Hi all,
From what I've read, success of an indie game largely hinges on the size and enthusiasm of its community. All the articles about Kickstarter/Steam successes boil down to this. Even the Kickstarter Handbook
says (emphasis mine):
"Kickstarter is a great way to share your ideas with new people. Still, most of your support will come from your core networks, and the people most familiar with your work."
I will soon have something playable, like a short demo, and I want to make sure that I somehow stay in touch with the people who like it. Otherwise, I will have no way of letting them know that the game is either complete or needing their input / support.
The options I've thought about so far:
- mailing list on something like google groups (people can post and reply)
- "Sign up for email updates" - a form asking for email address, so I can reach people that way (but they don't know about each other and cannot communicate among themselves)
- Facebook Group
- Facebook Page
- Twitter account
- Dev Blog
I obviously want to go with as few of the options as possible, with reasonable impact. Ideally, just one of those things would be enough to gather most of the interested players.
For completeness, things that I've rejected:
- a full internet forum (such as forums.tigsource.com) — way too much work for both me and the community (yet another login)
- Kickstarter campaign — I currently have no bandwidth to build a good Kickstarter campaign
- Steam — my game is web/mobile-based and textual, not a great fit for Steam
- Twitch — my game is web/mobile-based and textual, not a great fit for Twitch
What are your suggestions? Any articles that I should read on this topic?
Developer
