zukalous

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

The atomic unit of GDC is not talks, not speakers, it is the slide. Back when we used to do in-persons-talks there would always be this moment where an awesome slide would be shown and a dozen hands from the crowd would shoot up with cell-phone in hand to snap Continue Reading

Charm Your Communities Speaker: Victoria Tran – Community Director Innersloth Victoria Tran is the amazing director behind the community at Among Us developer Innersloth. She also used to work at Kitfox Games and I helped her a while back on their email newsletter for Boyfriend Dungeon. What is charming your Continue Reading