I am a hobbyist game developer nearing the release of my first game, and I am starting to wonder if I need to make a landing page. Making a website seems to be more expensive and complicated than I thought it would be, and since I’ve never released a game before and I don’t have much of a following I don’t know if making a landing page will actually be worth it. Most indie game marketing resources I’ve read say to make one, but I would assume that most of the attention my game gets would be through vendors like Steam rather than it’s own website. What should I do? I am releasing a minimal abstract puzzle game if that’s relevant.
If you do think making a landing page is a good idea, do you have any suggestions for cheap options?
My feeling would be that it’s not the most important thing, but doesn’t go astray either. On the one hand people aren’t going to be piling in on a website to look at screenshots of a minimalist puzzle game, but on the other, without an identity it’s hard to gather a following, unless someone else gives you an identity by playing it on their youtube channel or something. If you’re aiming at steam, I’d probably do a landing page anyway since your audience will be online on their PC anyway, and it’s too much of an opportunity to miss. Think of it as an investment for your future store front.
But if I were you, I would spend most time trying to get other people to review it and “let’s play” it, it seems to be the best way to spread the news for that sort of game.
You need a landing page, but keep it simple. Steam shoppers often click over to the game’s website briefly just to get a feeling that the game is legit. You’re going to want a separate site for each game, even if they’re all hosted on the same server. Don’t worry about setting up a company presence yet. Make a simple, polished scrolling landing page for the game; don’t bother with multi-page designs. Basically just a polished game logo, a description blurb, a download/buy button, and some screenshots.
You can use Vlambeer’s free dopresskit.com if you want to make a presskit page. If you don’t want to fiddle with websites, use something like SquareSpace. It’s a trade-off: it may cost a little more, but it’s simpler to set up.
If this isn’t a commercial venture, and if it’s for a desktop-accessible game, instead of setting up a dedicated landing page you might just create a page on itch.io or wherever you’re hosting your game.
Website isn’t expensive. You can pay something about 5 - 10 $ a year for hosting. And there should be (check earlier) some tools, which them you can create your website. Maybe later you will have some fun with webdesign (html + css are not so hard to learn). Think about, that you can earn more money with a website than with a game
Yes, every single one of your games should have their own webpage. Or pages. Gamers will wonder if you’re serious if you won’t even market your game properly, and that includes giving them a way to learn about your game other than the store they’ll buy it on.
They don’t need a whole domain. But they need at least a page.
I have a website landing page and honestly it’s a waste of time and money, especially with the low probability you’ll have a hit game or app that will be successful enough such that someone will search in a internet search engine for your game rather than a game and app search engine, eg GooglePlay, Windows Store, and Apple App Store.
Your landing page is for what? Wouldn’t people be searching at the app stores for your apps? What you do need is a email address and an organized way to address bug reports.
Most gamers don’t mess with websites. Hobbyist aka moonlighters might have interest but virtually no one else does.
The landing page is for contact info and to let gamers know that the game is legitimate (and a dedicated domain name is part of this), so a single polished page with its own domain name is sufficient. Don’t bother with A/B testing, SEO, or anything like that. For advertising and visibility, the stores (Steam, App Store, etc.), YouTube, Twitter, etc., are much more important.
Ok so most of you seem to be confirming what I suspected: a landing page is more for establishing legitimacy rather than for gathering sales or discoverability. In that case there doesn’t seem to be much point in having one unless it has it’s own domain name.
I want to spend as little money as possible, since I have no idea how well my game will sell and I am currently a full time student. If I do make a landing page, what would you recommend? The best I could find was BlueHost with $118 for 36 months ($3-4/mo), which includes a domain name. I haven’t seen any hosts for $5-10 a year.
You can host your landing page on ZoHo.com for free including domain name but you have to modify their templates and to establish a secure domain, which is almost a necessity nowadays, (https) it costs $4 a month or a small discount if purchased for an entire year. Their templates have it where you can add ‘like’ FB and ‘tweet’ twitter and such things should you decide to make ‘landing pages’ on those sites.
Honestly, I’m dubious of tweets getting you anything but notoriety except from like minded people but probably not many game players; however FB likes could be helpful to get free notice from game players.
You can buy cheap domains at many places. I use a non .com domain name and a cheap one but not the cheapest. I did pic a suffix that was short and easy. It still costs like £21.95/£24 a year after VAT & whatever is added in.
So if the BlueHost includes https certificate it is about 1/2 price compared to Zoho with a monthly certificate combined Freeola plus a cheap domain suffix. By the way Freehola has free hosting if you buy your domain there and mail address for your domain for you could do that. I doubt those Freeola hosting includes certificates unless you pay extra though. I’ve never tried to host there although I create my domain email addresses there & host them there.
If you just use http at Zoho you can get hosted there free and for 3 years at $90 or less with cheaper domain suffix from Freeola so a small savings but the inconvenience of creating 2 accounts.
And now you’re at the point where you have to ask what is cheap enough and not waste a lot of your limited time investigating.
Thanks to LetsEncrypt this has recently changed. Everyone can get free SSL certs for their websites now. If your current host doesn’t support this automatically then ask them when they will. If you’re choosing a host, make sure you pick one who’ll support this.
Personally, I’m renting a VPS for ~$5/mo and some control panel software (loads of options, including free ones). With those in place, I can host as many websites as I can fit on my VPS just for the cost of their domain names. At the moment it’d probably be in the vicinity of $20 per site per year.
Edit: The catch with this approach is that you need to be reasonably web savvy to set up and run all of that. If you’re not, then I’d say just go with some cheap hosting, and make sure you’re ready to move over to something more robust if/when your game generates enough traffic and income to be worth it.
If you make a website and if it does not somehow have content that will cause Google etc to send traffic to it, it may as well not exist. Do not have the “build it and they will come” mentality, or the “publish and pray” mentality with websites. It will just sit there and do nothing. The only way someone might find it is if they use search terms which very closely match to your content and you have some kind of unique game name that people know ahead of time that they’re looking for. Otherwise you have too start getting into content marketing and other SEO strategies to get traffic. For sure just making a page, it’s barely going to even register on the radar and you’ll get next to zero traffic. But if you’re more serious about it there are ways to make it work for you.
But what about using a website to look more professional to potential customers that are already interested, rather than as a way to attract customers via Google?
For those of you that have made landing pages for their games, how do you measure their value? Is there some way that you have seen the effect that a website has on sales or press coverage? A couple of you said the point of a landing page is to establish legitimacy, but I guess I’m asking if you have anything to base that idea on.
Use something like Google Analytics and see if page hits spike at roughly the same time sales spike. If there’s a correlation between the two then it’s almost certainly doing something positive - either people are checking your page before buying, or they’re finding your page and then deciding to buy.
