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…

That tv-movie is quite cool, I watch it every week here on pay-tv. It does talk well about married men problems. I’m not married but recently I saw so many discussion about relationships etc. I can only give you my honest opinion from the indie-developer point of view. If you want to ask yourself, what is the best situation to be indie? there’s no doubt about the reply: the best condition is to be single or at least not living together.

Why? there are tons of factors. Here’s a brief list:

• if you are engaged, you will have bad moment and discussions (if you know a couple that never has problems let me know, I’m curious to meet them). Does I need to tell you that programming (concentrating) in such moment is impossible? so if you’re angry for 2-3 days, in those 2-3 days you won’t work
• if you are engaged, you’ll have to listen to partner’s wishes. Don’t tell me that you always do what you want! that’s not true. you can’t ignore all the partner’s requests. If he/she wants to go out tonight, or go to last concert or … anything else, you’ll have to accept them, and organize your work… maybe when you are in a good productivity moment. People don’t realize that being indie, is more similar to being an artist – than a database programmer. Speaking with many successful developers they really “got insipiration” in particular moments and that can really make the difference from a topseller to an average game.
• being indie is really a particular job. People think is fine not to break balls if you’re in a office, but if you work at home (or the home is your office) then voilà , doesn’t count. Like they are entitle to distract you every possible way (if you live together).
• being indie means also dealing with bad periods. There can be moments where sales stagnate, and what will happen usually? unless your partner understand you well, he/she will complain about it and maybe the classic phrase will get out “why don’t you get a regular job?”.

Ok I think is enough – there are many more possibilities. Living in same house 24/24 can be very stressing if you’re indie! I’ve warned you 😉