PROMOTION

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Promotion Research - Week 1

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,916 words

To have any hope of succeeding with this games thing, I'll need to do a lot more promotion than I have been doing... as I've said in a bunch of different, fairly scattered posts over the past few months. Things do come up on my radar throughout the week, and to get better at focusing on this, I've made a new category of posts here, and I'll add a new post in this category every Sunday (a new dev post will be every Saturday).

I don't know if anyone will care to read them, but keeping a blog about my development progress certainly helps keep me on track with that, so hopefully writing about promotion stuff should be similarly useful!

(I'll update the Personal section only when I have something I want to ramble about.)

Flash Is The Past

Last week, I talked about ∞ how I should follow some indie devs on Twitter ∞. The comments were mostly (entirely?) about old Flash devs and what they're up to, which is understandable since they were my contemporaries and people who know me now are likely the same ones who've known me since I was the MARDEK developer back then.

Honestly, though, I've been trying to move away from Flash for ages now, and the world of modern games development and distribution is such a different animal to how things were back then that the skills I need to learn, and the people I need to connect with, don't really overlap with creators who used Flash to make free browser games over a decade ago.

Still, it's interesting to see what some of the old names are up to. Remaking or remastering old projects seems to be a very understandably common path. Makes sense if you had a big hit to hope to benefit from any nostalgia people might have about it, especially in this climate of remakes.

I was also linked to ∞ this site, which talks about the history of Flash games ∞. Definitely interesting, and really puts into perspective how much of a creative explosion that was, and how differently everything works now. It's sad that it's harder now, but I do feel pleased to have been a part of that. I looked for MARDEK in the wall of names (I couldn't find it, but did see four Epic Battle Fantasies and the likes of "Popstar Dating Sim Girls", "Fart-O-Mat", and "Porn Sex XXX 18+"; such tearily fond memories I totally have of those wonderful works of art), and in the bubble cloud, which does have insignificantly small bubbles for both MARDEK 1 and 2, but not 3, despite that being played many, many more times, because it only covers Newgrounds and I never released it there. (I think there were technical reasons like exceeding the size limitations, and I actually contacted Tom Fulp directly who lifted the barrier for me and seemed eager for me to add it to the site... but then I never did? I don't remember why! I wonder if it might have made a big difference if I had put it on there.)

Someone suggested I add my own comment to that site, but I didn't know how. Interestingly though, the guy who made the site sent me a... DM or whatever they're called on Twitter, saying he'd seen this blog and asking if I did want to add something there. I replied, but haven't heard back yet. I'll definitely write something if I can.

Anyway. As interesting as it is to look back on the good old Flash days, I need to look to the challenges of the future, so that's what I'm talking about when I fret about becoming a part of the indie games scene in some way, or following indie devs.

Twitter Suggestions

Somehow, Twitter knows that I'm an indie dev, and since I still don't follow anyone on there, it recommends tweets to me from tags like hashtag-indiedev or -indiegames or whatever (I should start using these myself).

∞ This tweet from a games journalist ∞ was one of these. She basically asked indie devs to give a brief 'elevator pitch' of their game, which she could retweet. I added mine! I might as well start somewhere, right? I'll try to reply to a few of these as I see them.

Tweets like this - I say as if they're a thing, which they might be since I saw another like this maybe a week ago - are also a good place to see other games being made collected in one place, which is exactly what I was hoping to compile myself.

It's hard to know the objective accuracy of this assessment, but from a quick look at the others who replied to that tweet, the competition (grr), mine feels... middling, maybe? Better than some, not as impressive as others. They're all quite different though and would surely appeal differently to different people.

I'll need to look into each of them more deeply when I have the time and energy.

The Need For A Publisher

In ∞ this tweet ∞, or rather thread of tweets, a guy asks a series of questions indie devs should be asking themselves about the marketing side of things, like:



All this is stuff I need to learn, and which I'm hoping to learn by doing research (which posts like this one help with). It's scary looking at things like this and seeing how ignorant I am, and the size of the mountain I'd need to climb, but I suppose the whole point of this thread is (I think?) to stress the importance of getting a publisher who can do all of these things for you.

I've read conflicting things about publishers, though admittedly I've not read much at all. One thing said that they don't actually do much good, and that you could just do whatever they do by yourself. You'd surely need time and skill to achieve decent results alone though.

Perhaps finding a publisher is something I'll need to consider, though I'm concerned about losing rights or doing a long-running series and being stuck with one or something. I'll need to read up about how that works (I remember talking/reading about this back when I was trying to publish Sindrel Song).

I checked that guy's profile, which included a link to ∞ this game he'd worked on, 'ScourgeBringer', on Steam ∞. It's in Early Access, and apparently has 981 reviews (Very Positive), which seems very impressive! I wonder how much money that amounts to, and it's not even completed its life cycle yet. It has two developers and two publishers though; I don't know how that works. And yet I think it looks like any other indie game I see. Maybe that familiarity factor is why it's done so well, though, and/or why it was able to get publishers in the first place since familiar is safe. Hmm.

Crowdfunding

Someone linked me to ∞ this Kickstarter for a new JRPG called Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes (such a JRPG title...), which is being made by some actually Japanese developers who've worked on classic JRPGs in the past ∞.

Currently it's got 20 days to go and has raised £2,139,764 from 28,437 backers.

So that's a lot!

It's not something I'd be personally interested in. It looks like a generic JRPG, which I suppose is the point, but I've never personally cared about that samey anime vibe so many JRPGs have, where all the characters look/dress like they could have been designed by the same person (or committee). What I can see of the graphics reminds me of Octopath Traveler, without the pixels.

Obviously there's an audience for this kind of thing, though I wonder how much of its funding success is because it's made by an actually-Japanese team (likely with specialised marketers, connections, and reputations), and it's in the familiar anime style with all the tropes people are used to.

Still, it'd be valuable to see what they focus on in their pitch when I have the time and mental energy to read it, and it does make me wonder how much I could raise were I to try going down that path.

Though the plan for Divine Dreams was to go down the crowdfunding route, and I talked about that a few times as the months went on, for whatever reason I felt that Atonal Dreams wasn't worth it, maybe? Or something? But now that I look at this, and have the thought of publishers fresh in my mind, I'm reminded that the reason I wanted to do crowdfunding was so then I didn't need to seek a publisher.

So hmm. I wonder. I mean, surely I'd need to get the word out anyway during the campaign? I'll need to think about it.



I actually meant to write more here - like some thoughts about specific games, and comments about a look through relevant subreddits - but tiredness and distractions have got in the way all day. It's probably already too long anyway!

I did have an idea though. I do want to look at some other indie games closely, see who their developers are, their budgets, how much attention they've been able to rally, etc; I was going to start with the ones who pitched their game on that tweet, maybe make a list here or something.

But instead of overloading an already-long post with that, maybe I could look at a new game every day? I don't mean play it; I don't have the time for that. But just a quick skim over how it's presented and who's making it, if I can find that out. I'd find that interesting.

I even got carried away with the idea, thinking I should add a new section to this site just to collect entries for these games, or even to make a NEW site just for that, so then I could help the indie games community, and, and-!

It'd be something I could do in a few hours, not a huge hassle, but I imagine there are already sites like that, and it probably wouldn't be worth bothering with? I don't know.

I'd still like to make some kind of list of indie games though. Maybe I'll add to it in private and post them all at the end of the week in one of these posts? Or short new posts every day?? I don't know!



Anyway, I do feel I'm making some progress towards learning about this stuff every week even if the steps I'm taking are small and take a long time. So that's something.

(Also, the notification emails weren't sent out for ∞ yesterday's dev post ∞, and I do wonder if it made a difference since that's got even fewer views than usual. I'm adding this here because the notifications should have sent out for this post.)