A Practical Guide to Indie Game Marketing

Joel Dreskin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317625506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

Learn how to market for your indie game, even with a small budget and limited resources.

For those who want to earn a regular income from making indie games, marketing can be nearly as vital to the success of the game as the game itself. A Practical Guide to Indie Game Marketing provides you with the tools needed to build visibility and sell your game. With special focus on developers with small budgets and limited staff and resources, this book is packed with recommendations and techniques that you can put to use immediately. As a seasoned marketing professional, author Joel Dreskin provides insight into practical, real-world experiences from marketing numerous successful games and also shares tips on mistakes to avoid. Presented in an easy to read format, A Practical Guide to Indie Game Marketing includes information on establishing an audience and increasing visibility so you can build successes with your studio and games.

• Through case studies, examples, guidelines and tips, you will learn best practices for developing plans for your game launches, PR, community engagement, channel promotions and more
• Sample timelines help you determine how long in advance of a launch to prepare your first public communications, when to announce your game, as well as recommended timing for releasing different game assets
• Book also includes marketing checklist 'cheat sheets', dos and don'ts and additional resources

Chapter 1

Introduction

Welcome!

Welcome to A Practical Guide to Indie Game Marketing! “Practical Guide” is a central principle driving the approach to this book. These pages provide tools and tactics for marketing your indie games, drawn from game marketing plans, case studies and seasoned industry veterans.

Marketing is nearly as critical for new indies’ success as the games themselves. This book focuses on providing insights, key concepts and tools for effectively building visibility and interest in your games—whether you choose to market them yourself, hire specialists, work with agencies or sign with publishers.

Who Is This Book For?

• Individuals and indie teams developing games for consumers.
• Individuals and teams considering a move into the indie world—perhaps currently employed with larger gaming studios.
• Students thinking about going indie for their game releases—after they graduate or perhaps for school projects.

Regardless of the path you take to market, this book will help with the process of formulating and executing effective marketing plans.

How This Book Is Presented and Organized

The book begins with core fundamental concepts and provides pointers on when and how to start. It will assist with marketing terminology and key principles, while presenting information in regular speak, rather than buzzwords—keeping jargon to a minimum.

In approaching the book’s organization and presentation, the publisher and author have designed for skimmability, opening each chapter with objective summaries and tip callouts and progressing to deeper information later on. The book includes numerous examples from real-world game launches and marketing materials, with a focus on those that have worked best.

Readers will come to this book with differing levels of marketing experience—a key reason we’ve taken this approach of designing for skimmability—so you can find the sections most relevant to you and skip over topics you’re more familiar with. That said, I recommend spending time with the opening chapters. Some of you may have bypassed these fundamental planning and organizational steps in the past, but they can deliver tremendous benefits.

Following the initial sections on core concepts and getting started, the book provides chapters that focus on these important areas:

• Developing your marketing plan.
• Determining which kinds of programs you’ll include in your plans, such as PR, advertising, promotions and others.
• Designing effective marketing materials—trailers, store pages, icons and more.
• Additional topics, such as developing your audience and post-launch programs.

About the Author

I work as an independent marketer, having built up experience at numerous companies in the San Francisco Bay area, including the LucasArts division of Lucasfilm, Telltale Games, and Macromedia (now Adobe). Earlier in my career, I worked in licensing and merchandising at Paramount Pictures, as well as advertising agencies. Projects I’ve driven have included big budget TV campaigns (one of which featured the real Jedi Starfighter from Star Wars Episode II), online, print and social media-centric programs, as well as smaller, grassroots initiatives. These launches have spanned many different platforms and channels—console, mobile, and desktop; digital and retail.

For a number of projects, I’ve taken approaches from larger companies and adapted them for organizations with different staff and budget sizes. As an example, I’ve helped conceive and run events that bring together indie studios with media and industry attendees for focused mixers and junkets. You can learn more at www.theindiemarketer.com.

Two chapters in this book feature contributions from special guest authors Tom Byron and Emily Morganti, writing enthusiastically on topics where they’ve established expertise: Branding and PR, respectively.

Let’s Get Started!

Breaking down the basics and potential players for your game provides a great starting point for your plan. Chapter 2 provides guidelines on where, when and how to begin.

Chapter 2

Marketing Fundamentals

Marketing can be as essential for the success of your game as the game itself. Poor planning or neglect with marketing can kill an indie studio’s dreams just as much as a sloppy approach to development. Some look at marketing as a task they should probably get to at some point. Too often, they never dive into it at all, or get to it very late in the process as an afterthought—and then might not consider the absence of marketing as a key factor if the game underperforms. Some might decide to skip marketing completely, believing they don’t have the budget to support their games. Some want to believe that they don’t need marketing because their game will sell itself.

Developers and aspiring studios that want to make games for a living and continue as indies should do everything they can to achieve these goals, including marketing! Successful marketing can provide a strong foundation for your studio’s ongoing growth and for sharing your creations with as many people as possible. And you don’t need a huge budget.

Strong marketing programs don’t work like a standard kit, one-size-fits-all or checklist. Effective executions will vary significantly from one game to the next—based on the gameplay style, kinds of players, platforms, release timing, your goals, and much more.

Chapter Objectives:

• Determining how and when to begin the marketing planning process for your game.
• Identifying important key questions and considerations to address early on.

Where to Start

Since you’re holding this book (even if you’re just browsing in a store right now) you hopefully buy in to the importance of marketing. Here are some helpful starting points in approaching this for your game.

Marketing Fundamentals

Since marketing can be so broad and vast and can vary considerably from game to game, you’ll find it helpful to begin with a shortlist of key concepts. This chapter frames these as “Marketing Fundamentals”—core building blocks that provide a starting point and help shape how you approach marketing for your game. Whether you decide to market the game yourself, with associates, or with a publisher responsible for marketing, you’ll find it helpful to get a clear focus on these areas early on.

Description: What Is This Game?

Start by writing up a concise statement about your game, which many refer to as the “elevator pitch” (how you might describe your game in the time it takes for a typical elevator ride). This statement communicates the game concept as precisely as possible to a new person in two to three sentences, capturing its essence and characteristics that make it interesting and compelling. You can’t really begin to build interest and appeal for a game with others until you zero in on the core attributes that make it most distinctive and can communicate them effectively.

Don’t worry about crafting the perfect verbiage right away or trying to come up with the most clever tagline ever. This is a surefire path to writer’s block. You’ll likely tune and refine the wording many times before you begin presenting the statement to real prospective customers or partners. You might start with jotting down representative words, statements or bullet points about your game, write it out in longer form and prune it back until you get to its essence. Make sure you land at a place that’s unique to your game—it shouldn’t be so broad that it could refer to any number of different games out there.

Tip: When writing your first brief game description, start by just getting words down on paper. Don’t expect to create the most perfect, brilliant, awe-inspiring line with your first pass (this approach would most likely lead only to writer’s block or a brain cramp!).

Here’s one example of a game description. Can you guess the game?

A puzzle game where seven different types of colored blocks continuously fall from above and you must arrange them to make horizontal rows of bricks. Completing any row causes those blocks to disappear and the rest above to move downwards. The blocks above gradually fall faster and the game is over when the screen fills up and blocks can no longer fall from the top.

A shorter elevator pitch version of this description might read:

Race against the clock to match and arrange vertically falling colored blocks before they stack too high and fill the screen!

Positioning: Identifying an Appropriate Place for Your Game

Positioning definition: “an organized system for finding a window into the mind.”¹

Basically, this refers to how you position your game against others in your target market, how your game might compare or differ from others. You may hear some refer to “differentiators” in this context.

Positioning statements take the form of a single sentence (possibly two) that describes your game’s primary appeal in relation to where it stands in the market. Positioning statements are succinct and speak to the main characteristics that make your game unique and...