I’m about to launch my first iOS game and I’m working on marketing and promo. I’ve read all the threads and articles on how to market games, and am doing as much as possible. But much of the advice is several years old, and I wanted to ask which of the following marketing techniques have you had the most success with? By success, I mean, “which do you think has led to the most installs?”. Which ones have been a waste of time and money?
Here is the list of marketing items:
Growing a Twitter following and being active on Twitter.
Growing a Facebook following and having an active Facebook page.
Writing to game review sites and blogs to get your game reviewed.
Writing to Youtube “Let’s Play” people like PewDiePie.
Posting in game enthusiast forums about your game.
Paying for a press release distribution service like PRWeb.
Advertising via In-App-Cross-Promo services like Chartboost.
Advertising on game sites.
I know there are already a ton of threads on marketing techniques, but I am more interesting in what is currently (Feb. 2014) working and what is a waste of time and money. As a one man show I don’t have time/money to do all of these well.
just from reviewing your List I think you have just about everything covered to Market your Game Properly except for one thing…
Attending Game Conferences like Casual Connect, or Indie Cade where you may have an opportunity to meet Publishers and Investors in person, discussing possible publishing deals (just an option to explore), and networking with other developers and game business people that may inspire you and give you some awesome ideas of how to make your game successful. Also one other major benefit is is having a chance to enter and win a contest, which will bring you some nice publicity before launch.
I attended Casual Connect last year in San Francisco and I thought it was an amazing experience, and I plan to go again this year to showcase my new game in development. While at Casual Connect I meet some pretty successful game developers, like the creator of 8BitMMO http://8bitmmo.net/, who kinda inspired me to persue my current Multiplayer RPG Project. I meet the creator of Bread Kittens Bread Kittens on the App Store which happens to be a very highly successful iOS game, it has 36,007 5 Star Ratings…
anyhow i was informed that one of the best things to do before launching an iOS game or any game for that matter is to first do a Soft Launch where you only release and market the Game / App to a certain Region / Country Only for a certain time period, so to test the Player Feedback, and Success of Installs in those smaller Markets. Then you’ll have some data to make improvements, and make your Official Launch even better, whether it’s improving Player Retention, Upgrading adding New Features, and or Bug Fixing…
this I have read a few recent articles on regarding this… so if there is anything I have to offer from my reply is attending conferences before launching your game, and exploring the Soft Launch idea. I like your game idea, looks really cool, cute, and lots of fun! Good Luck!
I’d love to attend some conferences. But I live in the middle of nowhere, game conference wise, so it is fairly expensive. I’ll definitely keep it in mind if the game has legs
Of the things I am able to do at this time, my gut feel is that the best use of my time is:
Twitter. Just getting started with this, but it seems like the many way news/info is disseminated organically these days.
Contacting game review sites. I didn’t have much success with game reviews on my previous game. Didn’t get many reviews, and the ones I did get did not generate much traffic. But I didn’t get any big sites.
Paying for press release via PRWeb. I’ve had decent success with this in the past, but it was several years ago.
Forum marketing. This one is tricky because I am not active on many forums, and people generally don’t appreciate new member self promoters.
Paid in-app advertising seems to be the industry standard for the big players, but CPI’s are way too high for my little outfit.
Facebook has gotten pretty good at filtering out all the game stuff, so I don’t think it is worth much effort at this point.
Let’s Play videos won’t work for my particular game because it is a puzzle game… they would give away all the puzzles.
