Develop Blog: Market Yourself, Not Just Your Game
How many of you love marketing? I'm near-sighted, but I'm sure I wouldn't see many hands raised. From my experience trying and failing to get my game known, I've asked endless questions, perused multiple marketing discords, and even got a question answered by Chris Z. himself. Yet I can never shake this anxiety I feel whenever I make a twitter post. I have no blue check mark so I already know that me going viral is unlikely. I've accepted that my my page will take years to bear followers. But sticking to it isn't a matter of discipline, it's a matter of overcoming my fears of rejection.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of making my first game the magnum opus. I don't have experience releasing anything outside of jam projects, nor do I know what it's like to get review-bombed on Steam. I have never learned how to deal with fans telling me how to write, I've never encountered trolls telling me to off myself, all I've encountered is a lack of notifications after a post went live. Part of me is grateful that I get minimal feedback. It means that I don't need to worry about growing a fandom that rivals the toxicity of Undertale. I don't need to worry about disappointing people because I skipped out on my blog this weekend. It's as if a lack of progress rewards me more than progress. Or more likely, it's my anxiety keeping me locked in a gilded birdcage.
How many of you look forward to posting on Reddit, making a tiktok video, or updating your discord? Tell me your secrets, because I'd much rather be writing my game's script than researching strategies on TikTok. Dopamine is one hell of a drug, and I get more of it by writing than appeasing consumers. I know a lot of people that'd prefer to pass it off to a PR agent and let them play with it. After all, they're the ones reading the bad reviews. Now if only most of them didn't cost an arm and a leg for us indies.
Sadly I don't have the silver bullet to get me or you all out of this rut. As much as marketing is research oriented, it's mostly doing. I call it a progressive craft, where you'll get better at it the more you throw yourself to the mercy of Reddit mods. Not only that, the best marketers will share their content to the point where it might annoy people. Think about all of those Youtube ads. I can recall Shick Hydra, the Lending Club, Old Spice, and all those brands marketed by corny actors four years ago. We all know what Genshin Impact is due to its pension for shoving anime girls in our faces. Chris Z. himself will tell you that the more you talk about your product, the more people will learn about it. Love it or hate it, it'll improve your odds of having someone visit your steam page. It sounds manipulative and underhanded, and that's because it is. Why do you think so many communities lose their minds at the slightest hint of self-promotion? Because everyone has a product to exhibit.
But how the hell could you, let alone myself, go through with doing something so corporate? Do we have to become those guys who get routinely banned by mods? Of course not, and I wouldn't advocate for you spamming your brand. Marketing isn't just promoting your brand, it's also about promoting YOU! Something interesting about being a respected member of a community is that you can get away with self-promotion a lot more than someone who isn't. It's almost as if people have come to like you, so they check out your page and wish list your game. And the craziest part about this is that you don't need a rigid schedule to market yourself unlike your game. You can be like me when I go into a Visual Novel discord, gush about my favorite waifu for ten minutes, then bounce. This helps me stay motivated with playing visual novels, and the mods see me as active so they're more likely to allow me to self-promote. Of course this is based on social media with forum mods and communities, but being active on Twitter, Tiktok, and Itch goes a long way as well. Because when you comment on someone's video, that person might be tempted to look at your profile out of appreciation. And if your steam page is listed in the bio, they just got hit with a call to action. People, especially newer profiles, adore any form of feedback. I'd know, I do a happy dance every time I get a comment on my post. Yes you read right, a sincere comment on a tiktok video indirectly markets your game. Your character can be just as profound as a flashy trailer. So is marketing still as scary?
Dale Carnegie, author of How To Win Friends And Influence People, refers to this as marketing for other people. Mods want an active community, so being an active member might make them more interested in working with you. Indie developers love feedback, so giving them what they want might encourage them to reciprocate what you want. One example from my past experiences is when I offered to be a beta tester for one of my colleagues. I had been following her for seven years. We were the same, both new developers struggling to make their big debut. So I played her demos, interacted on her twitter posts, and gave honest and constructive feedback from my beta tests. Was I working in the mindset of what I want? I'd be lying if I said no, but my priority was to help this indie developer release her first game. Later on, I ran into a conundrum where I needed to commission someone to help with capsule art for my steam page. Now pause and take a guess at what this developer told me when I asked her for some tips. If you guessed, "I'll help you arrange the capsules free of charge", then pat yourself on the back. But this transaction went both ways. Now, I'm a fan and will purchase future games out of appreciation. And the cycle MIGHT come around and she reciprocates. I capitalized the word "might" to emphasize something I want everyone to be aware of; to be sincere from start to end, whether or not you like the results. I'm not looking to train manipulators, and people can sense flattery through a computer screen.
Since that last example wasn't directly marketing related, another example involves these blogs. When I first started posting them to Reddit, I got a mixture of downvotes, no activity, and my post deleted by the mods. It made me want to hide and never blog again, but it also showed me that posting a small summary followed by a link probably rubs people the wrong way. My goal with these blogs, aside from keeping my demons at bay, is to spread awareness of my itch page. So what did I do? I included the entire blog in the initial post, with an optional call-to-action at the bottom to follow my itch. Then my next post got a lot of feedback. None got banned, people commented with thanks or criticisms, and I got to learn some valuable insights about how to make my blogs better. I wasn't seen as some other spammer, I was perceived as engaging the community. Well I hope I was…
I hope that this blog post inspired you as much as it inspired me. If you're as introverted as me, you'd much rather live under a rock and only come out when your masterpiece is complete. It's almost as if the difficult hobby that's game design teaches us bad habits. But in the end, it's a necessary part of the process. Baldur's Gate 3 would've been a flash in the pan had it not been for the devs not shutting up about it. However those developers did more than just post pictures of the women you could romance. They interacted with consumers and other developers, so much so that their game got fully funded on Kickstarter. Imagine someone willing to pay for your game's development for you! Us indie developers are underdogs by default up against the hill that is finishing our products. Be thoughtful and compassionate with others, and you just might have a helping hand up the slope.
If you enjoyed this blog, please leave a comment down below and tell me how awesome I am. If you'd like to support me, follow my itch.io OR play my prototype here https://totalleeaweaomw.itch.io/philistine. Let's become better developers together!
