First of all, a short announcement: At Your Feet 2 is progressing very well and we believe we’ll start the beta testing phase shortly after mid-August. The game turned out very nice, with A LOT of content, including some very hot and cute scenes, and a nice pin-up image which I managed to add inside the game in form of a dream that Linda has the first night in Trigue! You’ll recognize some familiar outfits and faces 😉

Remember that you can wishlist the game now on Steam to be informed when it’s out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3996520/At_Your_Feet_2/

And now, back to the topic of this post.

Today I’m going to talk about a very controversial topic, that is indie games marketing. I’m referring only to small indies, not “indies” with a team of 20 and a marketing budget of $50k!

When I read games post-mortem, especially those who didn’t do as expected, inevitably someone will comment like “what marketing did you do?” or even sentencing clearly “you didn’t do enough marketing!”

But what is “marketing” essentially ? For small indies?

I’m going to say this immediately: if you rely to “free marketing” tecniques, then good luck to you. Unfortunately this is what most of those commenters refer to.

The only way to do proper marketing is through paid ads. Unless you have a lot of followers on socials, your posts are going to be ignored by 99% of the people except your most loyal fans which probably already know about your game. Reddit posts are going to be banned 9 cases out of 10. It’s kind of hilarious to see all the strategies indies plan to make their reddit post seem not about their game 😀 No really I swear, I’m talking about coding this and that, about an effect, about retrogaming. Then casually putting their game link in comments. (I did this too BTW! it doesn’t work)

Here’s the harsh truth: all those efforts will maybe impact your sales by 1%. If you’re lucky!

Social and the illusion of marketing

Am I saying that you should delete your social accounts? No, obviously not. I’ve seen some indies that I know and that started around same time as me, that have greatly increased their reach by basically LIVING ONLINE 24/24. Something that maybe you can afford to do when you’re 20-30 years old, or if you have no life (sorry haha) and so on, but once you grow up like me… you can’t. You can’t spend your entire day be online AND develop games at same time.

When I was younger I was indeed online a lot. I remember clearly, every time before going to bed I was thinking “I must post something before going to bed!”. Like i the future of my business depended on that!

Here’s a trick: if you want to get more followers and you talk about your games… you better make a good game. Instead of spending 3h online, spend 3h working on your game. Not necessarily coding or writing, but even doing walks and think about the gameplay, the story, whatever. It’s much more productive.

If you want to get more followers in general you should use socials for what they’re made for: write controversial posts, catch attention (both good and bad), divide the public opinion, etc. That’s why they were made. Not to promote stuff. The only ones really getting rich for sure, are the people who control the socials.

I repeat again: I’m not saying you should delete all your socials. I keep posting. I post around once a day though, not more. I provide an update on what I’m working on, so true fans can see it. But that’s it. If I had 10-15k followers, my posts probably would get more attention or have a bigger impact, sure.

But how you reach that? I’m not going to post about politics, climate change, vaccines or all that stuff that has nothing to do with games. I want to talk about games. To get more people to talk about my games I need to make better games, as simple as that.

Conclusions

I’m sure that many people will disagree with me. It’s fine of course. This is my experience. However, I have spoken with a big number of indies over the course of my career, and maybe the 10-15% of them got success through socials… or maybe not even that. I mean, they were people (I won’t make names, but some of them made very big VNs and at one point had 20-25k followers on Twitter/X) who made good/great games. That’s it. That’s the great recipe for success.

THEN, they also were online a lot, posting about various topics, BUT the key point remains: they made great games. I know really a few who made good money with average games, and that was only by pure luck, being at right place at right time, or making a meme game that went viral (0,000001% chances of repeated success) and so on.

Sorry if my view is so negative but I am getting a bit tired of reading desperate indies and the usual comment “you should have done more marketing!” and “how your game can sell if no one knows about it???”.

Well, here’s the Steam stats of one of my recent releases, Christine’s Care:

This is the traffic that Steam directed to my game, lifetime (so far). Then I did some research wondering how much I’d have to spend to get that traffic. Well, with a CPC (cost per click) to get those 45k visitors I’d have spent an insane amount of money into ads! to get those impressions (which don’t automatically translate into visits!) the amount is lower but still around $3-5k. And it’s also a very targeted traffic (people who play games, not random people).

What does this mean? That if you release your game on Steam, you already get traffic (at least for now!). And if your game is a good fit (not “good” in general, but a good fit for Steam) it will gain traction and get more traffic. Of course, it’s extremely hard nowadays. And yes, you can try to use socials to increase the wishlists amount, but so it’s doing everyone else.

So you should focus on your game, and in case of a visual novel (but not just that to be fair) on the “hook”. Here’s a final stat, the traffic my other game “Save The World” got in same amount of time:

A slight difference, uh? I guess that “alien comes to Earth and listen to every word you say, how will you shape the world” is a better punchline than “Christine cares for disabled Hannah while meeting free-spirited Marlon and Liz. Torn between them, she faces love and life-changing choices.”

Or perhaps it’s just the art-style, or something else. It’s hard to tell, if it was, everyone would know exactly what to do. But clearly depends on the game. For the record, I think both games have great art style and Christine’s Care story is much better written, but it clearly lacks the “hook” of Save The World.

Now you know how to better spend your time: first make a great game and then, only then, focus on the marketing.