computer games

Indie “marketing”

There was a recent thread on indiegamer.com that saw Caspian complaining about the fact that he can’t find an indie “marketeer”. I want to write my 2 cents on that.

What is an indie marketeer? that’s the first question you have to ask. Because except for sending out a PR, what else you can actually do to promote your game that doesn’t require money? What other effective way to market it you have? My conclusion is: nothing.

Sure you can give it for free to bloggers - you can obtain some exposure but, nothing exceptional.

You can update the game and ad a level pack for example and try to resend the PR. But not every journalist would post twice about your game unless the expansion is something really big or innovative to catch their attention.

So what’s left? buying ads? requires money and so far everyone I talked to was “unsure” about the results (like playing a lottery and hoping to win). Trying to get a review from a big site? nope, if they want to review they’ll ask you. There’s no way you can “enforce” some well-known site to review any of your game if they’re not interested.

So what could really do an indie marketeer? mostly that’s left is very near to spamming that is, have a own blog about your game(s), post in game-related forums with links in your signature, and such. Nothing so special actually, that could guarantee you a good exposure, but at least you won’t be spending (ehm, actually wasting) money.
So really is a dead end. Like in real world, online business isn’t different. You can’t hope to get “exposure for free”. Portals spend huge amount of money in ads - you can see it in adwords and banners everywhere! Pavlina closed his games site. Probably he realized that there’s too much competition going around now in games, and you can’t just hope to live off 1-2 games earnings alone.
I think the only option for a small indie is just keep releasing new games, hoping that “one of them” becomes a huge hit. Everything else is going to cost money and “maybe” (depends how good actually you can track ads) give you unsure results…