Over the last few days I’ve been watching videos about how to market your games 🎮
In short: they’re all crap 💩 It becomes obvious when you watch them all back to back (more than two dozen). Some of those vids have like 800k views…
What they tell you 🙊
- have a Twitter. or don’t
- you need a Discord, or you don’t
- buy ads, or don’t
- you need awesome art, or you don’t
- post on Reddit, or don’t
They don’t know what to do themselves. They just poke around and cherry-pick some conclusions. There’s no playbook. Except, of course, for “well, you can message me, and I MIGHT (meaning for some cash) add a link to your game in my newsletter.”
For example: there’s a “game”. It blew up after a Reddit post. So post on Reddit. Oh, but 15 other games didn’t take off there, TikTok helped them instead. Post there. But here are 40 other games, they took off after launching Discord servers, so launch Discord servers…
It’s like trying to catch storks in the sky. Of course, if you have $$$$💸 for marketing, they’ll just buy let’s players and gaming portals and run ads.
Articles on big portals cost anywhere from $300 to $15k (what the hell, lol 🤪). Having a let’s player play your indie on Twitch costs roughly the same.
But there is one thing all the lucky games have in common: the authors didn’t stop, kept releasing games, slowly built up a critical mass of popularity and followers 😘, and built a community around themselves 🗣
Like my channel ❤️ Loca Deserta Telegram. I didn’t start it so I could later hit you with ads or whatever. I started it because I love showing what I make, especially progress in video game development. You can scroll up to summer 2021 and check out the funny screenshots I posted. Back then a sprite was running around a textured cube and something was spinning. A year ago I’d just launched Unity and switched to Unreal. And sometime around November I started making Sloboda in Unity for real.
Of course, my 15+ years of development experience help me a lot in gamedev, and I don’t plan on stopping. I wonder how I’ll look at the screenshots I’m posting now, but in 2023-2024.
My 100% focus until spring is Sloboda. After that, the plan is two more games by 2024.