How to market your video game and find your target audience

How to market your video game and target your audience requires a lot of work and thought — whether you are a publisher signing a game, a developer approaching a publisher, or a small studio going it alone.

The following combines advice by former Nintendo of America’s head of digital content and development Dan Adelman, now at Leadman Games, as well as Versus Evil general manager Steve Escalante, Raw Fury founder Jonas Antonsson, Headup Games CEO Dieter Schoeller, and Vernon Vrolijk, head campaign manager at Good Shepherd (formerly known as Gambitious), who were speaking at the inaugural Devcom conference in 2017.

Don’t be afraid to market your game and find your target audience

“Most people view marketing as a dirty word, and I’m no lifelong marketer either,” Dan Adelman says, as quoted by Matt Handrahan. “If you look at marketing as selling your product to people who otherwise don’t need it or don’t want it, that, I think, seems a little distasteful to the indie community, and rightly so.

“But there are people out there who, if they just knew about your game, would actually really like it. You’re doing them a service by letting them know about it. It just takes time to get the word out to the right people.”

And based on Adelman’s experiences since he started looking for projects post-Nintendo, time is an undervalued commodity among indie developers.

“Some had already shipped and aren’t doing well. I can’t help that person any more,” he says. To make a material difference to the commercial success of any given product he would ideally want a minimum of six to nine months ahead of the launch.

That’s a solid rule of thumb that any indie contemplating how to find and build an audience should adhere to, and the sort of sustained, public-facing approach that developers like Mike Bithell (Thomas Was Alone) and Tom Francis (Gunpoint) have employed to their advantage.

“It’s not easy, though,” Adelman says, grinning. “Just ask Phil Fish. There’s ways to do it wrong.”

Vernon Vrolijk from Good Shepherd, as quoted by James Batchelor, continues: “The market is the most crowded it’s ever been, so the opportunities are there but the reality is that things are tougher than they’ve ever been. You have to have a clear vision of what you want to do with a game, you can’t make that up as you go along. That’s a recipe for failure, for both the developer and the publisher.”

Identify your game’s ‘hook’ as part of your marketing

“My marketing director always asks me, ‘Well, what’s the hook?’,” says Steve Escalante from Versus Evil. “You have to think about how your game is unique. Because the press is going to pick up on that, the community is going to pick up on that. They’re going to compare you directly to [other] games and say: ‘yeah, it’s just this’. If it’s not: ‘This plus…’ or if it doesn’t have new things added to it, from a marketing point of view it makes it really hard [for us]. It can’t just be a reskin. That’s certainly something to consider at the beginning of your project.”

Vrolijk adds: “We’re gamers. If we get excited playing your game, I know I can get people excited. If I play the game and can’t think of anything to say about it, that’s a bad sign. It’s hard to build from that.

“Is the core gamer in me excited [about your game]? Do I want to invest two years of my life to work on this? If I do, there’s magic — but we have to feel that magic together. You can’t fake it. If you fake it everyone will notice, in everything you do. Influencers, the players, the press. The magic needs to be organic, you can’t force it. You can, but you’re not going to help anyone, especially the dev because you’re not going to bring them the success they deserve.”

“We’re gamers. If we get excited playing your game, I know I can get people excited”

Vernon Vrolijk, Good Shepherd

Dan Adelman continues: “The cost of development is definitely lower than ever before, but the number of really talented designers isn’t going to increase significantly in such a short window of time. My daughter went to a summer camp where they taught the basics of Unity for week and by the end of the week she had an endless runner game that was probably comparable to a lot of stuff on the App Store.

“She couldn’t compete with someone who’s really talented at design. It’s a craft, and not everyone who thinks they can be a great game designer will become one. A lot of indie developers who became ‘overnight successes’ were working at it for ten years.”

Adelman offers Super Meat Boy as an example: a conventional game in certain respects, but one from a team with the experience to refine and polish to an exacting standard. More importantly, Team Meat took that classic template and made it something distinctive and personal.

“It sounds cheesy, but when you’re competing with the rest of the world you need to find what it is that you have that nobody else does. That’s your life experiences. Put all of that in the game. And it’s hard to say, but not everyone is that interesting. Some people have a really interesting perspective on the world, and other people are like a lot of other people. Their unique take on the world might look a little generic.”

Choose your channels carefully

Vrolijk explains that you also have to think about ways to market your game that make sense for what it is, that show off its uniqueness.

“Each game is unique is in their own way and require their own approach,” he says. “Some games look awesome in a GIF, so with that game you can do some Twitter marketing because within two seconds, the game gets everyone’s attention. Other games don’t. If you have a simulation game, it’s hard to make putting something in a barrel look cool with a GIF — it just doesn’t work that way. You need to find out where the audience for your game is, where you should invest the money and that’s hard.” …