I’ll be releasing my new game soon and I’ve ben reading up on marketing ideas to get some inspiration. As a gift from above came this Gamasutra article about indie game marketing, and it contains loads of good ideas. Some things are obvious (start a blog, but write about interesting things), some things are very good advice (get some initial attention and keep that momentum), and some things are simply the hip thing to do right now (social networks, facebook, twitter, etc).

One thing struck me in particular, though: obscurity is major problem for indie developers. Of course I’m well aware of that but for some reason I still don’t do anything about it. Wildhollow is soon to be released and I haven’t made a single press release about the game yet. I don’t even have a public beta download on the homepage!

It’s probably a mix between fear of receiving negative feedback, and bad experiences from previous games. Sheeplings was featured on Kotaku and it generated a lot of attention…but the game wasn’t polished enough to benefit from the traffic. For Spandex Force I tried an awesome publicity stunt: a superhero photo contest. Alas, it generated no entries. So for Wildhollow I’m trying to find the right balance when to send out information about the game; the game has to be good enough so that I can keep the momentum going, and I must push out info about the game gradually so that I don’t end up in the Spandex Force situation. (“Here’s a competition for a completely unknown game! Wanna send in a pic?”)

I’ll probably send a press release any day now, and who knows – maybe I’ll even make the beta version of the game public on the homepage. Another thing I’m going to do is start twittering about the game. I’ve been very sceptical about Twitter, facebook marketing and all of these things, but today I saw a major benefit with using Twitter as a marketing tool for Wildhollow: I can show the latest twitters on the game homepage; this can serve as a small news column that I can update quite easily. Yay!

Maybe I should ponder if facebook can be used for something good as well… Possibly to give hints to people playing the game later, when they get stuck in my (not very) fiendishly difficult quests and puzzles.

Tags: Indie Games, marketing, twitter, Wildhollow

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Indie Games, Wildhollow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.