I hear this all the time from indie developers “I love the game making part of being a game developer, but absolutely suck at the marketing part because I have crippling social anxiety.”
Somewhere around the social media boom of the 2010s people started concluding that social media = marketing. Like they are the same thing. For many, when people say “do marketing” they mean, “fire up TikTok and post about your game.” Therefore many assume that the best marketers are the people who are the best “influencers.” If you aren’t a bubbly social media influencer, you are a bad marketer.
But this is incorrect and you shouldn’t feel bad that you are not a bubbly extrovert, and that is not required to be “good at marketing”
Let me explain…
I did a google image search for “influencer” and got this result.
My theory is that these images represent the perceived reality of what being a good marketer is and is ground zero for indie anxiety around marketing. These pictures make it look like to be good at “marketing” you have to be the prettiest, most confident, most effortlessly extroverted person who wears cool hats and nice clothes that are color coordinated to your thoughtfully accessorized bedroom. To “do marketing” it feels like the equivalent of standing up in your high school lunchroom, boldly walking over to the cool kids table and squeezing yourself between the prom queen and the high school quarterback and then regaling them with the funniest and well timed anecdote.
No wonder why indies hate marketing so much and assume that they are bad at it. In today’s blog post I want to reassure you that first, social media is not synonymous with marketing.
And second, that to be good at marketing is mostly about being strategic and not social. The majority of the most effective marketing decisions and actions you will take do not involve being social and it is better to have an analytical, metric driven approach.
Most other “social” marketing doesn’t work well either
Many indies also spend a lot of social energy running a booth at a live in-person convention. They literally have to pitch their game face to face to random strangers. This is terrifying. But thankfully it doesn’t really work that well. In fact, I don’t recommend using in-person festival show floors as a marketing method. It is expensive, time consuming, you typically end up sick, it takes away from developing your game, and you usually only get a couple hundred wishlists after all that. Paid Facebook ads have a higher return on investment.
Another BIG social form of marketing is running a YouTube devlog channel. To do well on YouTube you need the right type of personality. You have to have a lot of personality. You have to be a showman. The life of the party. But overall I don’t think having a successful YouTube channel translates to a hit game. Most devlog videos attract fellow game developers not players. Also the click throughs from YouTube to Steam seem quite low. You basically have to learn the YouTube Algorithms and the Steam Algorithms. You have to market your channel and market your game. I don’t recommend starting a YouTube channel to market your game.
What is effective then?
Here are the results of my survey where I asked indies where they got their wishlists from:
Most of the games that do well got their wishlists and sales without ever having a big social media post. Social media is a very very small portion of marketing. In fact, I bet many of those games could have done well without ever posting.
Note that most of the techniques: Festivals, Streamers, the Press, just rely on you emailing someone and saying “Hey do you want to cover my game?”
That’s it. That is how social you need to be.
To get people to feature your game, you don’t have to schmooze people over drinks at a hip bar. You just send an email that says “Here it is, take it or leave it.”
Even though Tiktok has the reputation for being about dancing or being charming and funny, I find that the most successful Tiks are just the videos of a sliced up trailer and having some captions run over it. No fancy dance moves required.
In fact, it’s usually more effective to skip posting yourself and try to get a real TikTok influencer to cover your game for you (I wrote about it in this blog about the game Momento). Look here is some other influencer playing this game:
So again, even TikTok is most effective when you just email someone else and say “Hey do you want to cover my game?”
Why do we think social ≡ marketing
You can market your game without ever posting to social media. Somehow the world was “doing marketing” for hundreds of years before social media was invented. So why is everyone so hung up on it?
My theory is that social media is public. Everyone can see it. So if a game is successful and you try to reverse engineer their success the first thing you will see are their social media posts. So it looks like social media is responsible for their success. It is visible. But that is just the availability bias. Just because it is the most visible and everyone likes what they did on social media does not mean it is the most effective. You can’t easily see that the developers submitted their game to a festival, paired it with a Daily Deal for their previous game, reached out to Streamers to do an exclusive reveal at the same time. All that is hidden from you but it is usually what was the big driver of success.
People assume social media is marketing because you can just “do it.” For instance, you go to a site like twitter.com, you fill in a text box describing your game, upload a gif, then hit “Send,” and poof! You did marketing! It is public. It is tangible. It is done!
However, the most effective marketing technique (getting into festivals) is not so clean cut. It requires waiting for the right festival (you can see them all on our chart here howtomarketagame.com/festivals) and then applying, and then waiting for them to approve you. It is hidden from public view, it is hard to find these festivals, it requires waiting for weeks, and most often you don’t get in and it seems like it was for nothing.
It is much easier to just fill in a text box on twitter.com and say “I did marketing today.” Therefore people assume most marketing is being on social media.
But for most games, social media doesn’t work. Social media is just a distraction. For most games they do not see their wishlists go up until they launch a demo and get Streamers to play it. See these examples of games that did well despite social media not working for them:
Basically, if your game is “social media friendly” you will know real quick. You post, it goes viral, then you get 700+ wishlists from it, that is a good sign. Keep doing it. But if you are like most developers, your game doesn’t do well on social, you can cut back on the amount of time and stress you spend on it.
The strategic side
Marketing is not about being social. It is about being strategic.
Marketing is actually about figuring out when to deploy your various marketing beats and under what conditions. Do you launch your demo to coincide with your big announce trailer because you got into a major festival? Or do you hold the demo for the chance to have a second marketing push later? It is a gamble, you might not get a second chance at a trailer. There are risks either way, but a strategic thinker can analyze the pros and cons of each.
Marketing should feel more like a Slay The Spire run. Which cards do you play on which round to maximize their effectiveness? Some cards are more effective used in combination. Sometimes you hold on to a card to be played the next round. Sometimes you take advantage of an opportunity and take a risk and play as many cards as you can in a single round.
You do need to do some communication though
I hope you see that you don’t have to be a bubbly social butterfly on social media to get ahead on the marketing game. HOWEVER, there is one social aspect that you need to be good at and that is “the ask.”
“The ask” is the proactive outreach to pitch publishers or festival organizers about your game. “The ask” is sending a nice, to-the-point, and confident cold-email to content creators or the press asking them to cover your game. “The Ask” is the friendly email to another indie game developer to pitch a collaboration such as a bundle, or cross promotion.
Many indies fear these cold-call-emails. In fact I believe the whole reason Woovit and KeyMailer exist is because they remove the awkwardness around reaching out to streamers. With Keymailer you just enter in some search criteria, pay some money, and they facilitate the outreach and hide the rejections from you. You are paying Keymailer to remove social anxiety. But if you are brave and do it yourself, it is free and so much more effective to personally look up streamers and YouTubers and send an earnest email directly. It might be awkward, they might say no, they might ghost you, but you do need to learn this skill.
Similarly, indies often ask me to build a big spreadsheet of other indies who are open to cross-promotion and bundling. Basically they want me to facilitate this awkward social interaction. They want me to be a matchmaker. But you don’t need me! Just find a game that is similar to yours and track down the developers contact information and give them a nice friendly pitch. YES, you might get rejected. It is more than likely. But that is part of putting yourself out there.
Part of marketing a game is cold calling some strangers. But don’t worry, those interactions are usually one-on-one emails. It is not like you have to be the center of a party where everything is about you like this picture:
This is not marketing. You don’t have to be the life of the party and the center of attention to get people to buy your game. Usually you just have to get them to play it.
If you need to do more information about how to do the cold outreach see these posts:
- How to Get Covered by IGN
- How do you get streamers to cover your game, bet a better capsule
- How to use TikTok Influencers
Pep-talk time
You can market your game even if you are socially awkward, have social anxiety, are an introvert, or hate being “salesy.”
Seriously, most of what works is just partnering with someone who has a big audience and saying “can you include my game too please.”
The most effective thing that works on Steam right now is having a great 30-45 minute demo. Your game is what takes center stage. That is perfect. It is not about you, it is about your game.
You can do this. Focus on making your game amazing.