Hello indie friends! Here I am again with some game advertising and development tricks! (with examples as suggested in the title)
1. First of all I would like to talk about incompleted projects and Games Jams.
My suggestion is to publish every single thing that you develop, even if it’s a little demo, publish a video and a demo of it!
If your keep these works for yourself only, for what the rest of the world is concerned it’s like you never did them at all ! Don’t take this suggestion too lightly , since I learned from experience that it’s fundamental!
For example, last month a publisher (IndieGala) casually found a demo I made back in 2011 (3 years ago) and that you can check out at this link:
http://www.kongregate.com/
It surely was a rough demo since it was one of my first , but still I decided to publish it just after I finished it.
Years later (2014) I decided to try to greenlit the game, and it was approved in just 2 months.
Now IndieGala is helping me financially to finish this game and publish it on steam (obviously with a revenues share).
Here is a screenshot of how the game is proceeding:
The game will be released on Steam on December/January. (official website)
2. Another advice I would like to give you is to cultivate the community.
What I mean is not only to inform through a newsletter or through a blog, but answer to every gamer asking you questions about the game, about the development of the game and anything anyone would like to know (even a keycode for your game).
Obviously it takes a lot of your time, but this is an effective way to really stay in contact with the community.
For example, I have a lot of friends on Steam and Facebook and I try to always answer to all gamers that start a chat with me!
I even created a Steam group for every game I develop (here is an example).
3. You have to understand how to distribute the traffic generated from a web page to another one.
I believe that this is an important concept that is often underestimated. For example a on a youtube video or trailer of a game, I always put 2 or 3 links to other websites (for example in my latest game’s trailer).
Even in this post I put a lot of links as you can see!
This helped me a lot to improve the traffic on our Facebook page (now with over 2000 likes) thanks to all the links I put on the Steam page, Youtube trailers, Facebook, Official Websites, Interviews and my Twitter account etc.
These are some tricks that I wanted to share with you and I hope they can be helpful !
I’m still experimenting the marketing side: for example next month we’ll release a demo of our latest game to increase the sales, we’ll see if itwill be useful!
Let me have your comments or write me an email (fabioferrara1989@gmail.com) if you would like to read other tricks!