90% of them. Team members(if applicable) that are better than 70% of them. And marketing that is better than 95% of em'.

0.1 * 0.3 * 0.05 = 0.0015

You have a 0.15% chance of success. My sugestion is: pray... hard... to the GODS OF LUCK!!!