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Here are two stories about what happens when the news for normal people covers indie games. Does it matter? Does it drive wishlists?
TL;DR: No it does not help you to get covered by regular news.
But please read because these are kinda funny stories.
Story #1: What happens when your game offends the elderly (and potentially the children)?
Long story short: A guy was playing the horror visual novel Scarlet Hollow on his laptop on an airplane. As he was deplaning, an old woman scolded him because she and her children were offended by what he was playing. The guy posted his experience on the subreddit called “Am I the Asshole?” (AITA) asking people if he should have done what he did.
Two questionable but mainstream news organizations (The Mirror and The Sun) read this reddit post and wrote a story on it because people love to be outraged about stories about airplane behavior and some reporters no longer go out into the real world to report on real world troubles and instead source stories from Twitter and Reddit.
Here is the story from the Daily Mirror
One of the creators behind this “gory video game” (Scarlet Hollow) posted about this story on my official HTMAG discord and shared his experiences with what it looks like on the other side when they cover you. Here is the resulting wishlist and sales chart with some other activities listed to give a sense of scale.
Now it is nearly impossible to isolate out just the results of the articles since the developers were simultaneously in a store-wide sales (Lovecraft Days). However, you can clearly see that the original reddit post and the Mirror article did not have a significant impact on daily wishlists.
Scarlet Hollow was available for purchase at the time of the article and as you can see here there similarly were no major sales impact.
Story #2: What happens when a local boy does good?
So one of the marketing tactics I always recommend is to post your game dev journey to your city or country’s local subreddit. The developer of Sovereign Syndicate took that advice and posted the story of how he quit his job and founded his studio to the r/Edmonton subreddit.
Sure enough, a local Edmonton radio station found him and interviewed him.
And then another radio station interviewed him.
And then the local news station did a remote video interview:
What was the result of local TV and Radio Interviews?
Reddit post was 200 or so, TV interview had no discernible impact, yesterday’s radio interview was about 50, hope to see at least 50 more today”
Isaac Otway from Crimson Herring Studios
What to learn from these stories?
I and I think a lot of people still find local news coverage cool. There is something about being in front of your local peers that is just magic. Your mom would be so proud!
But in reality, it doesn’t do much for getting your game seen by the people who will actually buy it.
There are two key lessons from this
- Just getting publicity doesn’t do much if it is the wrong audience. I know it sounds obvious but you must target people who are your potential players.
- Media attention and marketing doesn’t magically convert people to pick up your game. It is very very hard to get someone to pick up a new hobby. Most people people who read and listen to mainstream media do not play indie games that require PCs to play. So you really need to target gamers and where they read news; that is mostly Streamers on Youtube, Tiktok, Festivals, and the right subreddits. A while ago I wrote a blog post about the 10 reasons why you should stop targeting casual gamers. In short, it is very, very hard to target casual fans and much easier to target hardcore fans who consume a lot of video game news.
What to do next?
Although the Sun and Mirror stories didn’t yield traffic, you might be able to upsell that coverage back to a gaming site. Sites like Kotaku usually cover how gaming interacts with the real world and this particular story has a good hook for discussion: “should you play violent or horrific games in public?” Although the Mirror and Sun are questionable publications, I find that gaming blogs still think more mainstream media important enough to cover. So, take those two stories, send them to the editors at popular gaming blogs and see if anyone would write something up.
Even though Isaac didn’t get many wishlists from his Edmonton media blitz, he did say that he got a good reaction out of his local subreddit. In fact, he is going to post there again when the game is released. So post about your game to your local subreddit. Who knows, you might find a future local collaborator.
DONT FORGET MICROCONFERENCE IS ON
