Game marketing pitfalls transcript

you just spend a long time working on your game and you want to showcase the game to the world of course because while we start making a game for ourselves we hope that at the end of the day other people go and play our game but there are so many games being released nowadays that the question lies how do you stand out how do you actually let other people know that hey this cool game that I just made it's coming out guys go and play it it's probably one of the biggest questions honestly even more than how do I actually make the game that one is pretty straightforward for the most part but actually marketing the game and letting other people know that hey this cool game that I made is coming out is much more complicated if you ask me because it's also something that changes much more game design it's the same as 20 years ago except now we have nfds and microtransactions but marketing is something that if steam decides to change their algorithm like they very recently did I'll talk about it in a second everything changes and you need to figure out all of these things again so I want to talk just about some mistakes that I see you guys make when marked in your game we've also made some of these like I'm not an angel but at this point I've able to talk to a lot of people regarding marketing and I just want to talk a bit more about how do you not completely [ __ ] up your marketing strategy I can't guarantee you success but I can guarantee that at least you'll have done everything your power if you've watched through this video and apply the things in here and let's start by getting the first biggest mistake honestly out of the way and is thinking that hey I don't need marketing my game is so good it's going to sell itself and my God you're stupid I'm sorry there is no better way to describe it there is there is no such thing anymore as oh good game will Market itself I will just put it on Steam like 2 weeks before launch because that's the minimum it has to be on the store Page basically before you can release it and that's it it's going to automatically sell if you think that genuinely reconsider your entire game development choices because this is not the way to go the market keeps getting harder and harder to release in with Steam games having more than doubled in the amount of games being released versus just a few years ago and also steam deciding to make it even harder by allowing demos to have dedicated spots in for example the coveted like popular upcoming tab or the new and trending tab for freshly released games which drive a lot of traffic in those first days before and after your launch and because it's getting so much harder you can't afford not doing anything like you can't just tell some close friends of hey I made a game go and play it you are going to have to do a lot of marketing how are you going to do that I'll talk about it in the rest of this video but don't just make a game and even if it's a great game which it could be always do your best to Market it because honestly one you'll get money out of it if you get more people playing your game second off your awesome creation just gets played by more people which if you don't care about the money you should care about other people wanting to play the game that you probably spent years of development time on so now I've gotten you convinced you are going to do some more marketing the problem is that hey you make your cool trailer or you make some cool CHS and post them on Reddit this is probably the mistake I see the most honestly especially if people in like our Discord had like conversation about it recently where they posted a gif of their game on XD everything app and they got a very high amount of traction but then uh-oh they didn't really have a name for their game they had no signup form they had no steam page they had no wish list basically people looked at it they went like okay this is cool and kept scrolling there was nothing to do for them to like capture their attention and keep up to date with the development because if this game releases like 2 years from now or however long it may be nobody who saw that post originally on XD everything app will know oh let me go and take a look at it again because they have no idea of staying in the loop the optimal way for this and that is why you see so many people drive for it is getting wish lists this is where you have a steam page and the game is not released it but you can find out more about the game and you can wish list the game and what this does is if you the developer release your game everyone who press the wish list button will get an email stating that hey the game you've been waiting for for however long is out go and buy it and they get that reminder and you can contact them basically similarly they'll also get email notifications if you go on more than 20% discount those are very important things because those are the things that will drive traffic more throughout the entire marketing process you will want to drive people to that steam page and get those wish lists and then they will all convert hopefully the moment that you press the release button now what if you don't have a steam page that's a very obvious one that you hear as well when hey it's too early in development there are still some things you can do but keep in mind these will not be as efficient and those are mainly email mailing lists that's a big one where you have just a static landing page where you're like hey if you want to get up to date with the games development entering your email and you sign up and we'll send you some updates like once a month or whatever of how the game's going and this allows you to already build some community and then also once you make that store Page then you can send out those emails and be like hey everyone go and wish list the game now on Steam because if you get a bunch of wish list in a very short period steam will also give you more visibility in exchange for that an alternative but one that I'm not the biggest fan of is Discord servers where you're like hey you can join this game's Discord server for Progress updates the problem is that Discord you're probably in some of those Discord servers as well where like the L message that has been sent was like 2 months ago and you don't really know why you're in it it's very easy to disappear from it like when you clean up your Discord or whatever and just forget about it again with an email list you've got the email and as long as you're not sending newa emails basically people aren't signing off like you can keep that email address and you can keep sending them emails until they are like okay I've had enough of this now I want to sign out whereas with Discord it's much easier for people to just dip out throughout the development process so really always have something to do always have a call to action it doesn't have to be go and wish listed but it should be something so that at least when people see your CHF or your trailer or whatever they can go somewhere and stay up to date with the games development now of course like I said the best thing to do is having that steam page but steam Pages you can mess them up pretty easily as well and something that we've learned the hard way through songs overdate and how we did the entire steam page there is there used to be the idea of hey get that steam page out as fast as possible just so you can start collecting those wish lists where now with the immense amount of games being released and the immense amount of competition you have the advice has actually shifted a bit more and it's turned into a only release the steam page once it's as polished as it can get basically I made a video about that separately just about the core steam page mistakes but I'll give you a quick rundown once again the first one is not releasing your game with any kind of trailer basically just the five screenshots that steam demands and that's it don't do this always have a trailer because this is going to show gameplay and trailers is what people look at more than just screenshots because you're playing a game it's something that you do in Motion in action you want to see how is the combat that's something that you can't really translate through a static screenshot some other things that are important as well is get some capsu art made that is professional and not just you throwing something together in Photoshop this is important because if people are browsing Steam for example this is the first image they'll see of your game they actually won't see the trailer and things like that but they'll see either your small like capsule header or they'll see like a larger capsule but this is basically going to be one image in which you have to convey The Vibes of the game don't take screenshot of your game the point is purely here to attract eyes to attract attention to Intrigue people and to make them click through it's it's like a YouTube thumbnail at the end of the day you want to make it kind of you know clickbait but don't put like red circles on it but you want to make it interesting and you want to make it appeal so people actually click on it you most likely aren't a graphic designer and probably have no clue how to do it yourself so link Down Below in the description of this video there's an Excel list that I've been compiling over the past few months of a variety of different capsu artists you can see their estimated price ranges you can see the work they've done before and figure out which one fits the style of your game it's probably going to be the one thing that I really suggest you to put money into apart from of course the steam store credit getting a good capsule made we got a lot of extra attention for Forge industry simply because we got a high quality capsule and a lot of people walked up to our boots at for example Game Force which is like a Belgian convention just because they were like this art looks cool tell me more about the game so really it's going to be a good returnal investment and then two more quick things make sure that your tags are right getting your tags correct can take a little bit of time to get right but it's very important so that steam knows where to suggest you to once again I'll talk about it more in that video I mentioned before and also add some gifs similar to adding a trailer to get some movement on the store Page add some gifs as well in the description of your game that show the game in motion to show what the game is about because once again you're not selling the game through static images you're selling it through moving images and now you're all set for a great marketing campaign except there's something critical stopping you and that is you right there who is like oh no I would never post on Tik Tok because Tik Tok is cringe and that's where all the kids are at while Tik Tok is also where all your audience may be at basically what this comes down to is you are like oh no I don't really want to fully Market the game because I don't know the platforms or I think nine gag is cringe or whatever so I'm not going to post or try to advertise on it or you're like I'm too scared to send emails to influencers to play my game and this leads to hassing your marketing approach which once again may as well not do anything which brings us back to that first point of you need to Market as much as you can you're going to have to stoop a little bit low you'll feel bad about it in the moment but trust me you're not going to lose sleep about posting like the same GIF to 10 different subreddits sure some of them will be like Oh I'm a neck beard moderator and I'll remove this post that's also fine but still the more platforms you can reach the more eyeballs you can get the more wish list and once again the more wish list you have the more sales and sales are good right if you are really serious about marketing and you do want to take it correct you should do everything I've made a bunch of videos about specific marketing things before like reaching out to games press this is one that a lot of Indies believe like oh I would never be able to get featured on that you can I made a video where I sat down with actual gam press outlets and I just asked them how do I get coverage for m game it's a really good video I suggest you go and take a look at it also for example reaching out to influencers influencers in my opinion are the best leverage you can do in terms of the effort you put into sending out your campaign emails in exchange for the amount of wish list you get so try all of these things also if you want go to like some local event don't spend money on Gamescom boots I don't think those are worth it we'll be making a video about that soon but there should be so many more things that you should actually try even if you maybe don't think about it immediately or you feel like it doesn't apply still just try it also keep in mind that some of these things are time sensitive so for example reaching out to press is something you can only do when you are announcing your game when you're releasing the game or when you're doing like big updates no press journalist is going to want to write about a game that's been out for 3 months that hasn't really had anything going on and it has like seven reviews at that point it's too late don't bother with that similar with influencers this is me speaking as an influencer myself we're all kind of lame and we just pile onto ideas that other influencers have done so you want to group all of them playing your same game together to get more velocity and once some influencer has covered the game like four months ago if there's nothing new that you can do well they probably won't cover the game anymore unless you can say like oh now there's a big update go and play it again these things you do need to plan a little bit in advance other things like just posting shorts or posting things on Reddit just keep doing them as much as you can throughout the entire marketing process those are not as time sensitive now if you are interested in more General marketing things and you're not really sure what are all the different things I can do like festivals for example and you sticked around up until now which is like over halfway of the video I'm pretty sure that you are kind of serious about marketing your game in which case I would highly suggest going out and checking our patreon where we upload extra in-depth videos every week and I mean in-depth there are things up there like I for example I've done a marketing tier list where I tier list the different strategies you can do for marketing which are good which are bad some of the thoughts I have about them also videos about how do you actually make a trailer I've done streams before where I do trailer feedback but also just from me everything that I know speaking to people like D le for example how do you make a good trailer I put it all in like one big presentation and walk you through it there's a lot of super valuable content on also we're planning a lot of extra content in the coming few weeks about how Publishers work how we're trying to get Publishers for example and just the entire process it's really going to be worth it if you want to take your game to that next level and get more than a few hundred wish list and have a game that four people play at the end of the day the link for that patreon is also down below go ahead and click it and take a look I'm really certain you won't regret it barely anyone who subscribes to the patreon ever unsubscribes because there's just so much good content on there and then the last mistake that is like kind of marketing kind of release based but that I do see a lot of firsttime developers make is the concept of Early Access and not fully understanding it a lot of developers are like hey my game it's not fully done yet but I need the money and I need like more feedback let me launch it in Early Access as a test to see how many people are interested in this this is a bad idea because steam treats your Early Access release as your full release as the main release that your game will have so if you have a bad Early Access release there is nothing steam will do really to give you more visib ability you need to go into the Early Access launch as if it is a full release don't think of it as a low stakes test to test out of waters you're not going to recover most likely from a bad Early Access release there's just no data backing that up almost there are no hidden gems in that regard and also just from a general marketing perspective if you do keep developing on the game 1.0 updates are never going to be as impactful as just the initial release there will be some talk about hey this game has a 1. update but that's only if one the game is already popular and it's just not going to be as impactful as that first build that you put on Steam that you release so my general advice is if you don't really know what you're doing stay away from Early Access it's going to make your life a lot harder it requires you to be able to commit to a certain project for a longer time as well if you want to do Early Access right you're talking about another six to at least 12 months of development whilst in Early Access not every developer also simply can commit to working on the same project for that long and if you're asking people for money well you should be able to deliver on the final product right or you're just going to get even more marketing Flack and you'll probably just have to start a new company with a new name to get rid of that so in general I hope that these things help you a little bit with marketing I'm curious what did I miss what is something that you're struggling with right now in terms of marketing is it just oh my trailer and my devlogs and whatever aren't getting any views in which case just try more it's simply just like YouTube content the more you put in the the more you will get out and it's not linear growth it's not that if you upload 10 videos you'll get 50 wish lists so if you upload 20 videos you'll get 100 wish list no the first 10 videos will get three wish lists and then if you keep going at some point you'll have enough momentum where one single video can give you like 100 200 wish lists so just keep going at it just keep putting more stuff in the marketing and you'll get more out of it don't give up it's going to take some time and it's going to feel depressing sometimes when you refresh your steam dashboard and you get like three list yesterday that is not ideal so just keep going at it apart from that if you're new here we're game developers we've released our first game we're working on our second game now and gearing up for the entire marketing of that basically we upload two videos every week talking about those things what we learned the mistakes that we've made and a bunch of other topics so if you want to do me a favor go ahead down below and subscribe as it just also makes me happy to see the number go up anyways that's all already to say thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one bye