How To Fail at Marketing Indie Games

The one thing every indie developer have on their list of "difficult things about game dev" Because every indie developer has a list like that....

What? You don't have a list like that? What kind of indie developer are you? Get your act together. My goodness gracious me. People think anyone can just become an indie developer without making a list of difficult things they have to do? What is this world coming to?

If you would like to learn to code, I recommend these great online courses! (It's what I'm using.)

Contact/Links:

Music:
"Doh De Oh" by Kevin MacLeod
"Hitman" by Kevin MacLeod
Both songs licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

[Artindi]

Marketing is a multiplier:
A 1 game X 1000 marketing = 1000.
And a 10 game x 100 marking is also = 1000.
Food for thought.

[generalrubbish]

For best results, talk about your story so much you give away all the main plot points, making it so that the 7 people who were actually interested in the story don't even have to play the game anymore.

[arkimedeez]

Portal 1's marketing focused on the interesting and unique puzzle mechanics, while portal 2 leaned more into story in its marketing once they had a fanbase for the franchise

[massgunner]

The trailer bit definitively deserves its own episode, a rising trend recently is to put dummy profesional animation to sell the game that artistically clashes with the gameplay or straight up lie to you about what you can do.

[Phoeboi]

the true marketing strategy: spam it in random forums and servers

[Manavine]

honestly you should have changed the intro accordingly to "but if you never try at- oh wait this is the marketing episode, if you never try you already failed, but let's assume you do try. Here's how to fail harder."

[ewbaite]

always start your social media posts with " I quit my job to make this game!" that way you appear so sincere and not at all being cliche

[snowpoint]

Game Trailer: "5 million years ago there were 14 kingdoms. The history of each is important, but more importantly it's long."

[souptaels]

Devlogs that focuses on being funny, rather than showing off their game or their workflow for the game, I feel, have already failed. (coughthemanydaniclonescough)

[Soupnator]

We NEED a point and click adventure game exclusively using these drawimg with barely any animation. I’d buy it

[FernandoBroca]

I want the how to fail at failure of this episode in my table, now!

[goldendragonbringer]

Be sure to set up social media accounts everywhere and discord but never interact with the community until it is time to sell them something. You are very considerate making a place for everyone to make a community for you.

[DaikoruArtwin]

Out of all the disciplines involved into making a game, marketing is the only one I have absolutely no clue about how I would go around doing it, and therefore the most likely reason why my games would fail. Especially now in a market where there's millions of games out there competing for everyone's attention.

[artman]

As for devlogs: If you want to fail at devlogs, avoid doing what Factorio developers do.
But there's one way to surely fail at marketing: Use bots or spam links manually in comments of social media, especially in unrelated content.

[That-KidDo]

He makes a really good point at 2:33, definitely gonna try doing this to market my game.

[DrCoeloCephalo]

I was kinda worried about making such a short devlog with gameplay and making videos in between development. It looks like that fear was for nothing. Thanks fir this helpful video!

[Julian_H]

3:04 man this hits hard. I'm making a story-driven game and it's so hard figuring out how to show it off

[kitsunelunari]

WHO WOULD WIN
- Sakurai "Show the game right away"
- Artindi "Never show the game"

[TheBadlandsSandvich]

As one of the hundreds of aspiring indie devs, marketing is by far my biggest fear because like most game devs I am a horrible introvert and the idea of putting myself out there in any kind of meaningful light scares the hell out of me.

[ganondorf]

Hahaha!! I knew writing alternate dialogues for every possible party combination, and sometimes even quest completion order was such a good move! Everyone will love playing the game multiple times to see all the funny dialogues. They wouldn't dare play the game for the weird limited durability + inventory management turn based combat. They also wouldn't base a second playthrough on the difficulty sliders, they would just want to see what an old man says if you don't have Bob in your party!!

Real talk, I just like writing dialogue. I doubt it's super good, but I'll try to make it at least decent since it's in the game. I gotta make a skip button eventually too, even as a story nerd there have been times I hated games for not having a skip.