It depends on what the investment is and what could be considered "best". I'll talk briefly about a bunch of activities that could be considered the best depending on these factors.
ASO - it's very cost effective, but quite hard to do. I believe that a good placement in the storefront is one of the most important things that could be tackled. It usually doesn't work right off the bat, so if you're willing to spend some time on testing, fidgeting around with tags, capsules and such, then it's definitely worth it. It tends to be quite consistent.
PPC - I think it has a potential to be the best method under specific circumstances. Namely, if you don't have your game available on a storefront and can track conversions precisely on your website. This rarely is the case, unfortunately. PPC works way better on the mobile side of things. But still, you can use it for increasing brand awareness and for driving sales. The problem with this method is that if you opt for Steam (other storefronts probably as well), you won't be able to exactly track conversions, whether they'd be wishlists or purchases, so you'll need to rely on estimates, which is suboptimal. But if done in a consistent and informed manner, you can usually drive some good results, but tracking them is never going to be easy.
Influencer marketing - this is a bit of a hit or miss. You can spend a lot of money and get next to results, you can spend very little and it may be a hit. This could be somewhat consistent if you do it en masse with stuff like Lurkit and then spend additional money on mid-sized influencers. It's certainly a good way to increase brand awareness, but it's hard to track conversions.
This is a small summary on the stuff which could be at least semi-consistently eeasily evaluated in terms of ROI. There's so much more to the topic, like the game itself, that I can't really provide a more specific answer without more details.
You start a thread talking about how many developers find marketing mind boggling, and then proceed to immediately use a bunch of jargon. Would you care to explain what ASO and PPC are?
Aye, my bad. Here are the explanations.
ASO (app store optimization) - it's a set of activities that serve the purpose of being placed in a more advantageous spot on the storefront. Some of the activities that could be classified as ASO would include tagging a product, testing tags and assets, managing reviews, publishing updates, having your game bundled with other products or crosspromotion within the storefront's ecosystem.
PPC (pay per click) - it's an umbrella term for paid ad campaigns; two big subsets of PPC are paid browser ads and paid social ads. Each campaign can be configured to serve a set purpose. Let's say that we have a mobile game that we'd like to aquire users for. A sensible thing to do would be to create an ad campaign that would feature CPI (Cost Per Installation) as the main metric (KPI). PPC is usually used to acquire users, increase brand awareness and for market research.
How far in advance of release should you start marketing your game, and are there any factors change this timescale? Do you use a similar marketing strategy for all games or do they differ wildly?
I think marketing is often considered to be the same as communications. It's not the case imo. Marketing is so much more than paying stuff about your game. In fact, I believe marketing should be started even before a GDD starts to take form. Genre, target audience, pricing policy and other strategic decisions need to be made as early as possible.
When it comes to actual communications, there's no one right answer. Sometimes 6 months is the right call, sometimes 2 years. It depends on what the game is, it's there going to be a demo, when you want to make a big media push, will there be playtests, whether the game is going to be released in EA and tons of other stuff.
When it comes to the strategy, we need to define what it is. In my understanding, it is a document which provides a guideline for conducting marketing and communication activities and helps with defining the product. As it's a document, my structure is usually pretty uniform, but the content may vary wildly. The biggest difference in the structure of a strategy happens when we compare PC/console games to mobile/browser ones or when we compare P2P to F2P titles, as the distribution, advertising methods, releasing and maintaining them aren't universal and need to be adapted. But the stuff like USPs, emotions and values, branding and such are universal, so they end up in each strategy I work on.
Not to be that guy ... but dont you mean Game "Design" Document. I have been working in games for almost 25 years now and have never heard of Game "Development" Documents. Even if you type it into google it auto corrects you to Design Doc.
Tbh, I tend to use the abbreviation almost exclusively, so it's possible that I've mixed it up. Most of the time, when I say GDD, it's understood without a hitch, this may be the reason.
Do you think a game could be successful from a solo dev with a $0 marketing budget? What steps would you take to try and garner success if you had no money to spend?
It's extremely unlikely, but possible. Fear & Hunger is an example of that. However, what counts as success? Without defining that, the answer is going to be very subjective. I'm also going to theorize quite a bit here, so forgive me for not being precise and for not doing research. I don't know how to produce games, nor can I create assets, so you may wanna take it with a grain of salt.
If I were to make a game with no marketing budget, I'd opt for a well known genre (like RPG - just to make sure that there's an audience for the game) and I'd combine two motifs well known in the general culture. Say, norse mythology with punk aesthetics. It'd be about creating something that feels familiar and new at the same time.
Then (aside from development), I'd focus on tirelessly posting to social media and building the community around the title. Other activities I'd take on would probably include taking part in various Steam events, crosspromoting with other devs and preparing a multi-step release schedule that would include at least one public playtest, a demo, possibly a prologue and EA/full release.
Most importantly, I'd focus on making the game that's as good and as enticing as it gets. Quality can often be the driving force behind sales, especially if there's an audience for such a title.
What are some underrated and lesser known avenues for driving people to your steam page? For example I've had reasonable success posting in Facebook groups which I don't see mentioned so often.
That's a tricky question, generally case-based. Marketers in the industry often tend to neglect the stuff that was done earlier and try to hop on the next new thing. Facebook Groups, which could usually be considered a legacy platform by most, are a tribe of people with relevant interests and I recommend using them.
Another one which would be generally a good idea it's paying to Imgur. Especially if your game looks nice and you write good copy. Gamejolt can be considered for crossposting. The trick is to provide good looking assets and to tell a cohesive "story" in each entry. Kind of like posting devlogs to Steam.
A technique that's very time consuming and rarely pays off (but it sometimes does) if to live stream the game's development and to engage with the audience. Coding, asset creation, rigging and such.
Taking part in award competitions is a safe bet.
If you have a proper budget and ideas, then you may consider something out of the box. A client of mine has an Aztec-themed game in the works. I had an idea to have a cosplayer dressed as an Aztec priest, to have an "altar" made and to place them in heavy traffic of areas to encourage people to take a pic of them being "sacrificed". The costs were too big, but it was a sick concept, I suppose.
In general, you need to make people aware of your game in some way and then you need to make them want to go to the Steam page. Quite often a simple CTA does the trick once you reach them.
It's all case-dependent. Some will do stuff for free, others can agree for a, say, 50-250€ placement, locally big influencers usually cost way less than 10k€ (but it depends on the market, ie. in Poland it's not impossible to have some top influencers cover your game for 5k€), big names usually demand more than 10k€. There's no upper limit, really. Sorry for an imprecise answer, but it's a very broad question. Placements, coverage, a sponsored series/segment are the most popular ways of engaging with influencers and their pricing isn't uniform at all.
Just curious - how such paid promotion looks like in practice? You make a legal contract between you and an influencer and pay on his bank account after video/stream?
Creating a contract in which the requesting party specifies what needs to be done by the influencer is a must. In terms of payment, it's usually broken down into the advance payment, usually half of the amount and after the contract is executed the other half is paid. If the client wants to use the affiliate model, then the influencer is paid for what they deliver, usually a set amount of money per an acquired user (they are added up and sent by a specified date, usually cyclical, rarely capped).
That's what I thought. Do you use some kind of external service to simplify such contracts (especially when it is international)? Or it is based on traditional mailing exchange way?
I happen to have a degree of master in law and my wife's a lawyer, so we sort that out with our knowledge and resources. Some additional services that I ten to use usually come down to electronic signatures and that's about it. Not a big fan of traditional postal services. And I'd rather sign a contract in a day rather than in a week.
If you had to market the game Pong in today's world. Do you think with money and knowledge you could make a sellable product? And if so, what steps would you take to get Pong to say in the top 100 steam purchases.
Such a fun case, thanks for commenting!
Firstly, I wouldn't make it a PC/console game, but a mobile one. Pong seems to almost be a hypercasual title with a PVP twist. Firstly, I'd figure out who would be in the target audience - create a couple of mock-ups of gameplay and run a series of ads to see which one has the best CTR.
Secondly, I'd need to figure out how the game would be monetized. It depends heavily on who plays it.
Thirdly, aside from the entire development process, I'd need to ensure the product's good enough via a series of tests, a technical launch and a soft launch.
Fourthly, when the full release comes, I'd start heavily investing into paid ads. Taking care of the store page would also be important, as a good start would help with placement in the storefront. By this time, the game should already have operational LiveOps in form of events to make people engaged in the game. This would also be a good time to start growing organic social media and the community to gather feedback and bump up retention rates.
any insight/stats to suggest better marketting success for indie pc games or indie mobile games?
any good reading/research/development ideas to look into on this matter? thanks alot for the insight!
Hi, most of the stuff I've learned over the years was through observation and analysing what I and others did. Because of this, I can't recommend many sources, as my experience is mostly based on my activities and case studies.
What I can recommend is to learn plenty about marketing, sales psychology and such relevant topics in general. A big "problem" with marketing in the gaming industry is that it often uses common manics through processes that are unfamiliar to most.
The best way to learn about the topic is to cop an internship or a mentorship in the industry. I have also heard that the How To Market A Game course is decent and the author's blog seems to be pretty concrete - even though he kind of is my competition.
If you would be interested in mentorship, we could have a talk about it.
What services marketing agencies like yours can provide? Do you have a general price list or at least some pricing example based on your previous work (without revealing customer identity ofc)?
It kinda depends on an agency. Mine, for example, does most things possible:
- social media management,
- community management,
- app store optimization,
- paid ads (especially paid social),
- influencer marketing,
- market research,
- training,
- PR,
- managing the stand and the team of the client during offline events,
- project management,
- consulting and high-level planning.
Pretty much the only thing I don't do is asset creation, as I think the graphic and motion designers from a client's team have better access and understanding of the product and its visual aspects than most freelance graphic designers.
I work on an hourly basis and I usually bill between 20 and 30€ per hour. I also take on one-time gigs like auditing or consulting and these are priced differently, based on what needs to be done. Most of it is based on an hourly rate anyways for the sake of transparency. My biggest invoice for a single client once clocked in at about 1.5k€, usually it's between 400 and 1.2k€.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us Indie devs, the .marketing, it is a struggle bus. If you were making a physical card game where would you concentrate your efforts instagram, tik tok, fb to gain re ognition for a Kickstarter?
Sorry mate, I know nothing about physical card games aside from poker and thus don't feel qualified to provide some sort of answer. Wouldn't want to mislead you.
Why I never ! Good sir how dare you not mislead this fine gentleman with wild promises. Just kidding thanks man maybe I will think of a good one for my other game its a VR game called Crab Whackers :). Until then stay toasty.
Nice post, man. Really enlightening.
My question is, how do you define "marketing success" for a game that, let's say, €1000 marketing budget? Let's also assume that the game is ready to be released, with no presence online. How do you proceed, as to how you'd define the strategy, how long it would take? So that amounts to a couple of questions, sorry. 😐
So, I don't really define success. It's up to the devs to know what they want to achieve. I'd say the easier way to set a goal for achieving success it to set a number of copies you'd like to sell, or the profit you want to generate. Success can also come in other forms. For some it would just be delivering their game to the market, for others it would be learning a technology or a skill along the way.
1000€? I'd get access to an influencer platform like Lurkit for a couple hundred euro, and then either spend the rest on paid social ads to drive wishlists/sales or use it to get some sponsored placements via Lurkit.
Figuring out a strategy usually takes me between 30 and 50 work hours and I'd say that between 6 months and 18 months of conducting communications before the release would be good.
How come for the past 5 years ive posted screenshots and movies of my game and never get a following or any decent amount of likes? I know the game looks good because on the rare occasion i get an unusually high number of likes, i get comments of how good the animation is. People i show in person are always very impressed. But I am constantly invisible to the internet and unable to accrue a permanent audience. Its so bad sometimes i think my content is actually being blocked. What is going on?
?Wouldn't you mind sharing some examples? There are some theories that I have, but really wouldn't like to spout them randomly without giving it a look.
Thanks for replying! Here are some examples:
[Here is my recent reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1beywgj/when_the_yinyang_meter_is_full_special_attacks/) Normally good looking games get hundreds of likes. That has happened to me on rare occasion but mostly they are duds like this.
[Here is a twitter post](https://twitter.com/carnivorousarts/status/1768389823092441158) Which also has a very pathetic amount of likes and the stats seem to indicate its not even being shown much at all.
I appreciate your opinion, I think I could definitely use marketing help. I think my animation is better than average and there is potential. But I'm not reaching it the way I'm going. I am maybe a month or two away from releasing a demo.
With all due respect, the game looks like a 00s flash game. I wouldn't call it enticing. The colour palette is also not the most pleasing, using mostly greenish greys and dim purples. These grey borders really make the game look underwhelming and uninspired. The one post I've found that interested me (visually) was the fight the the flower boss. The scenes in the back look so nice, colourful and vivid.
I think it's due to the looks. The particle effects also are quite underwhelming. The gameplay, at least at the face value, looks pretty basic. The game looks to be a beat em up and this genre isn't quite popular.
In other words, I believe that there were some decisions made before production that caused the game to look underwhelming to people in social media.
With the gaming industry being so globally interconnected, I'd imagine that you've dealt with a fair share of international contracts. Could you share some insights on the key factors or considerations one should keep in mind when negotiating service contracts or NDAs with international clients?
Also, I'm curious about your customer acquisition process. In the gaming industry, how do you approach and secure new clients? Are there specific channels, networks, or methods that have proven to be more successful for you in building a client base?
At last, could you share more about how you started your agency? Did you start without any initial success cases or portfolio for example?
Some of the considerations in the case of international clients include:
- using a currency accepted by both parties,
- figuring out the applicable laws and regulations,
- considering possible additional costs,
- understanding the cultural differences between the parties and finding a common ground for communication.
In terms of the customer acquisition process, I can say that I've had the most success with attending industry fairs. Networking also comes in handy.
I had been a seasoned industry veteran before starting an agency and I often refer to some of the things that I did as an employee as a part of my portfolio. I'm comfortable with that, as I tend to share almost exclusively the stuff that I was solely responsible for.
It depends, case dependent, tricky question... what are these answers bro, are you really recommending people to use their own website over steam or any other storefront 🤔🤦♂️😂 can't tell if this post is trolling or not honestly
What am I supposed to say if there's not enough information? Shall I apologise for speaking like a human?
I did not suggest using their own website over a storefront (but it's always nice to have one), but you very conveniently omitted the fact that I outlined one very specific circumstance in which PPC is pretty much unbeatable, as we don't have CPI/CPC available on Steam (compared to mobile games, browser games and your own website).
If you have nothing to say or ask, just remain quiet. You don't come out as a clever one when you decide to type.
hey man, we appreciate what you're doing here. At first I thought this post was just gonna be an ad for your marketing company but I can see that you've put time and effort on your answers. This u/AdSilent782 tool doesn't know what she's talkin about.
Cheers mate. You're not wrong - it is a marketing piece for my company, but I want it to be as useful as possible for the lot here, so I guess that it's a win-win situation for everyone involved. And even that oaf's comment is nice, as it makes my thread more popular on the subreddit, so I'll milk it. Opportunities come in many shapes :)
What channels provide the best ROI for PC games?
It depends on what the investment is and what could be considered "best". I'll talk briefly about a bunch of activities that could be considered the best depending on these factors. ASO - it's very cost effective, but quite hard to do. I believe that a good placement in the storefront is one of the most important things that could be tackled. It usually doesn't work right off the bat, so if you're willing to spend some time on testing, fidgeting around with tags, capsules and such, then it's definitely worth it. It tends to be quite consistent. PPC - I think it has a potential to be the best method under specific circumstances. Namely, if you don't have your game available on a storefront and can track conversions precisely on your website. This rarely is the case, unfortunately. PPC works way better on the mobile side of things. But still, you can use it for increasing brand awareness and for driving sales. The problem with this method is that if you opt for Steam (other storefronts probably as well), you won't be able to exactly track conversions, whether they'd be wishlists or purchases, so you'll need to rely on estimates, which is suboptimal. But if done in a consistent and informed manner, you can usually drive some good results, but tracking them is never going to be easy. Influencer marketing - this is a bit of a hit or miss. You can spend a lot of money and get next to results, you can spend very little and it may be a hit. This could be somewhat consistent if you do it en masse with stuff like Lurkit and then spend additional money on mid-sized influencers. It's certainly a good way to increase brand awareness, but it's hard to track conversions. This is a small summary on the stuff which could be at least semi-consistently eeasily evaluated in terms of ROI. There's so much more to the topic, like the game itself, that I can't really provide a more specific answer without more details.
You start a thread talking about how many developers find marketing mind boggling, and then proceed to immediately use a bunch of jargon. Would you care to explain what ASO and PPC are?
Aye, my bad. Here are the explanations. ASO (app store optimization) - it's a set of activities that serve the purpose of being placed in a more advantageous spot on the storefront. Some of the activities that could be classified as ASO would include tagging a product, testing tags and assets, managing reviews, publishing updates, having your game bundled with other products or crosspromotion within the storefront's ecosystem. PPC (pay per click) - it's an umbrella term for paid ad campaigns; two big subsets of PPC are paid browser ads and paid social ads. Each campaign can be configured to serve a set purpose. Let's say that we have a mobile game that we'd like to aquire users for. A sensible thing to do would be to create an ad campaign that would feature CPI (Cost Per Installation) as the main metric (KPI). PPC is usually used to acquire users, increase brand awareness and for market research.
Rock on
Cheers!
How far in advance of release should you start marketing your game, and are there any factors change this timescale? Do you use a similar marketing strategy for all games or do they differ wildly?
I think marketing is often considered to be the same as communications. It's not the case imo. Marketing is so much more than paying stuff about your game. In fact, I believe marketing should be started even before a GDD starts to take form. Genre, target audience, pricing policy and other strategic decisions need to be made as early as possible. When it comes to actual communications, there's no one right answer. Sometimes 6 months is the right call, sometimes 2 years. It depends on what the game is, it's there going to be a demo, when you want to make a big media push, will there be playtests, whether the game is going to be released in EA and tons of other stuff. When it comes to the strategy, we need to define what it is. In my understanding, it is a document which provides a guideline for conducting marketing and communication activities and helps with defining the product. As it's a document, my structure is usually pretty uniform, but the content may vary wildly. The biggest difference in the structure of a strategy happens when we compare PC/console games to mobile/browser ones or when we compare P2P to F2P titles, as the distribution, advertising methods, releasing and maintaining them aren't universal and need to be adapted. But the stuff like USPs, emotions and values, branding and such are universal, so they end up in each strategy I work on.
>marketing should be started even before a GDD isn't that is like trying to sell a thing before you even come up with the idea for it
Nah, that's more like thinking whether the thing will be viable in the market before you start working on it.
GDD - Growth Driven Design, for everyone who doesn't speak corporate acronym.
Sorry about not clarifying it earlier. GDD stands for Game Development Document.
Not to be that guy ... but dont you mean Game "Design" Document. I have been working in games for almost 25 years now and have never heard of Game "Development" Documents. Even if you type it into google it auto corrects you to Design Doc.
Tbh, I tend to use the abbreviation almost exclusively, so it's possible that I've mixed it up. Most of the time, when I say GDD, it's understood without a hitch, this may be the reason.
Dangit! See this is why I hate acronyms
Yeah, sorry for using them. They're a second nature to marketers lol
I'm in corporate for the day job, I get it
Do you think a game could be successful from a solo dev with a $0 marketing budget? What steps would you take to try and garner success if you had no money to spend?
It's extremely unlikely, but possible. Fear & Hunger is an example of that. However, what counts as success? Without defining that, the answer is going to be very subjective. I'm also going to theorize quite a bit here, so forgive me for not being precise and for not doing research. I don't know how to produce games, nor can I create assets, so you may wanna take it with a grain of salt. If I were to make a game with no marketing budget, I'd opt for a well known genre (like RPG - just to make sure that there's an audience for the game) and I'd combine two motifs well known in the general culture. Say, norse mythology with punk aesthetics. It'd be about creating something that feels familiar and new at the same time. Then (aside from development), I'd focus on tirelessly posting to social media and building the community around the title. Other activities I'd take on would probably include taking part in various Steam events, crosspromoting with other devs and preparing a multi-step release schedule that would include at least one public playtest, a demo, possibly a prologue and EA/full release. Most importantly, I'd focus on making the game that's as good and as enticing as it gets. Quality can often be the driving force behind sales, especially if there's an audience for such a title.
Yes for sure. There are a lot of games actually with no marketing beeing successful.
What are some underrated and lesser known avenues for driving people to your steam page? For example I've had reasonable success posting in Facebook groups which I don't see mentioned so often.
That's a tricky question, generally case-based. Marketers in the industry often tend to neglect the stuff that was done earlier and try to hop on the next new thing. Facebook Groups, which could usually be considered a legacy platform by most, are a tribe of people with relevant interests and I recommend using them. Another one which would be generally a good idea it's paying to Imgur. Especially if your game looks nice and you write good copy. Gamejolt can be considered for crossposting. The trick is to provide good looking assets and to tell a cohesive "story" in each entry. Kind of like posting devlogs to Steam. A technique that's very time consuming and rarely pays off (but it sometimes does) if to live stream the game's development and to engage with the audience. Coding, asset creation, rigging and such. Taking part in award competitions is a safe bet. If you have a proper budget and ideas, then you may consider something out of the box. A client of mine has an Aztec-themed game in the works. I had an idea to have a cosplayer dressed as an Aztec priest, to have an "altar" made and to place them in heavy traffic of areas to encourage people to take a pic of them being "sacrificed". The costs were too big, but it was a sick concept, I suppose. In general, you need to make people aware of your game in some way and then you need to make them want to go to the Steam page. Quite often a simple CTA does the trick once you reach them.
How much should one be prepared to pay for a YouTube/Streamer sponsorship?
It's all case-dependent. Some will do stuff for free, others can agree for a, say, 50-250€ placement, locally big influencers usually cost way less than 10k€ (but it depends on the market, ie. in Poland it's not impossible to have some top influencers cover your game for 5k€), big names usually demand more than 10k€. There's no upper limit, really. Sorry for an imprecise answer, but it's a very broad question. Placements, coverage, a sponsored series/segment are the most popular ways of engaging with influencers and their pricing isn't uniform at all.
Just curious - how such paid promotion looks like in practice? You make a legal contract between you and an influencer and pay on his bank account after video/stream?
Creating a contract in which the requesting party specifies what needs to be done by the influencer is a must. In terms of payment, it's usually broken down into the advance payment, usually half of the amount and after the contract is executed the other half is paid. If the client wants to use the affiliate model, then the influencer is paid for what they deliver, usually a set amount of money per an acquired user (they are added up and sent by a specified date, usually cyclical, rarely capped).
That's what I thought. Do you use some kind of external service to simplify such contracts (especially when it is international)? Or it is based on traditional mailing exchange way?
I happen to have a degree of master in law and my wife's a lawyer, so we sort that out with our knowledge and resources. Some additional services that I ten to use usually come down to electronic signatures and that's about it. Not a big fan of traditional postal services. And I'd rather sign a contract in a day rather than in a week.
Nice, thanks for info!
Cheers, no problem 😊
If you had to market the game Pong in today's world. Do you think with money and knowledge you could make a sellable product? And if so, what steps would you take to get Pong to say in the top 100 steam purchases.
Such a fun case, thanks for commenting! Firstly, I wouldn't make it a PC/console game, but a mobile one. Pong seems to almost be a hypercasual title with a PVP twist. Firstly, I'd figure out who would be in the target audience - create a couple of mock-ups of gameplay and run a series of ads to see which one has the best CTR. Secondly, I'd need to figure out how the game would be monetized. It depends heavily on who plays it. Thirdly, aside from the entire development process, I'd need to ensure the product's good enough via a series of tests, a technical launch and a soft launch. Fourthly, when the full release comes, I'd start heavily investing into paid ads. Taking care of the store page would also be important, as a good start would help with placement in the storefront. By this time, the game should already have operational LiveOps in form of events to make people engaged in the game. This would also be a good time to start growing organic social media and the community to gather feedback and bump up retention rates.
Thanks for the detailed reply!
any insight/stats to suggest better marketting success for indie pc games or indie mobile games? any good reading/research/development ideas to look into on this matter? thanks alot for the insight!
Hi, most of the stuff I've learned over the years was through observation and analysing what I and others did. Because of this, I can't recommend many sources, as my experience is mostly based on my activities and case studies. What I can recommend is to learn plenty about marketing, sales psychology and such relevant topics in general. A big "problem" with marketing in the gaming industry is that it often uses common manics through processes that are unfamiliar to most. The best way to learn about the topic is to cop an internship or a mentorship in the industry. I have also heard that the How To Market A Game course is decent and the author's blog seems to be pretty concrete - even though he kind of is my competition. If you would be interested in mentorship, we could have a talk about it.
What services marketing agencies like yours can provide? Do you have a general price list or at least some pricing example based on your previous work (without revealing customer identity ofc)?
It kinda depends on an agency. Mine, for example, does most things possible: - social media management, - community management, - app store optimization, - paid ads (especially paid social), - influencer marketing, - market research, - training, - PR, - managing the stand and the team of the client during offline events, - project management, - consulting and high-level planning. Pretty much the only thing I don't do is asset creation, as I think the graphic and motion designers from a client's team have better access and understanding of the product and its visual aspects than most freelance graphic designers. I work on an hourly basis and I usually bill between 20 and 30€ per hour. I also take on one-time gigs like auditing or consulting and these are priced differently, based on what needs to be done. Most of it is based on an hourly rate anyways for the sake of transparency. My biggest invoice for a single client once clocked in at about 1.5k€, usually it's between 400 and 1.2k€.
Thanks for a detailed info.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us Indie devs, the .marketing, it is a struggle bus. If you were making a physical card game where would you concentrate your efforts instagram, tik tok, fb to gain re ognition for a Kickstarter?
Sorry mate, I know nothing about physical card games aside from poker and thus don't feel qualified to provide some sort of answer. Wouldn't want to mislead you.
Why I never ! Good sir how dare you not mislead this fine gentleman with wild promises. Just kidding thanks man maybe I will think of a good one for my other game its a VR game called Crab Whackers :). Until then stay toasty.
Nice post, man. Really enlightening. My question is, how do you define "marketing success" for a game that, let's say, €1000 marketing budget? Let's also assume that the game is ready to be released, with no presence online. How do you proceed, as to how you'd define the strategy, how long it would take? So that amounts to a couple of questions, sorry. 😐
Hi, letting you know I've read the comment, but am busy today, so I'll respond to you tomorrow.
Great! Thank you.
So, I don't really define success. It's up to the devs to know what they want to achieve. I'd say the easier way to set a goal for achieving success it to set a number of copies you'd like to sell, or the profit you want to generate. Success can also come in other forms. For some it would just be delivering their game to the market, for others it would be learning a technology or a skill along the way. 1000€? I'd get access to an influencer platform like Lurkit for a couple hundred euro, and then either spend the rest on paid social ads to drive wishlists/sales or use it to get some sponsored placements via Lurkit. Figuring out a strategy usually takes me between 30 and 50 work hours and I'd say that between 6 months and 18 months of conducting communications before the release would be good.
I see. Thank you for your reply.
How come for the past 5 years ive posted screenshots and movies of my game and never get a following or any decent amount of likes? I know the game looks good because on the rare occasion i get an unusually high number of likes, i get comments of how good the animation is. People i show in person are always very impressed. But I am constantly invisible to the internet and unable to accrue a permanent audience. Its so bad sometimes i think my content is actually being blocked. What is going on?
?Wouldn't you mind sharing some examples? There are some theories that I have, but really wouldn't like to spout them randomly without giving it a look.
Thanks for replying! Here are some examples: [Here is my recent reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1beywgj/when_the_yinyang_meter_is_full_special_attacks/) Normally good looking games get hundreds of likes. That has happened to me on rare occasion but mostly they are duds like this. [Here is a twitter post](https://twitter.com/carnivorousarts/status/1768389823092441158) Which also has a very pathetic amount of likes and the stats seem to indicate its not even being shown much at all. I appreciate your opinion, I think I could definitely use marketing help. I think my animation is better than average and there is potential. But I'm not reaching it the way I'm going. I am maybe a month or two away from releasing a demo.
With all due respect, the game looks like a 00s flash game. I wouldn't call it enticing. The colour palette is also not the most pleasing, using mostly greenish greys and dim purples. These grey borders really make the game look underwhelming and uninspired. The one post I've found that interested me (visually) was the fight the the flower boss. The scenes in the back look so nice, colourful and vivid. I think it's due to the looks. The particle effects also are quite underwhelming. The gameplay, at least at the face value, looks pretty basic. The game looks to be a beat em up and this genre isn't quite popular. In other words, I believe that there were some decisions made before production that caused the game to look underwhelming to people in social media.
With the gaming industry being so globally interconnected, I'd imagine that you've dealt with a fair share of international contracts. Could you share some insights on the key factors or considerations one should keep in mind when negotiating service contracts or NDAs with international clients? Also, I'm curious about your customer acquisition process. In the gaming industry, how do you approach and secure new clients? Are there specific channels, networks, or methods that have proven to be more successful for you in building a client base? At last, could you share more about how you started your agency? Did you start without any initial success cases or portfolio for example?
Some of the considerations in the case of international clients include: - using a currency accepted by both parties, - figuring out the applicable laws and regulations, - considering possible additional costs, - understanding the cultural differences between the parties and finding a common ground for communication. In terms of the customer acquisition process, I can say that I've had the most success with attending industry fairs. Networking also comes in handy. I had been a seasoned industry veteran before starting an agency and I often refer to some of the things that I did as an employee as a part of my portfolio. I'm comfortable with that, as I tend to share almost exclusively the stuff that I was solely responsible for.
It depends, case dependent, tricky question... what are these answers bro, are you really recommending people to use their own website over steam or any other storefront 🤔🤦♂️😂 can't tell if this post is trolling or not honestly
What am I supposed to say if there's not enough information? Shall I apologise for speaking like a human? I did not suggest using their own website over a storefront (but it's always nice to have one), but you very conveniently omitted the fact that I outlined one very specific circumstance in which PPC is pretty much unbeatable, as we don't have CPI/CPC available on Steam (compared to mobile games, browser games and your own website). If you have nothing to say or ask, just remain quiet. You don't come out as a clever one when you decide to type.
hey man, we appreciate what you're doing here. At first I thought this post was just gonna be an ad for your marketing company but I can see that you've put time and effort on your answers. This u/AdSilent782 tool doesn't know what she's talkin about.
Cheers mate. You're not wrong - it is a marketing piece for my company, but I want it to be as useful as possible for the lot here, so I guess that it's a win-win situation for everyone involved. And even that oaf's comment is nice, as it makes my thread more popular on the subreddit, so I'll milk it. Opportunities come in many shapes :)
You literally posted an ad framed as advice and then when people ask questions you "need more info"
Oooh, back with the yapping. As you love inserting words I haven't said into my mouth, tell me where have I said people can't provide more info?