What I wish I had known about marketing my first game

Two weeks ago, my first game acolytefight.io was released. This game was a solo project that I worked on for 3 months. These are some things I wish I had known about marketing the game.

1. Don’t rely on going viral. There were a few instances when my game would get to the front page of a particular subreddit or Hacker News. This would only last for less than 24 hours before being pushed down by other content. It is true that this drove 3–4x more traffic to the game than anything I managed to get through paid advertising, but it is unsustainable. If you want your game to really get noticed, you need to put in some real money.
2. Auto-play video ads are the most effective. I advertised on Facebook, Twitter and reddit. In my case, the Facebook ads were by far the most cost-effective. I think this is because (a) you can create auto-play ads and (b) Facebook’s targeting is far more sophisticated and powerful than the other two networks, and so you can get more bang for your buck.
   Tip: Use Facebook’s ad manager for maximum configurability! Don’t just boost posts.
3. Performance matters. I fixed a lag issue 7 days after release, and the retention rates increased 2–3x. I also changed the game to automatically reduce graphics settings on slower hardware, which increased the positive reception of the game and helped the marketing.
4. Go international. I initially released to just the US, and that was a mistake. It is more expensive to advertise in the US, and so as soon as I increased the reach, the number of players increased many fold. My game is a multiplayer game, so the more players, the more fun.
5. Purchase your ads in accelerated bursts. Facebook and other ad networks provide an “accelerated” ad option which spends your budget as quickly as possible. This is a really good idea for a multiplayer game as it fills the server for a little while, giving the newbies lots of other newbies to play against. This is better than having people trickle into an empty server and then leaving immediately. Or worse, someone trickles in, meets a pro player, gets thoroughly smashed and leave immediately.
   I found a way to automate this with Facebook ad manager. I created a rule to add a small amount of money to an accelerated ad every hour, which kept the servers topped up while also staying cost-effective. Facebook ad rules are very powerful!

Best of luck to all the other indie game developers out there!