The basics of marketing your indie game transcript

What's the point in making a game and making an awesome experience when there's no one who actually gets to play that game? That's kind of the the big problem of game development where you can spend years on making a game and you could maybe make the best game possible, but news alert, good game will sell itself is unfortunately not true. There is going to always be a part in game development. It comes down to, hey, you have to market your game.

And in this video, I just want to give you the very quick rundown of, hey, how do you do the basics of game marketing just so you have at least a fighting chance in getting other people to play your game, to buy your game, and maybe one day buy your Lamborghini, although that's probably not going to happen if you need to watch this video. First of all, marketing. There's one big statistic that you need to know throughout this entire thing.

Wish lists. The main goal when marketing your game before the game is out is to get wish lists. We're only going to care about Steam because Steam is the only platform genuinely on PC that you need to care about. Forget about the Epic Game Store. Forget about all of that. You're going to put your game on Steam and you're going to send people to your Steam page with the goal of wishlisting it. Why you want them to wishlist it?

Because they will get an email and they'll get notified the moment that the game comes out. Hey, you can now buy this game. They can buy the game. They can play the game. They can do all of that. Once that your game is out, your goal for marketing shifts from instead of, "Hey, wish list this game. Hey, buy this game." But probably that's not what you need to focus on right now. It's always going to be easier to get wish list and then convert them into sales before the game is out.

And you want to do this in advance instead of focusing of like, hey, I'm going to release the game first and I'm going to focus on marketing that game later. It's going to be way harder to do that. So start marketing from day zero. And that brings me immediately the first big hard to swallow pill about game marketing, and that is that the end of the day, the game is what matters for marketing. Marketing at the end of the day starts with your game's hook.

What's the hook of the game? Why should people care about your game? If your game looks horrible, if your game has a very unclear explanation of what the player will be doing, the game just doesn't look interesting, well, nobody's going to want to play it. Doesn't matter how much money you throw at Reddit ads or at influencers or all of that. Your game just isn't good and interesting enough. It doesn't matter what the rest of the video is here, it's going to be harder to market your game.

Now there's cheat codes kind of in terms of of marketing your game where you start making games specifically with that focus on making marketable games. So that's when you look at genres like for example streamer bait games, friends games whether you know it's the one to four player like extraction co-op multiplayer games and whatever. These are going to get like a boost in terms of just marketability because of you know it's highly replayable content creators love making videos about it. it's going to be easier to market those games, for example, than marketing a 2D platformer Metroid Vania.

Now, that doesn't mean that you cannot market a 2D platformer Metroid Vania. You just need to be very certain and very clear about the hook and what is this game about and be able to communicate that. It's always going to be a benefit if your game is visually interesting because most of the marketing ways we're going to talk about in this video are also going to be visually focused. So, making a pretty game genuinely is something that matters for marketing your game as well.

But at the end of the day, you need to have a good game because we're going to market our game always as well. Do not make a shitty game and then act surprised when nobody wants to wish list your game and you have to launch with 100 wish lists cuz that's just not good. The number of wish lists that people usually talk about as the goal is between 7 and 10,000 wish lists. I think 7,000 is just getting on the low end. I think right now it's more like 8,000.

Why? Because this puts you in the popular upcoming category on Steam. And what this allows you to do is basically get another few thousand wish list. a little extra final boost in terms of how many people are interested in your game because you're going to be pushed on Steam on the front page. People are going to see your game and it's going to be better in terms of getting more organic reach and reaching more players.

If you're below, I would say 8,000 wish lists. You will not show up in this list and you're kind of just going to cold drop your game without people seeing it as much that it's going to come out soon. So, you generally want to go for 8,000 wish lists. But honestly, for the first few games, I have to be honest, and we have to be realistic about this, getting 8,000 wish lists, it's kind of hard. Um, especially in the beginning, we honestly have never hit 8,000 wish lists ourselves.

Part of that has been our fault. I think if we wanted to, we could hit them with the games we're making now. So, it's not like your game is going to be doomed if you don't get 8,000 wish lists, but you do want to get probably multiple thousands of wish lists before you launch your game if you want to have any chance of, you know, getting more success. So, okay, we want to get those wish lists. which means that we need to have a Steam page.

Honestly, marketing your game doesn't make as much sense until you have a Steam page up. Yes, there are ways you can do it and you see like more advanced ways of marketing such as having email signups before the Steam page is live. If you're a solo indie developer, which most likely you are if you're watching this or you're a small indie team, you do not have the time and you shouldn't focus on this. Focus on working on the game, making the game as good and visually interesting as possible until you reach the point where you can get your game onto Steam.

And once you have your game with a Steam page live, then start considering more about marketing. So, how do we do this? First of all, you pay 100 bucks to Steam. You get your Steam developer account, and then you can have that Steam credit to start working on your store page. There's a few things you're going to need to have here. And I mean this, you need to have these be goods before you actually put that store page live.

First thing, capsule art. Always get professionally made capsule art. I don't care if you're the 2D artist or the 3D artist for the game. Pay someone else to do your capsule art. It is incredibly important, unless you are a genuinely cracked artist, to let someone else do the capsule art. It's going to cost you between 200 and 500 bucks, I would say, on average. And there's a link down below to a spreadsheet of like a collection of capsule artists that we and people in our audience have worked with in the past because this is going to be one of the main things that people will see as that first impression of your game.

And which is why it is so important to get this made by someone who knows what they're doing in terms of capsule art. You want to basically sell the game in one single visual to people who are browsing Steam, who are looking at event pages, who are looking at, for example, that popular upcoming and they want to look at it and immediately be like, "Hey, this looks like an interesting game." So, spend some money on the capsule art.

It takes a few weeks to get done, but it is truly worth it. Do not make AI generated garbage. Then, AI generated capsule art is never going to convert. You're just going to waste time. You're doing yourself a disservice. Do not even bother with AI generated capture art. just immediately pay the money. If you don't want to spend the money on the capsule art, honestly, you shouldn't watch the rest of the video because you're not taking marketing seriously.

I mean this, it is extremely important. It's going to cost you a few hundred bucks, but you can do it. Some other things that you have to have, this is a big one. You want to get that store page up early. That's something that people talk about, like get it up early so you have more time to market game. This does not mean get the Steam page up the moment you have like a shitty game. Basically, there are a few core things and you basically need to have a trailer.

Do not put your Steam page up if you do not have a trailer, which means do not put the Steam page up if you don't have at least a solid 30 to 45 seconds of gameplay for your game. Don't make like cinematic teaser trailers or whatever. You're not a AAA developer with a previous following and all of that. Show the gameplay up first. Show interesting varied gameplay, lot of different shots. Don't spend more than like 4 seconds per cut.

Basically, don't just record like a gameplay footage and make that as your trailer. We've made a bunch of videos on this YouTube channel once again about how to make trailers and how to make them good. So, take a look at those as well and get that done. Same thing with screenshots. Do not have placeholder art in your screenshots. The game should look like finished already on the screenshots, even though maybe you only have five screenshots of like a few different environments, but not the full game.

That's fine. Other things, tagging, short description, put GIFs in there. Those are more basic stuff. There's a a free guide by Chrisky, how to make a Steam page. Go and look at that. He talks about all of that of like how do you tag your Steam page? How do you write good short descriptions and all of that? Basically, use a lot of verbs and this goes back to that previous point of your marketing starts with your game idea.

If you're not capable of clearly explaining the game, the hook and what the player will be doing in like one or two sentences, which is that short description, you have to go back to the drawing board and figure out something else about your game just to make it more interesting and thus make it more marketable. Honestly, do not use AI generated [ __ ] anywhere on your store page as well. I talked about capsules before.

Do not let AI generate your long description, your short description, whatever. Please use your brains and your god-given hands to type out some descriptions. People can sniff it from miles away. If you use an emoji in your Steam description, I will find you and I will kill you in Minecraft. Once again, you're not really taking marketing serious, at which point stop watching this video and just keep making slop instead.

Put time and effort into it. Take marketing seriously and do not let an AI make that for you. It's really not as good as you think. Okay, so now we have the store page. We have a converting store page. So if people get to your store page, they will probably be like, "Hey, this looks interesting and let's wish list." How do we get people to go to that store page? Now, that's the big question. There's a variety of ways to do this.

A common one that developers try out is to example do progress posting on things like Twitter, Blue Sky, and whatever. Impact of this is pretty shitty, and I honestly like wouldn't worry about it too much, but it's like, hey, you just show clips. You post clips of your game and whatever. You showcase it on Reddit of like, hey, I made this new feature for my game. Maybe some of them blow up. You link to your store page and people find out about your game.

This is a way that depending on the game can work, but I think by far my favorite way to get wish lists for your game is through content creators. Content creators, you send them earlier builds of your game. Don't send them play test, but either like advanced copies of the demo or of the full game release basically and you're like, "Hey, just for you, I have a special build." Send them a special build. Even if it's just the same thing as the demo, just send them it early or something.

Make them feel special and unique and make them have a reason to cover it because they have an exclusive coverage that people otherwise wouldn't have. Send it to them. Be like, "Hey, go and play this game, please. I worked on it. Here's a press kit. Here's some information about the game. It would be really nice if you could make a video about it. I've made a video before about like everything, how you sent the emails and things like that before sending it to content creators so that they cover your game.

This is, in my opinion, the S tier approach to marketing. You can skip every other thing. Like I wouldn't suggest it but theoretically you can skip every other way of marketing like Reddit, like Twitter, like events or whatever. Just participate with those content creators and they can carry you a very long distance already. That's what happened in our case for example with Unicycle Pizza Time. That game was carried entirely through content creators and I think it still was a pretty good success.

Now one thing that I want you to realize here in terms of wish list as well and this is a kind of common misconception is that wish lists are not about a steady trickle stream. Wish lists will be explosive. There will be months on end probably where you're getting like five wish lists a day. And that's fine because what makes it worth this is when you join an event for example like a Steam Nextfest or a Tiny Teams or another partnered event and then you suddenly get 500 wish lists in a day, a thousand wish lists in a day or a week or whatever.

That's those peaks that you want. Or for example, in the case of content creators, some suddenly a content creator makes a video about your game. You get 2 million views on that video which converts to a whole bunch of wish lists. Once again, those are the points that you're going to be focusing on. Do not think that slow and steady wins the race. You want to go for those explosive moments. Do not worry about, oh no, I have to do daily content posting to keep my strickle stream going.

No, focus on bigger events first. Focus on steam events like for example in NextFest is something that I do genuinely suggest. Demos in general have gotten way more important on Steam. I'll talk about them in a separate video probably, but you want to join Steam NextFest. Steam NextFest is the closest you can get basically to free wish lists. You go into a Steam NextFest with a demo and you're going to come out with more wish list.

Now, one thing that I do want to talk about here in regards to Steam NextFest, because I've seen a lot of our audience completely [ __ ] up their NextFest approach is that there's something you need to understand about Steam NextFest. Yes, Steam NextFest is free wish lists, but Steam NextFest is a multiplier of your wish lists. If you go into Steam NextFest with 100 wish lists, you're going to go out of it with 200 wish lists.

Whereas if you go to Steam Nexus with a thousand wish lists or 10,000 wish lists or whatever, you're going to 2x your total amount of wish list basically. So because of this, do not join the first Nexfest you can. I know a lot of developers, including you, maybe are like, "Hey, I put my Steam page up and it didn't perform as good as I expected. I'm only at 200 wishes or whatever. Oh my god, what should I do now? Hey, I'll just join the next Steam NextFest just in case." Even though they're not planning on releasing their game anytime soon.

That's a bad move because you're going to go in, you're going to get that multiplier, but you're going to multiply basically like 200 and go to 400 or whatever, which is not a good enough number. Like I said, your goal should be like 8 to 10,000. 400 is not going to be it for you. So, this is why you generally only want to join the last Steam NextFest before your game comes out. If you expect your game to release in 12 months from now, well, do not join the next possible next fest and basically wait until the last possible next fest before your game releases.

If your game, for example, is going to come out in November, well, join the October next fest. Do not join the February exfest or whatever, because once again, you're not going in with as much wish list as you can with not as good and polished of a build of your game as well as you can, and it's just going to be a worse experience. And honestly, those two things, Nexfest and then sending out your demo to content creators and an earlier build of your game release is already going to be, I would say, 80% of your total marketing in most cases.

You can do more stuff like marketing. You can do more stuff like, for example, getting your trailers featured on IGN. You can do more stuff like Reddit ads, for example. But those are not the basics. They're not hard. But if you're watching this video, I just wanted to be very short and clear. If you're interested in more in-depth marketing, I'm going to link to our Patreon down below where we talk in depth about how to get your game on IGN, how to do Reddit ads, how to do all of that to get you more wish lists.

I think there's a lot of very interesting in-depth knowledge on there that you just can't fit into a short video like this. So, if this is something that you want to take more serious, I do suggest you to check it out. But I want to wrap this up with a few final like beginner mistakes of what you should not do because I see a lot of our audience make games and I see a lot of them just completely fumble marketing. There's no better way I can say it.

And some of the things is like for example, yeah, they use AI generated capture art and text and whatever. And it's like in that case, you know, you deserve to get 50 wish lists. But there's some other stuff as well. Like for example, I said do not wait until launch to market. If you're going to try to market your game a week before your game releases, it's too late. Start marketing from the moment your Steam Steam page comes up and accept that, hey, it is going to be in those spikes.

But still know when are there going to be relevant festivals that I can participate in. Still plan for when am I going to have my demo and do content creator coverage around the demo. Do not get stuck on just, oh, I'm just going to focus on making the game and I'm not going to worry about anything else. And then suddenly it's like one week before launch and it's like oh I still haven't reached out to content creators because at that point it's too late.

You want to do that stuff weeks in advance often creating good comprehensive lists of content creators because you want to have like hundreds of them usually takes weeks usually as well cuz it's just you know something you do 15 minutes 20 minutes every evening. Find some relevant content creators for your game. Those are important things as well. Do not wait until the last minute because then it's going to be too late basically.

Also know where your audience is. I think that's a big one. I see so many developers and they make devlogs for example but they're aimed at other developers because nobody cares about you know how your Unity project is set up. You're not going to get good conversion from that. Know where does my audience sit? If you're making incremental games there are like platforms for example like the Reddit for incremental games and there's some other incremental game site I forgot the name exactly where you probably want to try and like advertise your game.

Whereas if you're making a cozy game you probably want to find the relevant subreddit for that. Whereas I also see developers and they just join our Discord server, which whilst our Discord server is very cool and there's a lot of awesome people in there, it's not the place to market your game. Do not just go shotgun approach on every single platform you can find just spamming the same message day by day by day because you're just going to get banned from every platform and it's not going to help anyway. you're way better off doing like more focused targeted outreach to the few communities that you know are going to be interested in your game or the few content creators that are going to be interested in your game versus just scatter blasting to everyone.

Don't send your like rogike deck builder to someone who only does GTA 5 role plays because that YouTuber is not going to cover your game anyway. You're going to waste time on sending them the email anyway. Focus on knowing who's your audience and do the marketing things related to that audience. If you're making cozy games, once again, you want to try a Tik Tok. If you're making super deep strategy games and forex games, Tik Tok doesn't make as much sense.

Have a good understanding of where your audience is and then alter your marketing approach for that. Allins. It's a video idea that I kind of considered at some point of like having like different road maps of like if you're making this genre, this is the steps you want to do. If you're making that genre, these are the steps you want to do because there is no single blueprint of how to market your game at the end of the day.

So, that's the rapid fire way of how to market your game. Maybe controversial, I know, maybe it's not what you like to hear. Oh, make a pretty game. Oh, make a good game. Oh, focus on marketing. I know that a lot of you guys do want to just make games. And I understand you. I wish I could only make games as well. But fortunately, if you want to have a chance of hope of making this sustainable because let me tell you, even if you're not doing this for money, making a game and then having two people buy the game and one of them refunding it, it's not going to make you want to keep doing game development because it's just going to suck.

Marketing your game is really important. Even if it's something that you're like, "Oh, marketing is dirty." It's not. It's just part of the field you chose. And right now, it's probably the hardest it's ever been to market your game. So, you have to do these bare minimum things. The good news is that 50% of Steam honestly isn't even trying to market their games. They're not thinking about making interesting hooks, good visuals, appealing games, and all of that.

They're not thinking about having good trailers, screenshots, reaching out to press, doing content creators, and whatever. So, it's honestly pretty easy to get into the top 50% of games releasing on Steam. The problem is that the top 50% isn't really good enough, but then the competition does start getting better. But I think if you can slowly incorporate marketing, maybe don't think about it too much for your first game, but you're going to build up experience in it.

You're going to get better at it. You're going to get a better understanding of how do I market my game two games, three games down the line, you're going to get better at this, and it's going to be worth it because you're just going to get your game into more people's hands. If you're interested in game development content, we're game developers and we talk about the things that we learn along the way. If that sounds interesting, then be sure to head down below and subscribe because we upload these videos every week and you'll get notified whenever these videos come out.

So, that's all I have to say. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.