🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉

Not many can claim 25 years on the Internet! Join us in celebrating this milestone. Learn more about our history, and thank you for being a part of our community!

Beginner? Sure

Started by
13 comments, last by HouseAndMoon 6 years, 4 months ago
7 hours ago, HouseAndMoon said:

I finished the game, I published the game ... I have no idea how to promote my game

Moved the discussion to the Business forum. Others have gotten good marketing advice in this forum.

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

Advertisement

Thanks, Sloper.

The thing about being indie is having to do everything on your own. Also marketing and the average game company spends a huge chunck of the total budget on marketing so this is as important as any aspect of your game. Usually the look of the game is a big part of the marketing as well. Having seen your screenshots, and it does not look bad at all but it is hard to read and hurts my eyes, both are caused by super high saturation. Perhaps toning down saturation for all non important. You also need a video, at least some gameplay footage but a bit a basic trailer is best.

The thing is, and you have to be honest about it yourself, does the game has a great potential? Is it worth to invest a lot of time and perhaps money into marketing this game? Factoring in the amount and quality of other games of the same kind and how does your game stand out. Honestly, I think you should be very proud of completed a game from start to finish I have been doing game development for more then 6 years and only have completed 3 fairly simple games the rest are the usual way to ambitious projects and prototypes.

Anyway, you can find a lot of information on how to market your game on internet but in the end your game has to be good (or some sort of gimmick that goes viral). To sum up a couple:

  • Home page
  • Social media, Google+ page, Facebook page, Twitter, Tumblr, youtube, reddit, etc)
  • Youtubes reviewers and let's players. (There are plenty of small guys that would love to play and promote a little for you for free)
  • Giveaways (buy a bunch of cheap games and tell people to like and share your social media in order to win)
  • Press releases, indiedb
  • Release on multiple platforms (Amazon, Ios, perhaps even port it to desktop and release on steam)
  • Devlogs and be active in the community. (Gamedev.net, Tigsource, gamasutra).

As you see marketing is a huge timesink and unfortunately it is mandatory for a good game to succeed on the market. It can even let a bad game succeed if done properly but this gets harder and harder since the market is very saturated. Try to get followers, be personal as a indie developer and make them feel important. If your game is good enough your followers will do a fair bit of the marketing for you, it's a snowball effect, the more followers you have the more followers and marketing you get.

You take a lot of time to answer my question thank you :)

The colors for the game are a tricky question. For instance, if you only care about gameplay the best color for background is not having anything at all, but in terms of appeal to users it is usually better to have colorful backgrounds. In the first version of my game the background was black and white and it becomes more colorful when you start to lose. It was better for gameplay but I decided to give up a bit of clarity for graphics. Anyways you are right about the text, it could be easier to read.

Advertising is very important of course. I don't know how to do it :) . I'm learning now. Anyways I would not mind to put down a bit (or not only a bit) of "success" and speed of "success" if it would allow me to spent less time in advertising. By the way, I don't think I can.

I like your game also (Brick breaker - Bounce and Break), a different approach for Arkanoid. Nice one.

Thanks for your time.

This topic is closed to new replies.

Advertisement