Who you should tell about your indie game

In my last post I rather sarcastically revealed the biggest “secret” to marketing your indie game. Well, in this post I detail exactly who you be telling, not including your mother.

Real life friends and family

You need to let people you know in real life know about it. Facebook, text messages, emails, real life friends are your first port of call. They’re your friends and family. They HAVE to play.

Online friends

If you are like me you’ll spend a large amount of time online, on various sites, blogs forums. And if you spend enough time on there you get to know people quite well. These people are your next stop. Comment on blogs, start new topics in the forums – try to get your game in front of as many people as possible. But whatever you do don’t spam. You don’t want your game associated with annoying spam messages begging people to play. Make sure you post on relevant site and in appropriate forums. Don’t try to tell people about your zombie vampire cross over game on a forum about mortgage lending, it won’t go down well, trust me.

People talking about games – Social media

By now you’ve probably already tweeted and shared the game on Facebook. But there’s a lot more you can do in the world of social media. Social news sites like reddit and digg have special sections dedicated to gaming news. But don’t just post a link and hope people will read it, you need to make it enticing for readers. Spend some time on the sites to understand what kind of content does well. They are great places, but like any community, they don’t take kindly to people coming in, spamming advertising at them and leaving. But they will try to help a guy out if you ask in the right way. After the social news sites, there are countless other sites such as delicious, a bookmarking site, and stumbleupon, a site discovery platform. Get your site on as many of these as possible, but always remember to do so in the appropriate ways. Copy and pasting the same text onto each one may save time but a tailored approach to each site will have significantly better results.

People looking for games – Search Engine Optimisation

One of the additional benefits of submitting to social media sites such as reddit is the impact it can have on your SEO. Whilst people aren’t going to be looking for your game if they don’t know about it, they may find it whilst looking for something else. Submitting to social sites is just one step in ensuring that you have optimised your site for terms relating to your game.

Industry sites

Once you’ve told all the people know about the game, improved your site so it features in search engines and submitted to social media sites, it’s time to up the game and try to get some coverage on industry sites. There are countless game review sites online, big and small. And almost all of them are open to submissions. But don’t just email them a link to you game and hope they play it. Most sites have submission guidelines. And even if they don’t you should still do your best to make your game stand out. Explain why it’s different from other games, and why they should play it.

This isn’t something you can do in an afternoon; it’s a never ending process of trying to get people to play your game. But developing your game didn’t take a few hours, so why would you expect marketing it to?

So those 5 groups of people you should tell about your game, who else? Let us know in the comments.