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[ANtY]

What I see lately is that a lot of projects announces contain links to both, Kickstarter (or another crowd funding website) and Steam Greenlight.
Seems like a good way for free press coverage and feedback of real gamers of your freshly announced project, any thoughts on this topic?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i wouldn't consider either of those "free press" considering that there are a ton of games on greenlight and kickstarter and most people don't see any of them; i imagine the average game on kickstarter or greenlight gets like 10 views

[ANtY]

Really? I saw some really not-so-good games on Greenlight that didn't have any press coverage not counting some really small blogs and even those had (at least)20+ comments there

don't you think that press is more likely to cover your project when it's on either of those websites?

[Ant]

I doubt having a greenlight/kickstarter is a persuader for the press, especially if it's a kickstarter for an almost finished game. People tend to be pretty hardened to these sorts of tactics now.

From my own experience I have done a kickstarter, it absolutely tanked and got no press. I did get about 20+ twitter followers but they pretty much all just came from when cactus retweeted it. So I think it's like in that other discussion about adding your games to a bunch of portals, it probably helps sales doing stunts like this but not by much and takes up a whole bunch of time. Generally my master plan is to just try and consistently make good games so that you build an audience yourself, after which you're less reliant on press who once you have some solid games under your belt are far more likely to write about your stuff anyway.

Also it's worth keeping in mind that both greenlight and kickstarter have their own community tastes like tigs. If somebody comes here with a pixel platformer then this place laps that shit up, but greenlighters tend to hate anything pixelly. Generally the people who browse greenlight are modern gamers and kickstarters are hipsters.

[ANtY]

Ok, thanks for your experience with kickstarter. Seems like it's not worth just as a marketing tool now.

 I'd love to hear some thoughts about this from someone experienced with greenlight now.




the sole idea of titling posts this way puts me off

[melos]

greenlight frontpages you on greenlight for a bit of time (idk how long). usually you get a couple thousand views, maybe near 10k...but no one really clicks on links there or anything unless it's phenomenal.

no clue about kickstarters.


Unless your game goes viral or some big names talk about it (very hard to do), greenlight will flatline after about a month, and then you have to either have a big fanbase, a game that people latch on to in a viral manner, or lots of big names talking about it (though it is surprising how much this actually doesn't help the greenliight process, it has to be like totalbiscuit or yogscast scale to do much)