Alora Fane

I've just been naively assuming that Sindrel Song will do okay without too much promotional effort on my part. I very much doubt that it'll make millions!!, but I thought $10k+ would just 'sort of happen somehow'. That if the game were out there, thousands of people would notice and buy it. I've been avoiding actually doing research about promotion and marketing though because it's stressful and unfamiliar to even think about, but now that release is upon me (or delayed, if anything), I've been looking into it and... well, experiencing the anxiety I'd been avoiding it to prevent. I'm planning to do more research and to keep updating this post with everything I learn, even if nobody reads it and it's all for my benefit! It'll be useful to have it all in one place.

First, I've made it so that the Alora Fane blog posts show up on this blog, as you've probably noticed. They've been getting relatively less interest than the usual Taming the Mind ones, though that could be because I've posted several posts back-to-back.

I've been enjoying working on my new project, but perhaps I should reluctantly put that on hold for a while, as I devote myself as completely as I can to promoting Sindrel Song.

It should be out very soon, though I'm clueless about how best to go about it... So, research, then!

Simo Vihinen commented on the Alora Fane post about this with a couple of links:

∞ When Not To Release Your Indie Game ∞
∞ INDIE DEVELOPERS: KNOW THE BEST TIME TO RELEASE YOUR INDIE GAME ∞

Basically, they talk about times of the year when the storm of press interest in AAA releases will overwhelm any hopes a niche indie game has of being noticed. One of these seems to be from September on to the end of the year, but they describe August as a lull in big releases, a good window for indies... which means that I really should be releasing ASAP otherwise I'll have to wait until January next year!

So that's made things feel a whole lot more urgent.
I mentioned in that Alora Fane post that I was considering early access, though honestly I didn't know anything at all about it. I've now googled it, and I found this interesting article from an indie developer trying to promote and market his first game:

∞ Is Early Access Worth It? ∞

He also wrote ∞ another article about his attempts to get his game approved on Steam Greenlight ∞ (is Greenlight still a thing?).

It's... interesting, reading about his experiences. Bleak, honestly. It seems that he spent a couple of years on the game and earned less than four figures for it in the end, despite hours upon hours posting and promoting everywhere. He mentions things like spending days cobbling together a preview version which ended up being played only a handful of times. Perhaps this is the course most indie games follow? So much for 'making millions'. Makes MARDEK 3's release - which I've seen for years as disappointing - look like a windfall.

From looking at that game, though, I can understand the lack of obvious appeal. There's nothing about it that really attracts interest, it just seems to be a competent, basic 2D shooter sort of thing. It was also his first game, so he had no existing fanbase at all.

Would Sindrel Song fare differently? It's hard to say. An awful lot of people played my games back in the day, so I've got that going for me, though I've no idea how many of them would still remember about me or care about new work that's unlike my old stuff. Sindrel Song has these bright, 3D graphics and screenshots that I think are immediately intriguing... though I'm obviously biased so I can't be sure what people unfamiliar with it might think ("furries? Weird, pass"). I think the "made while struggling with brain cancer!" thing gives an eyebrow-raising hook. The themes it explores in dialogue seem like they'd be intriguing once you were in the experience and really engaging with it, but it's hard to convey that appeal in screenshots, descriptions, or videos. I'd also say it's unlike anything else out there, which could be either a good or a bad thing for pretty much the same reasons. Sindrel Song was also done in a few months; he took two years. It's challenging, perhaps prohibitively so.

This developer seemed to put a huge amount of effort into promotion compared to me, with poor results. I think it's unreasonable, then, to expect this game to do okay with no promotion on my part...

Though I never promoted my old Flash games either, and they did okay in terms of players if not profits.

I've been told I should reach out to Armor Games as a publisher, who'll do promotion stuff in exchange for a cut of the profits. I was surprised to hear they're still at the games thing, in this new form! This reminds me of the old Flash model, though I suppose it'd be very different if the game were sold directly rather than all the earnings being based on the pittance advertising generates. Have you seen any other indie games published by Armor Games? I haven't, but I also haven't played as many indie games as I should have. They sponsored my very first Flash release (some absurdly-named space shooter with 'Cyber Orteks'), so it'd be interesting if they also played a role in my first non-Flash release.

(I released that Cyber Ortek thing before I even knew I could make money from games, and Armor Games saw the unsponsored released version and said "hey, we could have paid you for that!". They did pay me, but less than if I'd released it with their branding to begin with. I think I was paid something like $600 for that? Or maybe it was $300, I can't remember. Somewhere in that range. It definitely took me by surprise since I wasn't even trying to make money.)

I'll need to keep researching this. I'll keep updating this post with new things that I find; I'm not expecting anyone to read it really, but I think it'll help to do it in this way!

Honestly, at this point I really don't know if this is something I can stick with in the long term. I'll probably be quite public about its metrics following the release so then we can all see how it goes together.

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