Creating a game in front of your eyes - part 6: Let's talk about PR indie games

In previous articles I talked about the technical side of the project, and today let's talk about PR. About indie PR. I will share some thoughts, and most importantly - experience. Though small, but still real.



Let me remind you that we are doing a strategy / taykun with an eye on the PC (Steam) with premium monetization (no fritupleya). Therefore, in this vein, I will tell.



So, it's no secret that PR is difficult. And most importantly - do not forget that you need to think about the promotion of your game in advance, and not after the release. In general, the first thing to do is to read Galenkin’s book. There are many useful things.

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As for “when to start promoting”, there is also a figure “a couple of months before the release” for the mobile project and up to six months for the PC. This is due to the fact that throughout you need to maintain the interest of a potential buyer to your game. And the duration of this interest is different for different platforms.



Another mega-useful site is www.pixelprospector.com . There's a ton of information on PR for indie. Lists of forums, sites, etc. etc. Required to study.



But this is the lyrics. Let's move on to practice.



To get started, start Twitter accounts (English is mandatory, Russian is optional), Facebook (better if it will be than not) and VK (again, if you are targeting the Russian community). It is advisable to start your own website and blog, as a single point of information about your game (including, of course, in English!). As a blogging system, I advise WordPress - it is easy to set up, well and flexibly expands.



Next you need to start. Obviously, creating accounts will not add you an audience immediately. Nobody knows about you. What to do?

Let's talk about twitter

For Twitter, the easiest way is hashtags. Here are some useful: #gamedev, #indiedev, #pixelart, #screenshotsaturday. Post more and someone will see you. Post more screenshots / pictures / sketches. Such records are better seen in the tape and are more likely to cause a repost and subscription. Yes, and I advise you to immediately add the URL with your site to all the screens. And no one knows how they will spread across the network ...



Another important point - at the very beginning, having created an account on Twitter, you will have 0 followers there (well, or a dozen friends). Such an account is not very appetizing for a potential subscriber (“why should I follow if no one follows?”). For this, I advise you to buy the first few hundred followers on some stock exchange. As a rule, they cost a penny. For 500 rubles, you can get a few hundred subscribers. It is clear that all these followers will be bots, but for us it is now important to get rid of the number “0” in the subscribers field. We did the same - open the hashtag (for example, #indiedev) and start to follow those who retweet. These are your potential customers. Only not the people who write (because it will be the same indie as you), namely retweeters, because these are interested people. Seeing you in subscriptions, a great chance to follow each other.

Forums

Feel free to create topics about your game in all indie forums (look at the list for all the same PixelProspector). The most famous is probably TIGsource. But do not neglect the smaller ones. Will an extra thousand views hinder you? I think no.



Having created a topic, do not forget about it. After all, he will fall down. Constantly post in it new screens, news, etc. You can even start a fake account and sometimes arrange correspondence in your thread if the topic looks dead.



But do not count on the mountains of traffic. For example, a topic raised to the top of the TIGsource will get about 100 views until it falls down. But if you post constantly, you can make 1000 in a couple of weeks.

Articles, etc.



Here - more difficult. Many articles on your game (or about the development of the game) you do not write. And where to publish them is also not entirely clear. Yes, there is the same Habr. There are, for example, Gamasutra. I recently translated my technical article about shaders to hamasutra.







As you can see, this gave a total of 100 transitions to the site. And this is taking into account the fact that the article was zafirechena.



Here is the article on Habr:

Youtube and letsplay

You can talk about this only when you have some kind of working version. So far we have only a prototype, so we ourselves are not looking for letsplayers and we don’t push them (again, there is a list of letsplayers on PixelProspector). But sometimes letstplery themselves find us. It all depends on the size of the channel audience.



This is how the transitions to our site look like after a man with 300 thousand subscribers has lost us:

Game Catalogs

We have so far tried only 1 directory with free games - this is GameJolt.com . The bottom line is that our prototype demo is naturally free. So place it anywhere.



Having placed on GameJolt, you get in new. Then it is very desirable to ask all friends and community to vote for your game. 20 “fives” will take you to the first page of the top, and to the first 3 places in your genre. How the top is calculated there is hard to say. Obviously, not only the average score is taken into account, but also the number of ratings (so that games with three fives do not make it to the top by 1 place). We with ~ 50 ratings and an average rating of 4.8-4.9 even visited the first place.



We are satisfied with the site. Hanging out in the top at 1-4 places, we received about 1000 views of our game per day:







And on June 6, we were befallen. From here - growth.



Conversion to the site is not amazing, but not bad:







By the way, on the same GameJolt, you can fasten their system of high goals and achivok. It took me a couple of hours maximum.

Torrents

Recently I was surprised to find that our (free!) Demo was cut out of the browser and distributed on one torrent tracker.



The author of the distribution cut out the information about the game from the site (which is currently plans for the future) and inserted it into the description of the torrent with the prototype. As a result, people are wondering where all the declared features, etc.



This is what I am for - your game (even a web demo) will appear on torrents. It is better to immediately take it into your own hands and distribute it yourself by writing exactly the description you want.



Do not rely on the mountains of traffic. It’s rather just a way to keep the spread of your game (and information about it!) Under your control.

Game Conferences

Recently passed DevGamm. We were invited there to participate in the game projects showcase as the winner of GamesJamKanobu (plus 2 more times we were invited as winners / participants of other jams).



The bottom line is that they give you a table and a half day time to demonstrate your game to all visitors. You can also buy money for 2 days for money. This is how our place looked like (pictured by Nikita Dartius )







We printed out a pack of business cards and an A5 handout on the showcase.







It was necessary to vinyl magnets, but somehow did not think.



The usefulness of this event depends on your goals. If you need to find a publisher (especially mobile) - this is very good. People constantly approached us and were interested in how to make a frituple for mobile phones from our game. And we were very upset to hear that we are making premium in the first place for the PC.



In addition, it is a good way to meet players and colleagues.

Advertising

It’s too early to talk about advertising. We have no pre-order and intelligent alpha version. But we decided to try advertising on PixelJoint. This is a website dedicated to pixel art. That is our subject.



A small banner of 200x200 costs them $ 30 a month and they promise 300,000 views. So far, about 60 people a day have passed through it. Which is also not bad. That is, a click costs about 1.6 cents.







Here is the banner.

Some information from friends

Simple, useful information. The game, laid out on the GreenLight in the first days of gaining about 2000-3000 likes, which gradually disappear. At the same time, the Greenlight campaign on IndieGoGo is gaining very little (less than $ 100). Although, of course, it depends on the game including.

Conclusion

Naturally, we still have a lot to learn and I have no right to advise you from the position “do as I do and everything will turn out”. In this article, I just shared the experience that we have already received and some conclusions.



I hope someone will be useful!



All articles in the series:

1. Idea, vision, choice of setting, platform, distribution model, etc.
2. Shaders for styling images under the CRT / LCD
3. We fasten the scripting language to Unity (UniLua)
4. Shader for fade in on the palette (a la NES)
5. Subtotal (prototype)
6. Let's talk about the indie games
7. 2D animations in Unity ("as in flash")
8. Visual scripting of cut scenes in Unity (uScript)