15 tips to get your game noticed
- Start early and get your game known in as many places as possible.
2. Hit as many free online channels as possible and regularly engage with your audience, prioritising those channels which receive the most amount of activity.
3. Build relationships with journalists and ask them to follow you — a post share could influence other journalists you may not have a connection with.
4. Don’t start a game development blog, start several. Once you’ve written one post, copy it into others to reach a different audience and think outside of the box.
5. Running a contest? Search for media/forum sites that have a loyal community to partner up with, they tend to avoid bots and time wasters who couldn’t care less about your game.
6. When you send a game to streamers or video creators it is crucial to attach engaging trailer, qualitative screenshots, a key to the game and a short but informative description. Also you can write one or two lines about yourself or your studio. It will make the email a bit more personal.
7. Don’t send out a nonpersonal mass email to streamers or YouTubers. Make sure that each email expresses your intention and respect to receiver.
8. Don’t expect influencers to shoehorn in something that doesn’t fit. Target your emails at individuals and groups known for covering similar genres, and demonstrate that you really want to see this project get out there.
9. Send access before release, as releasing videos and articles before or during the release window is best for both streamers and you.
10. Demonstrating gameplay in trailer is vital. Gameplay is more important than 1,000 words. If the trailer is only cinematic with no gameplay, it becomes a far harder sell to find the game interesting from that trailer.
11. Twitch streamers need games that are very easy to play while talking to your audience. You can even join streamers live to answer questions from the audience for a more engaging stream.
12. YouTubers have the advantage of making montages; they play games for hours and then slice that into an entertaining video. The problem is that now it’s more difficult to get any coverage, as everyone is contacting them. Also, since triple-A publishers are throwing their marketing money at YouTubers, it will become excessively more difficult to get any traction during triple-A game launches. Think: don’t release games between September and December.
13. Send a game to streamers if it’s out in a few months or just released.
14. To ‘sell’ your game to the public as an indie developer, you have to be authentic. The only way to achieve that is to either run the promotion yourself or work with someone who knows the game as good as you do. But if you don’t have a PR guy on board, maybe you can find one somewhere on the internet.
15. Make sure your producer is also your PR guy, that producer needs to have development experience, or ideally wears the hat of the game designer as well.
This post based on article Crowd Control: How to get your game noticed. If you have more thoughts about this topic, please, feel free to leave a response in comments or hit me on twitter: I’m @sergey_91.
