A Guide to Marketing your Indie Game (Patreon)

So you’ve decided you want to start marketing your new indie game and you need some advice on getting started and how to run your social media. I have a few tips and tricks on how to help you gain an audience.

 In terms of my personal background, my name is Katie Nelson, I graduated from University in 2015 with a degree in game development. Around 2 years ago I was a struggling game developer, working on a failed kickstarter game,  wallowing in self hate and depression and completely unsure on what I wanted to do with my life. I made many mistakes, and learnt from them, but it wasn't so easy to overcome my personal fears and anxiety. 

Being a game developer can be tough, and I fully appreciate how hard it can be, putting yourself out there is scary. I want to be open about my failures, so you can see that we all fail, and we all grow. So here are some of the lessons I picked up from one of my greatest mistakes, I did zero marketing prior to my kickstarter 

Marketing your game early is extremely important. We live in an age where anyone can develop games, the industry is over saturated. Start building an audience as soon as you can or you’ll find yourself without customers when your game is ready to sell.

Find Your Unique Selling Point!

In the world of indie games it's hard to stand out, find out what makes your game unique! What gets people excited to play your game? Ask them! Our unique selling focus is our cute wholesome characters and co-operative 3D platforming gameplay, we try to demonstrate this with our posts: 

It’s All in the Name

The most important part is naming your game, once you’ve named your game you’ll have to stick with it or risk confusing your audience. You’ll also need something unique enough that if people google you they can actually find you. Here are some tips to follow for when you name your game

Unless you're a AAA company with a huge marketing budget avoid using one word adjectives or nouns unless you are using a made up word like Ooblets. I have seen games in the past that have used a generic word and then found it impossible to find their game, even when I was actively searching for it on google I couldn’t find their game anywhere. The only way I could find them is by directly knowing their twitter tag. People should be able to find you quickly. Ideally you want to google your name and find yourself at the very top of the results 

Try and think of something catchy that’s easy to remember. Don’t make your name too long or confusing. There are some indie games that I’ve seen and enjoyed but then found it impossible to find them online because I couldn’t remember the name of it. 

Try out multiple names and see what people think of them. We had multiple suggestions for names before we all decided and voted on one we liked.

 Setting up your Page

When it comes to Twitter you’re going to want a nice clean and attractive page. When people click on your page they’re going to want to know everything about your game on first glance. 

When people first see our twitter, without even having to scroll down, they now know

• The name of our Game
• What our logo looks like
• What our two main characters look like 
• What our environment art looks like
• What genre the game is
• What type of gameplay they can expect
• Where our Discord is
• Where our Patreon is
• Where our Facebook is

Try to do the same with your game and nail down the most important aspects of it. You have limited space to use so make sure you use it effectively. Does your audience really need to know where you’re based or how long you’ve worked on your game for? Use this opportunity to elevator pitch your game, not your company. I would encourage you to set up a special account with your game name and avoid using personal accounts, you want to advertise only your game here. On your personal twitter you are then free to post cute pet photos, selfies or your Sunday lunch. It focuses your feed and gets people knowing the name of your game when they see it pop up on their feed.  

Patience

Success isn’t 100% luck, although it can play a factor. When you see a successful developer you won’t see the string of failures behind them. We all fail, we all struggle, and it’s very rare that a new person will enter the game development scene and create an instant hit. The difference between people who succeed those who fail is determination. 

Building an audience will take time, Billie Bust Up took a while to gain any form of audience or engagement but bit by bit it’s grown. Don’t expect big numbers overnight, don't give up. Analyse your mistakes and learn from them. 

This time last year I rarely got any engagements on my work, it took a lot of patience to build up a following, don’t lose faith in yourself,  you’ll get there! 

Keep your Timeline Clean

Your audience will have a very short attention span so keep your timeline clean and relevant. If you retweet unrelated stuff or respond to comments with gifs then you should delete them the next day by either undoing your retweet or by deleting the unrelated content. If I look through your media tab I want to see your game, if your audience is having to scroll through unrelated gif responses they will eventually get fed up and leave your page. 

You should also include a trailer to pin to your page with important links to your other social media. Find your unique selling point and demonstrate it clearly throughout the trailer. 

Brand your Work

I make sure to add our logo to all of our videos and pictures, that way if someone shares our work outside of our social media someone will be able to find us easily by googling our logo name. You should keep the logo in the same position for every post you make, I like to keep ours in the bottom right corner. The more people see your logo the more they’ll start to recognise your content too! Maybe they won’t follow you straight away but the more they see your work pop up the more they might start to warm up to your game. 

Reshare & Retweet old work

You’ll want to make sure you retweet or repost your older work so that you can maximise how much of your audience sees it. I will try and tweet at peak hours when Twitter is most active (usually early morning and late evening) and then retweet again 8 hours later for people on different time zones. 

Repost your older work! Your new followers won't have seen it, just because you didn't get lots of views on your first try doesn't mean the post is bad and creating constant new content for your followers is a lot of work, save that time and work more on your game instead

Analyse your Work

I’m always asking myself these questions; “why did this tweet do badly?” “why did this tweet do well?” Try and figure out where you’re going wrong and learn from your mistakes. You can use Twitter analytics to help you

You can also check under the ‘tweets’ tab for analytics and look at how individual tweets performed. Sometimes a tweet won’t get high amount of likes or retweets but you’ll see that it had very little in terms of impressions on the analytics. This could be down to multiple reasons, perhaps you posted at the wrong time of day, or you didn’t use the correct hashtags, figure out why people are not seeing your post and fix it. 

Study more into engagement rates and learn what your baseline is, despite 8.6% sounding like a low number it’s surprisingly high for twitter! Don’t feel disheartened if these are low for you, it’s very normal. Try increasing your engagements by asking an open ended question at the end of each tweet, responses will help boost your engagement rating and thus the visibility of your post.

I also end up learning more about what my audience wants from our game, when tweets do well it helps me figure out what characters or environments people like. Originally I wasn’t sure about the bat characters I had designed, but the fantastic engagement on them helped to convince me to keep them in the game. 

Moving Images

This is very important for Twitter, people will quickly be scrolling through their feed and you will need to grab their attention. Movement will always draw the eye to a tweet and is an easy way to maximise your engagement. I try to avoid videos as Twitter has a bad habit of butchering the quality and creating a blurry mess. If you need to show a long section of gameplay you should use video but default to gif if you can. I will very rarely use static images, you’re selling moving interactable art, show people your game in action. If its a static character pose put them on a turntable!

Check out this ‘amazing high quality’ footage of our game! 

With gifs even when the user has a low quality internet connection they’ll get a clear and crisp picture 

Giveaways

Giveaways are an easy win-win scenario, you reward your audience with something free and you can easily reach your target audience. Don’t feel the need to give away something flashy or expensive, especially when you’re a struggling young developer with not much money. We do monthly giveaways for stickers on our twitter and it’s never failed to get us new followers. I’ll often print the stickers out on paper and manually cut them out myself which I then send in envelopes so it’s easy to ship abroad. To enter the contest I usually ask for retweets instead of asking for a direct follow, if people are interested in the game they will follow themselves, I don’t want to bribe people who are not really interested in the game into following. 

Don’t Mass Follow or Follow Back

I would never encourage someone to mass follow other accounts or to follow people back for an easy high follower count. People will see right through that. An account with 1000 following and 1000 followers are less impressive than an account that is only following 10 people with 1000 followers. You want people who are actually interested in your game.

 You definitely should not follow a bunch of people and unfollow after they follow you back either, your account may seem impressive at first glance but people will be able to tell from your posts lack likes, retweets or comments that your followers are not real ones. It doesn’t give a good impression on you or your business ethic either. I try to limit my personal account follow backs to friends, or peoples work i’m interested in and the Billie Bust Up account to people who work or for the project.  

Engage with your Followers

Never undervalue your audience and try your best to engage with them! Once you get thousands of followers it will obviously be harder to do this but dedicate a set amount of time each day to respond to people and encourage conversation. Make your followers feel loved and valued, they’re the reason you’re able to pursue your passion and make video games and they should know how important they are. Conversations will also pop up onto other people’s feeds and in turn motivate more people to join in and discover your game. 

Discord

Set up a Discord! I was very nervous when I first set up our server, we were a new game and I was embarrassed of the thought of having an empty server but I couldn’t be further from the truth. The server may be smaller than other popular games but it still has an active community of wonderful people! The people there have helped spur me on, given me feedback, and we’ve even set up a weekly DND session to hang out together. I’m so happy I took the step to make this server, just make sure you actually talk in it yourself! I’ve found empty game servers where the community is clearly eager to chat but the developers never seem to respond. Get to know people and keep the chat going and you’ll slowly grow a nice community there, it’s up to you to build it.

Patreon

I’ve had a couple of people ask me about Patreon and if I would recommend it as a good funding platform. Personally I’ve found Patreon great so far but make sure you have an audience first. Before I set up the Patreon I had several people ask where they could make a donation to help fund the game so I knew I had people who were willing to pledge the second I went live. It’s a great way to reward people for helping support the game as long as you make sure you keep the rewards purely digital with the rare one off physical reward. 

Use All Social Media

I’ve mostly spoken about Twitter in this article, probably because I’ve had the best engagement via Twitter so it’s my prefered platform to market with but make sure you cross post to all social media and learn the multiple rules for each. For example on Facebook videos do better than images when it comes to visibility and gifs are pointless. Each social media website requires a different approach. I like to upload videos to Facebook and then cross post to interested groups like the Unreal Engine 4 Developers Group, that way I can get feedback from other developers and also gain interest for our game. Instagram is another great website for game development, along with indiedb or Youtube!

Just make sure you are consistent with your names, as you can see the Billie Bust Up Facebook shares the same username as the Twitter page.

Thanks for reading! I hope to see your followings grow and I can’t wait to see your games out there.