The indie marketing plan

Okay, maybe more like an indie marketing plan than the plan, since every game and every company comes with its own approach to marketing. Nevertheless, at Ronimo we have gathered a ton of experience with marketing through Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers, and I have also done quite a bit of marketing for my hobby project Proun. Today, I would like to share this knowledge in the form of a rather complete plan that other indies hopefully find useful to help guide their marketing.

Traditionally marketing is the field of the large companies and the large budgets, who buy advertisement space on television, magazines and websites. However, today a small indie studio with hardly any marketing budget can still get a lot of attention going. In fact, I think indie studios can potentially market downloadable games better than big companies! When we launched Swords & Soldiers, we were a pretty much unknown company with no marketing budget, and yet we managed to get enough attention going that when it launched, one review started with this sentence: "Has this much-hyped title been worth the wait?" I hope today's blogpost will help others hype their games as much, and more!

This is a very long blogpost, since there is a lot to it and I feel it is worthwhile to write something comprehensive. This means a big wall of text, so just this once I am going to start this post with a step-by-step summary. To compensate for today's wall of text, next week's blogpost will be almost exclusively images, giving fun examples of creative marketing things we have done.

• Marketing is one third of your chance at success
• Your biggest enemy is not being known
• Spend a lot of time on marketing
• Don't expect your publisher to do all the marketing
• Do not focus on buying advertisement space
• Send out press releases
• Find your own voice
• Create a press list
• Find big foreign sites
• Build a relation with game journalists
• Give exclusives to specific press
• Create news
• Create a marketing plan early on
• Use your indieness!
• Visit trade shows
• Start your marketing early
• Don't show crap
• Create trailers
• Send out review copies
• Send out preview copies
• Engage your community
• Social media are about replies
• Contact big Youtube channels
• Launch on additional platforms
• Keep adding features after launch
• Have a marketing concept for every patch
• Measure the success of your marketing by tracking metrics
• Be super enthusiastic about your game
• Be creative about your marketing
• Talk about your game, all the time
• Get Steam/PSN/XBLA/Apple/etc to feature you
• Get into bundles
• Do contests and give-aways with press
• MAKE A GAME THAT STANDS OUT

(I considered putting this image here, but it is really too lame...)

Marketing is one third of your chance at success
I think getting high sales is for only 33% determined by the game itself. The rest is one third marketing, and one third luck. Sometimes you make the best game in the world and it still doesn't sell. You cannot control luck, but you can definitely control your marketing. Lots of beginning developers seem to forget about that: they focus on making a great game, and don't do anything else.

Your biggest enemy is not being known
If you want your game to sell well, then making a good game is not enough. In the end, if no one knows about it, then no one is going to buy it, no matter how good it is. If your game happens to be the most incredible game ever, it might spread like wildfire (like Minecraft did), but any normal game will need a lot of marketing to reach an audience. Your problem is not that people might get the wrong opinion about your game. Your problem is that they have no opinion about it, because they don't know it!



Spend a lot of time on marketing
Doing marketing well takes a lot of time, as the number of items in this blogpost exemplifies. Spending this time is totally worth it and necessary. Take a couple of days to make a good trailer, then a couple of days more to contact press, then do some more. Marketing is often left out of the development planning, but if you are a small indie studio and need to do everything yourself, then you will need to schedule a lot of time for marketing to get the most out of it. Remember that you spend so much time making an awesome game, it would be a waste to not do the best you can to promote it!

Don't expect your publisher to do all the marketing
Some indies manage to get publishing deals, and they often expect that their publisher will do good marketing for them. However, it is wise not to count on anything, even if the publisher promises great marketing. Some publishers can indeed do great marketing, but I have heard enough stories from fellow indies in which the publisher did horrible marketing. There can be all kinds of reasons for this. For example, the bigger publishers might have signed a dozen games for release in that month and only focus their marketing effort on the ones that turned out best, totally ignoring the other games they signed. Some other publishers might just be specialised in something else and might have no idea how to market a downloadable game properly. In the end, publishers can do great marketing, but you should never count on it. Always plan a lot of your own time for marketing, and try to work together with the publisher to make the most out of it.

Do not focus on buying advertisement space
Buying banners on websites or pages in magazines is incredibly expensive. An indie game that sells 100,000 copies does quite well (big successes are of course way above that). At the same time, there are hundreds of millions of gamers. This makes getting to your niche target audience with advertisements incredibly difficult, and in practice the price of the advertisement rarely lives up to the amount of extra copies you might sell. Instead, there are tons of other ways to reach your audience. Ways that are often completely free and even more effective than advertisements.



Send out press releases
This is the most basic form of marketing. To get attention, you need press to write about your game. A press release is simply an email with some news about your game, usually including links to screenshots and maybe a trailer. If the news is interesting enough, press will write about it. You can send your press release to hundreds of gaming websites and magazines, and hopefully enough will pick up on it.

Find your own voice
If you have never written a press release before, you will probably look for some examples online, and are likely to see what kinds of texts most big companies send out. Don't copy their style: they suck. Big company press releases are often incredibly boring and contain a combination of marketing buzzwords and corporate language. There really is no need to do anything like that! When we saw an early press release about Super Meat Boy (might have been this one), we realised that you can do anything you want in a press release, and there is absolutely no requirement for boring stuff! Figure out what fits your studio and your game. And if you and your game are boring, then feel free to go for boring press releases after all... Find your own voice!

Create a press list
To send out press releases, you need to know who to send them to. So start collecting the email-addresses of as many websites and magazines that write about games as you can. Many websites show their email-address for news somewhere, or you might even be able to find the email-address of the journalist who writes about your type of game.

Find big foreign sites
Every game developer knows about big websites like IGN, Gamespot, Eurogamer, Kotaku, Joystiq and Destructoid. Finding such international websites is not very difficult, while it is easy to overlook local, non-English websites. Some of these are really big, though, and could get a lot of eyeballs on your game! One way to find such sites is to look which have a high Alexa rating. Alexa rates how many visitors a site gets, and although the precision of their estimates might be in dispute, Alexa is still a good way to get a quick overview of what gaming sites are big in, say, Italy.



Build a relation with game journalists
Game journalists are human beings (really!) and it is a good thing to treat them like that. They are more likely to write about your game if they know you and know what your game is about. If you met someone before, then it might be a good idea to mail them personally, instead of just adding them in your generic press release.

Give exclusives to specific press
Sometimes you need to bribe press into giving your game more attention. (Nothing wrong with a good bribe once in a while...) Websites and magazines like to beat the competition and be the first to bring the news. So offering an exclusive scoop makes it more likely that they put your game on their front page. Small exclusives can be specific screenshots you only give to one site, or you can offer some real news.

Create news
Some things are quite obviously news: the announcement of the game, the announcement of the release date, the actual release. Beyond that, it is all about creativity and what parts of your game are interesting. What you might not realise, is that you can create news yourself by being smart about it. The simplest way is to keep most details about your game secret and gradually release more info. Every bit you reveal can be a news item. This works best for titles to which everyone is looking forward, though: for Grand Theft Auto V, even the announcement of the date on which a new trailer would be released was news. For a small indie, it takes a bit more creativity and persistence to create news. How you formulate things is also important. With one wording something might be more newsworthy than with another, so you really need to think about this.

A great example is the reveal of the Chinese faction in Swords & Soldiers. In our first trailers, screenshots and press releases, we always showed two factions, plus a big question mark in the spot of the third faction. By continuously telling people that we were not telling them what the third faction was, we spiked their curiosity, making it a serious press moment when we finally revealed the Chinese. Had we shown the Chinese in the first trailer, this would not have been news!



Create a marketing plan early on
To create news and keep yourself from revealing everything at once, you need to plan your marketing ahead of time. Be creative, come up with a ton of ways to get press attention, and then put the whole into a planning. This also greatly helps to see what is needed for marketing. Making trailers costs time (our trailer magician Ralph often spends a couple of days on his best trailers), and to reveal something, it needs to be finished enough to show it in the first place. So make a big marketing plan with tons of moments to reach out to the world!

Use your indieness!
A good way to make press enthusiastic about your game, is to talk to them directly. Journalists often love talking to indies because they get to talk to the actual developers: real people instead of some random marketing puppet! Also, as an indie you are free to do as you please, giving you a lot of freedom in your marketing. You can make bold statements and even create a controversy, if you think that is going to help your marketing. I know one studio where the two members always pretend to be fighting in public, just to get more attention.

Visit trade shows
There are three ways to meet press: visit them, pay their ticket to let them visit you, or visit a trade show. All the big websites, tons of blogs and even hobby-journalists visit trade shows, and it is much cheaper to talk to a dozen of them a day at Gamescom, than to fly all over the world to visit each and every one of them. When doing this, it helps to make appointments ahead of time, since it might be difficult to find the right person in the crowd, and since some journalists cram their entire visit with meetings and don't have any time left in their agenda. If you happen to have some marketing budget, you can also rent a small booth to show off your game. This is a great way to reach the public and attract extra press. The amount of press coverage Awesomenauts got from our booths at Eurogamer and PAX East was definitely worth it!

Start your marketing early
This item is hotly debated, even internally at Ronimo. What is the ideal moment to start your marketing? Let me quote Spy Party developer Chris Hecker on this one: "Every AAA Indie Game has A Long-term Slow-burn Grass-roots Awareness-building Campaign" If you start early, people will see your game once in a while over a longer period of time, building a stronger sense of awareness that this might be something special.

I personally feel the ideal moment to start talking about an indie game of decent size is around 6-12 months before release, but big titles like Braid and Fez have shown that it can work great to start showing things years before release. The reason I prefer this timing is that the game is probably already looking good at that point, and that it avoids running out of news way before release.

Don't show crap
I think an important note to starting marketing early is never to release crap. Only show screenshots and trailers if they actually communicate the awesomeness of your game. Players and press are usually hardly able to fill in the gaps of an unfinished product, and are incredibly fast at drawing negative conclusions. This does not make it impossible to show things early one, though: often small pieces of the game are already looking good, while the whole still needs a lot of work.



Create trailers
This one is quite obvious, of course: trailers are the most flashy way to show your game in action to people who have not bought it yet, so be sure to make fantastic trailers! This is an art in itself, and if you have no idea how to do it, then check for example this presentation on making trailers. And please don't think one or two trailers is enough: the more the merrier, and I think a dozen or so is a good opportunity to get the press to show your game to their audience again and again and again!

Send out review copies
Unless you make the most anticipated game in human history, press are not going to buy your game themselves. You need to give them the game, preferably a bit before launch so that they can have the review ready on launch day. The press list mentioned earlier helps to find a ton of press to give the game to. And don't be shy about this: in case of doubt, just send a key. These gifted games are not going to hurt your sales, unless you expect to sell only a couple of hundred copies, which usually means you are doing it wrong in the first place.



Send out preview copies
Giving press early access to your game is an extra chance at media attention. So when you feel the game is good enough, send out preview copies. Make sure the preview still gives an enjoyable representation of the final game and watch out to not give away too much too early if you still need to keep some news for later!

Note that if you are making a console game, you will have to find out which press actually has a console testkit to run your preview on. The bigger websites and magazines own these, but most of the smaller ones do not.

Engage your community
So far most of this post has been about press, but press is not the only place to market your game! In fact, once the ball is rolling, there are other spots where marketing might be much more efficient. Facebook, Twitter, a blog, a forum, a blog (maybe even one as technical as the one you are reading now): all of these are possibilities to get into contact with your fans. For word of mouth to work, it really helps to have a fanatical core audience that talks about your game all day, and engaging them is a good way to keep them interested. Give them something to talk about!

Social media are about replies
On Facebook and Twitter, a reply is worth much more than someone simply seeing your post. If they reply to you, their friends might also see this, causing your post to reach a much larger audience than simply your own followers. Keep this in mind and try to post in such a way that it triggers reactions! Good examples of this are polls, and asking questions in which repliers can show how incredibly funny/creative they are. This is easier than it may sound and requires only a little bit of creativity. For example, one of our most successful Facebook posts was a poll that my colleague Olivier put online when the new Muppets movie launched: “Which Muppet would you want to see in Awesomenauts?” Of course we are not going to put the Muppets into Awesomenauts, but it is a fun question to think about and reply to, and tons of people did!



Contact big Youtube channels
On Steam we can see our sales statistics per hour, allowing us to track closely what works and what does not. The one thing that we have seen causing our biggest sales boosts, is big Youtube channels featuring our games. Contact channels like the Yogscast and the Cynical Brit and get them to feature your game. There are tons of Youtube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and a list of the 100 biggest ones concerning games can be found here.

Launch on additional platforms
This is not really a marketing concept by itself, but it does work great for marketing. We have seen with both Swords & Soldiers and Awesomenauts that each platform the game is released on, is a new roll of the dice. A new chance at getting a breakthrough and selling tons of copies. The first platform does not necessarily sell the most, and one platform selling horribly does not mean the game could not be a success on another. Somehow reaching your audience starts all over again when you launch on a new platform.

Keep adding features after launch
It is possible to get hype going after a game's release, but this is much more difficult then before, since the news, reviews and previews have already been spent. Creating patches that add new content is a great way to bring back attention to your game. We have been doing this a lot with Awesomenauts and every time we patch with something awesome, some press will write about, despite the game having been released months before.

Have a marketing concept for every patch
It greatly helps if you think about how new features added after launch might actually improve your sales. Try to come up with a marketing concept for each big patch. A great example of this from Awesomenauts is Skølldir The Terribly Overweight Space Viking. We asked Simon from The Yogscast to voice this new character for Awesomenauts, and he did a great job on the voice. Not only did our existing user base love that we added a new character, but it also gave the Yogscast a good excuse to talk about the game a lot, and many other Youtubers mentioned him because of Simon's voice acting. Just this one video got over 750,000 views on Youtube, and that wasn't even the only video they did that day! This is an excellent example of how, with the right marketing concept behind it, content you add in a patch can generate massive media coverage!



Measure the success of your marketing by tracking metrics
It is not always possible to directly see whether a specific marketing thing has a real effect, but in many cases, it is possible to measure response in some way. For example, maybe one press release is featured on all big websites, while another is not. And once the game is live you can probably see your sales per day, and thus see directly whether something had an effect. Be sure to learn from what works and what does not!

Be super enthusiastic about your game
Obviously. Radiate enthusiasm whenever you speak or write about your game!

Be creative about your marketing
This marketing blogpost may mention tons of things to do, but a lot of them require genuine creativity to really make them work. Coming up with things that could be news about your game requires thinking out of the box, so real brainstorming is in order here. Do not just apply your creativity to your game, but also to your marketing! In next week's blogpost, I will give a bunch of examples of creative marketing shenanigans we did to promote Swords & Soldiers, Awesomenauts and Proun.



Talk about your game, all the time
Chris Hecker excellently explained this one: "Most indies come up with tons of reasons not to talk about their game every day, and I include myself in this criticism (no one will care about this, it's not big enough news, I should save up for a big splash, I don't want to rock the boat with an existing or potential partner, it takes so much time to write a blot post, I want to wait until I've got this part totally figured out, this is too detailed and technical, etc). As far as I can tell, this is basically always a mistake, and erring on the side of talking about the game and updating fans is always worth it. There is so much to talk about in making a game that you can always avoid certain sensitive topics for a while if need be, and still keep up regular updates. And fans eat this stuff up, they love the tiniest details..."

Get Steam/PSN/XBLA/Apple/etc to feature you
This is the number one, this is the motherload. Nothing can push your sales as much as a feature by the platform holder. A front page banner on their store is the biggest push there is. This is very much up to their own decision, though, but you can help this by regularly telling them you want to join in big sales and keeping in contact. If you want to be featured well after launch, you often have to do a serious discount, and this is almost always worth it. To improve your chances you can even make banners on the right resolutions for their store and just send those over, to make it easier for them to feature your games.

Get into bundles
Like the platform holders above, this is not really a marketing topic by itself, but it is a great way to get tons of extra exposure. Especially the Humble Indie Bundle drives crazy amounts of eyeballs towards your game, if you can get your game into it.

Do contests and give-aways with press
If your game has been out for a while already, it might be difficult to get press to still talk about it. However, a lot of websites like to do contests where they give away cool merchandise and free copies of your game. Offering contest prizes to media is a nice way to get a little bit of extra press coverage, even long after release.

MAKE A GAME THAT STANDS OUT
This may be the last point in my long list, but it is nevertheless the most important one. If there is nothing special about your game, then getting any kind of attention to it is going to be a lot more difficult. You need at least one thing that really stands out, preferably more. This can be anything: your game can be really original, it can be better/prettier than the competition, it can have some unique angle, or it can go back to a genre that has been abandoned for ages. For Awesomenauts, we had several angles: the crazy eighties cartoon vibe (complete with a real eighties hair metal theme song!), how it innovates on the MOBA/DOTA genre by going platformer, the really detailed and lively graphics, and the completely crazy characters (including a Russian laser jetpack monkey and a pimp frog). Having all of these unique features makes marketing a lot easier. It all starts with a game that is worth noticing!



This brings me to the end of this blogpost. There are tons of other things one can think off (did I already mention targeting live game streamers, or traditional non-gaming press?), but I think the list above is quite complete as it is.

After this incredibly long wall of text, you might wonder: “Which item is most important, what should I focus on?” I honestly don't know, and I don't think this is a question you should even ask in the first place. Marketing determines your sales for a large part, so you should spend a lot of time on it and do it really well. Just imagine the pain if you have spent years on making a great game, and then no one notices it because you forgot about marketing... If you can, do all of these things! And then think up some more, and do those too! (And be sure to let me know if you come up with something good. We always want to learn more about marketing!)