What have you guys done to market your game(PC Mobile)? In the past for my mobile games I’ve just posted on forums and facebook but there’s gotta be more to it so let me know what you have done and what works for you!
You can create a trailer for the game and post it on YouTube.
Hey Sean. Looking at your games I’d probably label them Flash/Mobile ( please correct me if I’m wrong as the rest of this post is based on that assumption ). I say this because it best defines the market in which you are operating, and the marketing approach will vary depending on your audience and market nature. For illustration purposes and the benefit of less experienced community members ( I’m assuming you are well aware of the nature of your market ), I’ll compare PC games to Flash/Mobile, irrespective of audience profile.
PC games typically require far more resources to complete, have longer development times, and following the mass migration of developers to mobile, arguably have more room for maneuver in marketing due to fewer but larger titles being released. This longer time-frame supports pre-launch marketing including building relationships with journalists, attending expos, and alpha and beta test programs.
Flash/Mobile on the other hand is a saturated market characterized by short development cycles, leaving little opportunity for pre-launch marketing. It’s much harder to get noticed, and I’m presuming you don’t have a sizable marketing budget to back launches, or the track record in generating sales revenue to encourage Apple/Google to make you a featured product. Therefore you have to be even smarter and work harder than marketing managers at publishers.
So what options do you have available? Obviously forums and facebook which you are doing, but those will only generate limited traffic. What about your existing customer base? Are you encouraging or incentivising your customers to provide their email addresses and permission to market? People who have played and like your games represent your hottest prospects and are more likely to try and perhaps buy your future games. They might also like to read about development progress on your latest game, building hype ahead of launch, so you might consider a blog, twitter or newsletter.
Think about your brand, is it time to get more professional and establish a studio website and start building a strong reputation that can be embodied in your brand mark such as EA or Gameloft? There’s a reason they include those little icons in the AppStore: customer quality expectation. If you can establish a strong track record, or demonstrate a quality and/or innovative product that is news-worthy, journalists in your field are more likely to take notice. Don’t try pushing your message to journalists outside your segment; focus on easier wins.
While making posts on the Unity forums might be of interest to a hand full of developers, they are not your majority audience. Think about the nature of your audience and their lifestyles: are they casual or hardcore gamers? What’s their profile? How do they learn about new games? What sites do they frequent during their online time? Word of mouth from friends most probably, so how do you get people talking about your game? Give them something new and fun to try, and make it easy for them to play.
How about cross-promotion. Perhaps work with an established non-gaming brand with a good synergy for your game who have an existing large customer base they can market to. While this generates traffic for one game, you can cross-promote your other games and encourage people to sign up for newsletters. It’s strongly recommended you focus on building a community to market into, otherwise you are starting from nothing every time you launch a game.
At the end of the day, a good product sells itself, and you can’t flog a dead horse no matter how hard you try. So making an awesome game that people want to play, and that generates revenue not only for you but for your distributors, is half the battle. The other half is building and retaining the interest of a community of potential prospects that you can market to. Indie marketing on no budget is a hard task that requires the same if not more hours than you spent making the game.
I hope this helps, or motivates, and doesn’t come across as teaching you to suck eggs.
aaaaaand Games Foundry wins with the best response ever. Thank you, that is some great insight!