zukalous

Reddit is hard. You have to get the tone just right otherwise people call you out for self-promo. You also rarely get more than a title and a description to talk about your game. And just having a cool game is not enough – you need a GIF that has Continue Reading

The most important thing in marketing your game is actually having a good game. All the promotion (tweeting, streaming, festivals) in the world is worthless if every single person who plays your game is so bored that they switch away or are so frustrated they immediately delete your game from Continue Reading

In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard. For instance, last week Twitch introduced a new “Boost” program where streamers can pay to get more viewers to see Continue Reading

On the first of October 2021, solo-developer-studio Two Star games posted an announcement trailer for their horror game Choo-Choo Charles (CCC) The trailer, the corresponding tweet, and the tiktok video went thermo-nuclear and Choo-Choo Charles earned over 85,000 wishlists and becoming the #131 most wishlisted upcoming game on Steam by Continue Reading

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