Feel Confident marketing your game
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. Continue Reading
How would you like over 3,000,000 impressions on your game every day for 2 weeks? The developers of Eden Crafters managed to get this for the launch of their prologue using “One Weird Trick (TM)”: they launched during the Steam Summer Sale. Typically everyone advises against doing any big promotional Continue Reading
Terminus: Zombie Survivors recently emerged from Early Access (EA) to 1.0. Look at this review chart for the game. When Terminus had its original EA launch in April of 2021, it didn’t look like it would be a hit. The game only had 15 reviews in its first month and Continue Reading
On August 12, Jeffrey “Chimeric” Nielson launched the 1.0 version of the top down SHMUP roguelite Nova Drift. Over 10 years of development with 5 years in EA, the game has sold nearly 400,000 copies on Steam alone. Even more than 400K when you factor in itch, gog, humble, streamer Continue Reading
As I wrote in my last blog post, Valve will remove all URLs that are embedded in your game’s Steam page. Valve’s aim is to declutter Steam pages that are no longer about the game itself. For the most part, this is a very good, proactive move. It keeps Steam Continue Reading
Last week Valve outlawed excessive cross promotion and other visual noise from Steam store pages. Here is their official blog post announcing this change. I am not sure this is a great idea. In today’s post I will look at what they are changing and why I don’t think this Continue Reading
Twitter still works in Japan Strangely, Japan still loves Twitter. They also love reading blogs about games! I love Japan. If you look at stats you will see Japan is the #2 user of the site. If you do the math that means the number of accounts is about 50% Continue Reading
Valve just radically changed the behavior of demos. You can read all about it here. The TL;DR of the changes are as follows: This is the button that launches the emails: So how does this change your marketing strategy? Should you launch your demo when you launch your Steam page? Continue Reading
I see this a lot. I have worked on games like this: A well-crafted game releases that have sales that are ok, but not great. And these games did everything right! They followed the basic marketing meta of entering into festivals, sending their demo to content creators, creating a tiktok Continue Reading
At the end of every year I go back and look at all the games that reached at least 1000 reviews (old blog posts see my 2022 recap and 2023 recap). Here is a preview of my 2023 recap: This year, instead of doing one post in December, I am Continue Reading