5 Indie Game Marketing Hacks With NO MONEY

hey guys my name is Thomas brush from the creator of a game called pinstripe I'm also working on a game called once upon a coma that I've been making games for about 10 years in these 10 years I've learned a ton of indie game marketing hacks and the way I first started out marketing my games was to not market them at all because I was a purist and I thought a good game is gonna sell itself and that's just not true really these are kind of hacks that I've been using over and over for my work this isn't me bragging at all hopefully give you a little bit of credibility I've been featured by Time magazine I've been front-page done reddit 3 May I think maybe four times I've had two successful Kickstarter campaigns both of which raised about $100,000 ultimately my work has been able to support my family in my studio and I've been able to push and sell enough copies so here are five indie game marketing hacks that you can use for your game [Music] before I tell you these five indie game marketing hacks here's the thing about marketing it requires a gazillion skillsets from graphic design to email marketing to just knowing how to write you really need to learn a ton of things before you can be effective at these five hacks so head on over to skill share and see if you can learn something from their courses you probably will so if you want to take these five marketing hacks that I'm going to tell you and you want to make them better and you want to actually learn how to do the nitty-gritty details of them click the link below and get two free months of skill share great fun courses and it's a great way to become a game developer and an effective one all right the first one is gonna sound obvious but I promise you it's probably the most important thing that you can do and it's gonna be the most miserable thing that you can do in the process of creating your game and this should happen about two to three months before you launch your game you really need to be putting together a press list of about 200 personal email addresses not necessarily personal but they need to be personalized email addresses whether it's a company or a gmail account for a freelance writer you need to have these personal email addresses like their name and then the company or their name at gmail.com now you're gonna be tempted to just go get a press list online you can find plenty just type in the indie game press list you're gonna see this massive press list and you're gonna think wow my work is done I can just send emails to these addresses don't be fooled by this beautiful wonderful needle in a haystack you think you found see the thing is is most indie game developers are using the same press list so what do you think is gonna happen to that email account when they get thousands of emails from people who want them to play their indie game they're going to delete that email address and they're gonna use a new one so it's your job to find the current email addresses that nobody else knows about putting together this press list of about 200 email addresses it takes a ton of time if you have an intern or you have a partner and someone who can help you hopefully you can minimize that time but I know for me I did it all alone it took me about two to three weeks of just full-time work just putting together a targeted email list now be careful you don't want just any email address okay you want to find writers who actually like your work now it's hard to know if someone's gonna actually like your work right but you could know if a writer liked a game that is similar to yours so what I like to do is I like to go on Metacritic and find games that are similar to mine and look at all of the reviews that were written about that specific game I find the reviews that are honestly good maybe seventy five to a hundred in terms of score and then I find that writer and then I email that specific writer now finding their email address is going to be tough because sometimes they don't really have it anywhere a lot of times it's just in their Twitter bio but if you can't find their email address feel free to tweet them or send them a private message if that's possible on Twitter obviously there's plenty of tools and websites out there to find email addresses so feel free to use those but the best thing that I've found in finding an email address is most of these writers have personal websites feel free to find that personal website and look for their email address on that site guys once you get 200 personalized email addresses don't be surprised if you only get ten responses believe it or not ten is amazing if you could get ten people to write a review about your game you're golden a second hack you need to use is post to reddit now reddit is a swath and a bath and a confusing universe of weird rules per category and per subreddit and a lot of people are mean and a lot of people are nice and you never really know what's gonna happen right so don't be discouraged if you post to Reddit and then you find out that you're hated and that you get banned or you get your post removed off of the subreddit or mods reach out to you and tell you you broke the rules but what I can say is it's definitely worth a shot because again I've been front-page to about three to four times and I could tell you I was nervous every single time I posted because I put a lot of effort into the post it was just definitely a scary thing because it's just a highly personal thing to do to post to Reddit you don't ever want to post to Reddit something like here's my game check it out it's only 15 bucks people hate that stuff on reddit instead post something like for ten years I've wanted to make games today I'm launching my game and it's a dream come true that kind of content is personal and it works on reddit also remember a great way to have an effective reddit post is just to have a beautiful five-second animated gif the third tack for marketing your indie game is to not ask youtubers to play your game rather get them involved in your game now posted an entire video about this nobody's really seen the video it doesn't have that many of you so I figured I'd just say it right now get youtubers involved well how do you get them involved reach out to them ask if they want to voice act in your game or they want to be a character in your game or they want to critique your game or just ask their opinion about your game the reason why is because youtubers get hundreds of emails every day about play my game play my game play my game play my game they probably instantly just trash these emails or they probably even have someone to sort through it so they don't have to deal with it but instead if you ask them if they want to be in your game that email will likely be flagged by their editor or just catch their attention if they're reading their emails and they'll take a look and see if they want to be interested in your game they'll take a look at your game and even if they say no you at least have their attention then you can ask them to actually play your game now regarding your press list I'll be honest you should probably double your press list have 200 writers and then 200 youtubers and I know I just probably doubled your workload but I know that that's really worked for me and again if you get ten youtubers to respond that's amazing now just be careful some youtubers aren't really worth your time this is gonna sound offensive and I'm sorry to those of you who have this amount of subscribers but if you have anything less than ten thousand subscribers on YouTube that influence isn't really gonna help sell your game so just be sure you're focusing on youtubers with like twenty thousand two of twenty million subscribers and even think more than twenty million good luck trying to get them to play but overall just focus on youtubers who actually have a certain amount of subscribers the forth indie game hack is do a synergistic stunt with somebody who is influential now this was applied for my Kickstarter campaign my most recent Kickstarter campaign for my game once upon a coma instead of just launching the campaign I actually spent a month reaching out to other Kickstarter campaigns that were successful reaching out to their creators and asking them if they wanted to participate in a synergistic stunt the stunt was simply if you post my campaign to your campaign followers and let them know that they can get a free whatever whether it's a free soundtrack or a free copy of my previous game something free see this was a great idea because the campaign owners they had an incentive to actually post my work because hey it's a free game for their audience they were able to post my game in their updates on Kickstarter and I had about 15 to 20 I believe campaigns involved on launch day and an incentive for their audience to actually pre-order a copy of my game now I know this is Kickstarter but you can certainly do something similar if you have a pre-order campaign of any kind pre-orders are a great way to gain traction for your game now the fifth hack is actually going to be three non hacks and I know that's kind of weird but I want to give you some hacks that aren't actually hacks and that most people think are hacks when in reality it's just a waste of your time looking for tweets from people who you think have a ton of influence is probably not worth your time an example of this is there was a specific influential individual that I just really wanted their tweet right I was obsessed with getting their tweet so I engaged in this long conversation with them on on Gmail and tried to tell them about who I was and gain sort of some kind of friendship because in the end this is sound gonna sound manipulative and it kind of is and I feel guilty about it but in the end I kind of just wanted to get a tweet from this person well when I actually looked later at their Twitter account sure they had a hundred thousand followers but when I actually looked at the engagement of their tweets it was like fifteen retweets and 300 likes this isn't really that effective for your game I mean that might sound exciting too but in the end it's not really gonna drive sales now if you can get hundreds of influencers on Twitter to retweet that's awesome or if you can get jacksepticeye to retweet your game that's incredible go for it but if people only have about a hundred thousand followers on Twitter it's really not worth your time another non hack that most people think is a hack is paying for youtubers to play your games this just doesn't seem like it's worth the effort or the money in my opinion especially if a youtuber has less than five hundred thousand subscribers now I've had youtubers who have 14 million subscribers play my games now it was great and it helped but it wasn't worth what the price they're charging now I didn't pay for this I was fortunate enough to have youtubers just willing to play the game because they believed in the project but if I had paid the rate and sometimes the rate can be $10,000 to $20,000 if I had paid that rate would have been severely disappointed it's just not worth that amount of money obviously focus your attention on getting youtubers to play your game but I don't know if it's worth paying for it the third Don hack has to do with your presence on other websites that really don't have a lot of influence specifically your own website I've seen studios spend a lot of money a lot of time and a lot of effort on making their website beautiful gorgeous tons of content tons of screenshots tons of videos I don't know if it's worth it guys I don't know if it's worth spending your effort and your money your time on making an epic website rather focus your attention on something that doesn't seem as important your press kit page the thing is is your press kit page the press doesn't matter what it looks like they're just looking for content now for example if you send out emails to your press list your 200 email press list you need to make sure that you include a press kit link in these emails and you want this link to be immediately visible on your email and you want it to have everything that this individual needs to write an article about your game that includes screenshots that includes a description that includes a bio an email address a trailer a logo everything they need to write a great article the thing is is that the press is going to write up maybe a quick brief of your game some kind of outline really quick and they might forget about it and they might not write anything and if they come back to it and realize they have all these assets that they need to reach out and get from you they're gonna disregard it and they're not going to finish the piece make sure they have everything they need from that very first email you send them all right guys I hope that this was helpful if you thought it was helpful please subscribe hit the like button leave a comment and I'll try and answer as best as I can also guys please remember you can support me on patreon that's everything we need yeah we're good thanks guys I'll talk to later bye [Music]

Channel: Thomas Brush

Views: 88,318

Keywords: indie game development, indie game motivation, how to finish an indie game, video game marketing, video game marketing campaigns, video game promotion, marketing tips for indie game developers, marketing your indie game, indie game development tips, indie game dev marketing, indie marketing, market indie games, marketing your game, how to market your indie game, how to advertise your game for free, how to market your video game for free, digital marketing with zero budget

Id: otza1Eg5AsY

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019