INDIE

People keep asking me what my marketing strategy is, so I'm writing down everything I learned that led to my indie game blowing up 3 years post launch: ✨From 0 to 10 Million Views✨ Jo's Cheat Sheet for Indie Game Marketing Platforms: 1. YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have the highest virality potential. Use them for cross-postable shortform content. You get 3x the exposure for the same effort. 2. X is great for long-term brand-building and making connections and has more reliable exposure once you build an audience. 3. Reddit provides decent short term exposure and can be good for meeting others in the games industry How to make content that is blessed by the algorithm: Study other game devs who are already succeeding with games that look similar to yours (appearance, not genre!) Focus on high volume, but quality, content. Don't spend 2 months making a long form video when you could put out 8 shorts in the same amount of time and learn 8x as fast. When you begin, the point is not to go viral, the point is to develop your taste and expertise. Try to learn something with each piece of content and push yourself to improve every time. Continuous Improvement compounds - this is a super power. Do not spend lots of time looking at your analytics. Analytics are only useful if they teach you a specific lesson (ex: My retention curve is bad, I need to focus on script writing. My stayed-to-watch is low, I need to improve my hooks) - the rest is mostly vanity and not useful. Study pacing, hooks, and storytelling (most good content is a good story) . Avoid tasks that feel like work but don't move the needle on your primary goals. Not all work is created equal. Focus on leveraged tasks. This one is huge: Poor production quality with a great story beats high production quality with a boring story every. single. time. You can see this all over, look for it, it's eye opening Don't worry too much about Call to Actions, just get your content in front of people's eyes. Gamers are smart, if they see something they like, they'll look for it (do make it easy for them to find though - pinned comment, link in bio, etc) Success happens in short bursts. Aim for outliers. Keep experimenting. Iterate. You won't learn much from trying the same formula with minor tweaks over and over. Try making content that's significantly different. Experimentation and reflection is where learning happens. Going through the motions without that is pointless. You must be honest with yourself. If your game isn't loved by at least a few total strangers, you may want to take a hard look at what your game has to offer before you expend effort on marketing. If your game is niche, your content should still appeal to a wide audience. You need to reach 100s of thousands of people in order for players in your niche to find you. The Legibility and clarity of your content is super important. Look as Sealubbers. Simple pixel graphics, but super viral. Why? I think it's because players instantly understand what they're looking at and buy-into the fantasy of what the game might offer. Content should educate or entertain. Do something valuable for your viewer, don't try to trick them into watching something that has nothing to offer them. You have more stories to tell than you realize. If you made something cool, you have a treasure trove of stories about that process - tap into it. Your game must offer something special and then you must learn how to communicate what's special about it to players. The reason pong was a huge hit in 1972 is because no one had ever seen anything like it. If you remake it today no one will play it cause it already exists. Steam is full of a gazillion roguelikes. If you cant show players quickly why yours offers something they've never seen or done before they wont be interested. Every 5 years, there's 5 years-worth of new players who have never heard of your game before. You can keep marketing. You have an infinite potential customer base. Your packaging (thumbnail, title, hook) should create a secondary question in the mind of the viewer. A lot of people get this wrong and make their title a question. But the title: "I almost had to delete this character from my game" makes the viewer ask the secondary question "why?". This is the curiosity gap that gives them a reason to watch. A 10% better video gets 100x more views (I learned this from Paddy Galloway). Once you've put in the work and feel like you've got a bit of a grasp on what's good. Make sure to commit to that last 10% of polish. You've already put 6 hours into your video. Don't just rush it out, put in the extra time to make it great. For short form, put an outsized amount of effort into the first 10 seconds, there is much more leverage here. The formula for a commercially successful video game is simple (but hard to achieve). Here it is: A successful game = fun factor (the game itself) multiplied by presentation (art-style, storepage) multiplied by awareness (how many people have seen it) The job of your marketing is only to increase awareness. If your game is fun and has a good appearance all you need is increased awareness. I try to share everything I've learned during my journey from working on my game nights-and-weekends to becoming a full-time indie in order to empower other indies to succeed! If that sounds like your jam, follow me for more :)

Indie Game Devs: Your potential customer base is much larger than you think. Once I realized how this really works, it resulted in a massive influx of sales. Let me explain: For background, my spellcrafting game, Spellmasons, had plateaued for years and was losing traction when I recommitted myself to marketing. This resulted in my 3rd year, post launch, beating all the other years combined. Here's what I figured out that made this happen: - Your game is an asset you'll own forever - Everybody says launch causes the most sales and that's just not true for indies because indies usually don't reach anywhere near their Total Addressable Market in terms of exposure - chances are, indies will literally never reach every eyeball that might be a potential buyer, which means there are always more potential customers who would love your game if only they hear about it And even more importantly: New gamers are getting old enough to sign up for steam for the first time every. single. day. If I restart marketing in 5 years, there'll be 5 whole years worth of new gamers who might be interested. It's literally millions of new players every year. You'll never run out of people who are hearing about your game for the first time, no matter how viral your content is.