So I had a request from Nyapurgisnacht to expand the online presence section of an article I wrote up a while back. Note that there may be some overlap between the two articles. Also note that there may appear to be gaping holes - check the other article and I’ll have (hopefully) covered it.
“A rough summary of traditional practice of games companies was to release batches of press kits followed by promotional material and marketing as the release date approached. Marketing your game without a million dollar budget isn’t going to be as easy, but what you can do as a much healthier practice is to start a meaningful dialogue that lasts the duration of the development process. We have access thanks to the internet of huge networks and a plethora of methods of distributing media.
The thing to remember is engaging with the community is not only going to improve the profile of your team, but also give you a community fan base for future projects.”
I’m going to hit as many areas as I can, if there’s any you think I’ve missed, check the other article or drop me a message!
TIGSource
For building a dialogue with fans over the course of development, I would suggest TIGSource. I use this for documenting all of my games. It may not have the prettiest interface, but it has one of the largest community bases of developers. The likes of Phil Fish (Fez), Lucas Pope (Papers, Please) and PowerHoof (Crawl) all have their full development logs available for the world to read. They engaged with the community from the start with their projects and as a result the community embraced them and gave them a foundation of fans who spread the word about their projects.
So when you post onto the site, you want to be releasing a wide variety of work – artsy stuff like concept art and designs for characters along with design decisions, technical breakdowns of things like fancy shaders and unusual/special effects you managed to achieve (because you never know, people might not how to do it) as they’ll be appreciative of the shared knowledge.
Nothing to write about? Post up visual content! Screenshots of gameplay, Gifs! Gifs are amazing. Doesn’t require the production value of a video, but provides a slice of gameplay that provides more interest than a screenshot. Of course there’s there’s the aspect as well of doing trailers, video logs and where you can get them – interviews.
Content like this will get audiences excited in turn will motivate the team to work harder!
To add, at the end of the project, you’ll have a huge collection of all the awesome work you’ve done which you can reflect on together. Each of the groups here have an average team number of 8 people, so it should be more than possible to keep the blog updated at the least once a day. If you can manage that, you’ll end up on the front page of the site, as standard forums work – when you post your game goes to the top of the page and as others post it gets buried. If you can keep yourself on that top page by posting on a regular basis, your name will keep cropping up and the numbers will rise, its as simple as that.
Another invaluable website to look at is Twitter. It’s a very low maintenance method of marketing, in which you only need to write a small amount of information in order to get high quantities of exposure. The amount you have to write means you only need to spend 5 minutes on an article compared to 50. To add to this, you can anchor the post to certain tags. One of the most commonly used in the games development community on Twitter is #GameDev. From these, a selection of Twitter Bots forward the message to thousands of other developers and Twitter users subscribed to their feeds.
If you’re struggling to get to grips with something like TIGSource, this is a good alternative which gets you into the routine of posting work up often. From this, you can expand onto other sites and use Twitter to promote these extra branches.
You’ll find out about places to distribute your game, events to showcase your game at (all of the events I’ve been along to were discovered through Twitter) and people who are not only enthused by your work but will help you.
The other less narcissistic area of Twitter is where I deem most useful – engaging in conversation with other developers, journalists and representatives in industry, which is only going to increase your experience and open up doors. Here’s an article that I wrote about promoting other developers through Twitter using #DailyDevPromo.
A lot of developers who try to use Reddit get chased out by anti-marketing mobs so to speak when they go in with a business head on e.g. PLEASE CHECK OUT MY GAME! You first to break the ice need and contribute to the community before you get something back. For me, that’s involved posting articles about games development which reference the games I make in the context of the conversation (so not a direct sell). There are hundreds of thousands of readers on the gamedev subreddit, so it’s a great method of spreading your game around the web. There’s also the option of finding a subreddit in the niche of game you’re producing e.g. r/JRPG. The main area I’ve been posting thus far has been r/gamedev.
Another way of getting people interested in your project on Reddit is building a story around the development of your game. The developers of Red Awakening advertised their game to the online community through telling their development story, divided up by screenshots of gameplay. It got picked up by a member of Reddit and they made it onto the top 5 most read articles on the site recently.
http://imgur.com/gallery/4afRy
I find that Reddit usually provides a stronger dialogue than Gamasutra, with some of the articles I’ve posted on there having equal word count in the form of comments.
Gamasutra
Gamasutra provides what I deem to be a nicer interface and presentation of articles (since Reddit is primarily text based). Gamasutra are a lot more lenient with self promotion and has a more presentable layout (images/videos). They also have a feature system in place that essentially means your name/articles could be forwarded to millions of developers. I recieved an email last week as part of the site’s daily email and noticed that the subject was the title of a previous article I’d written.
It’s a win win situation because you get to help other developers whilst building interest for your own work. Occasionally, articles that you write can also result in industry talks or educational ones.
The only issues I’ve found with using the site is there aren’t any stats for how well your articles do and it takes a couple of days for editor approval.
I also post up my articles on TIGSource and Gamejolt’s recent addition, Fireside. This spreads my reach and adds a personal touch to the work I post up on the sites. Due to the time it takes to get editorial clearance through Gamasutra, I release the articles first on Fireside.
Youtube
At the current time, there is a paradigm shift in traditional media for the world of games. Whilst websites such as Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku bring in swathes of viewers, those who have the strongest influence and the highest frequency of traffic are Youtube channels of Let’s Players. They open the floodgates to millions of potential eyes on your product.
Use the tools above to contact Let’s Players and get your games online. Whilst getting your game on the biggest channels is important, coverage by the small channels is also a useful as they’re more likely and having a high frequency of them across the web is great for filling the first few Youtube results with your game. It also serves as a method of getting recorded footage of people playing your game on testing purposes – you can dissect the footage and identify bugs based on their reactions (as Let’s Players are very vocal with their thoughts as that’s what usually provides the interest in the channel).
To add, watching people enjoy playing your game is a tremendous motivation – listening to their reactions to what you’ve created is great for lifting sprits.
Vines
Whilst I’ve had limited experience with this (since my phone is not good), I’ve heard good things about Vines. As a developer it provides an opportunity to expose the public to a teaser of gameplay with audio and quality video - call it a high budget GIF. One thing I’ve been warned of is that it’s near impossible to play your own game whilst co-ordinating the functionality of the Vine App (Holding down the play button, keeping the camera steady and controlling your game all at the same time in a 6 second window). Record your gameplay footage first then record your vine from the footage. These can be combined with Twitter for a very large response, especially if you get a very juicy bit of gameplay.
Hope you find this useful! If there’s any other areas you’re interested in knowing more about, let me know!
#twitter #reddit #gamasutra #youtube #vine #tigsource #online
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