Year: 2021

I decided to change how I cover the 3-times-a-year Steam Festival and provide some analysis and results while the festival is still going on!  If you want to watch a fully voiced virtually-in-person analysis of the Steam festival, I uploaded a 30 minute video to Game Marketing Ideas (Click here Continue Reading

The Steam audience is savvier than you. They are more intense and more opinionated too. I have seen many indies surprised when their game gets called out with bad reviews for what seem like trivial nits. But they aren’t trivial. These are features Steam players expects and if you are Continue Reading

It is really hard to get anyone to actually buy anything, much less take an action like joining your mailing list or discord. It is even more difficult when you are offering a game that is different, or a bit avant garde. The reason is they don’t know if what Continue Reading

I do a lot of Q&As and many questions I get are like “Well game <X> came out of nowhere without any marketing and it did ok, so why even bother?” That feeling totally makes sense! There are games released every month that come out of nowhere and rocket up Continue Reading

High-traffic, high-visibility, top-of-the-funnel channels like TikTok and Twitter are good at getting exposure but they aren’t very good at building an engaged community member that will eventually buy your game. Once they discover you on those top-of-the-funnel platforms you need to get them to join your email list or discord Continue Reading

Almost 3 years ago I wrote about the weird tricks you can use to get GIFs of your game onto the front page of this quirky site named imgur. Here is that post. It was a pretty simple process that could yield you a quick 400 wishlists if you played Continue Reading

Here is the problem, you have released a game, or will soon release one and you have thousands of wishlists. At best you can expect about 20% of them to convert during your first week. But what about the other 80%? Those wishlists represent thousands of people who have expressed Continue Reading

My blog last week (How Steam works against small games) was a deep dive into all the ways the Steam algorithm works against the “rapid release” strategy. The corresponding twitter thread I wrote blew up and was pretty much my most viral thread in over a year. Note that last Continue Reading

Today, I launched a new site… Meet GameMarketingIdeas.com.  Most developers are good at making games but have no experience marketing them. They don’t know where to start. All the time I hear something like  “What should I tweet about?” “What do I write in my newsletter?” “How do I go Continue Reading