Do you team up with marketing experts or use their services? Does Steam h_elp?

[klaus]

Getting the word out about your game ain’t that easy nowadays it seems.

Do you make all your marketing yourself or did you team up with experts in this area? Can you recommend services?

I stumbled across these ppl http://blackshellmedia.com/services/marketing/ but I don’t know if they are good.

Honestly speaking, alpha registration count is lower than what we expected until now. We want people in, but we are not so far in development that we can contact press media and so on to review the game, because it’s still in an alpha stage. We’re thinking about contacting youtubers for a review of the alpha version though.

And we are thinking about going on Steam. Did Steam help you with drawing attention to your game?

Also, early access would be a good thing for the type of game we are making I think.

[orangepascal]

Steam is not gonna do anything for your marketing out-reach. You’re game will be in the new-releases list for a few days but so will a few dozen other games be.

Press and media only pick up “stories” or games that are already talked about, because that’s what attracts readers. If your game is good enough, and it’s in early beta, it might just be interesting enough to talk about and why not contact sites about and start talking a bit? Most major sites won’t even pick it up , but the smaller sites might and they can bring in some gamers.

if you wait until release to do marketing, you’re way too late you should have started when you first had something to show people.

[klaus]

Thanks for your reply!

@orangepascal

Steam is not gonna do anything for your marketing out-reach. You’re game will be in the new-releases list for a few days but so will a few dozen other games be.

I heard that they introduced a banner rotation for all games in greenlight. Maybe that will help a bit in the future.

@orangepascal

if you wait until release to do marketing, you’re way too late you should have started when you first had something to show people.

We did start marketing about 1 month ago with the launch of our website and the first trailer video. We also started posting on twitter, facebook and g+ at that time. We mostly care about twitter though, because we are expecting the most from this platform. Reddit seems to be a good place too - I’ll have to dive a little more into that.

[orangepascal]

oh true, if you go through Greenlight first, then you do get some more exposure, since the game will be on the frontpage for a bit longer than the normal steam pages. But the attention you get there is mostly yes/no votes (literally a 50/50 divide for most games I know about).

Having some sort of sign-up or even a beta to try out might increase your results more (haven’t tried that myself).

Twitter and facebook are two good ways for marketing, Twitter is mostly interesting for the quick news posts (any thing like new screenshots, blog posts, etc) and hope it get’s retweeted/favorited enough… and facebook is best for trying to grow your fan base, getting people to like your page so it’s easier to reach them in the future.

Also try to setup a mailing-list and see if you can push people to sign up on that… nothing beats having a direct line to your customers.

reddit is a big mystery… most links,posts seem to just die in a void, at least on all my attempts but if it DOES get picked up, it goes big pretty quickly.

[princec]

These days you’ll be lucky to remain visible in New Releases for more than a few hours.

Greenlight won’t really help your actual marketing efforts in any serious sort of way. It’s there just to make Valve’s life a little easier so that they can at least have a little bit of auto-vetting on what they bother letting onto the service.

You do get a few shots at the main capsule on the front page given to you by default when you are finally released on Steam. However you will actually need to massively push the title yourself at the same time: because Valve will perpetuate titles on the front page that start making them a lot of money or getting them a lot of downloads (it’s mostly done on automatic stats). So if you want to maximise your chances, run an exposure round on the main capsule right after and during a massive marketing campaign.

Marketing campaigns these days might easily amount to the tens of thousands of dollars. This is mainly going to be in the form of generic advertising solutions (AdWords, Youtube, Project Wonderful, etc) and the odd cleverly targeted site takeover (eg. RockPaperShotgun) and so on.

Cas

[princec]

The benefits of remaining in the Steam front page capsule rotation are enormous and exponentially greater than any exposure you can gain anywhere else for any kind of money. So make it count.

BTW Twitter and Facebook are quite expensive for their supposed effectiveness… but then we’ve also concluded that advertising takes a very long time to mature. As in, using very clever tracking techniques, we can trace sales coming in occurring over a year after advertising exposure. It’s a very, very long game.

Cas

[KevinWorkman]

@princec

BTW Twitter and Facebook are quite expensive for their supposed effectiveness… but then we’ve also concluded that advertising takes a very long time to mature. As in, using very clever tracking techniques, we can trace sales coming in occurring over a year after advertising exposure. It’s a very, very long game.

This is super interesting to me. I’d love to read a more detailed article or blog post about this!