Now that you have a polished game and quality screenshots to prove it, your game speaks for itself. That doesn’t mean that you can’t talk about how great it is, though! Promoting your own game is one of the joys of being an independent developer.
Promotions don’t have to be cheesy. You are proud of your game, and you should tell the world about it.
A Website for Your Game
Publishing on Core automatically creates a informational page for your game, that displays screenshots and allows players to launch it. You can still create your own homepage, to give yourself more space to put promotional material, create multiple pages, and customize your own theme.
This will also form a central location for your game that you can link back to in the many different social media sites you will use.
How you approach making your site depends on how much you already know or want to learn about web development. For a fast an easy option that doesn’t require study, try Wix.
The key to an effective social media strategy is to know your audience. Different sources will require different content, and keeping this in mind will keep your posts relevant and engaging to the people that find them.
Mailing List
Collecting a list of e-mails of players who are interested in getting more information about your game will give you a highly customized and enthusiastic support base.
Frequency
Contacting your mailing list should take the form of writing a newsletter. Keeping up with your readers regularly is important, but you should focus on not spamming readers with too many e-mails, between 1 and 4 per month is a good number to start with.
Good Content
Each time you reach out in a newsletter, you should make sure that you have new updates to tell your readers about, that you have multiple subjects to tell them about, and that there is something in the newsletter to catch attention that you can mention in the subject line.
There are many tools to use to generate and maintain mailing lists. Mail Chimp is a popular one.
Twitter is the perfect place to publish all those one-off thoughts and tiny updates that aren’t enough for a mailing list yet.
Starting a Conversation
Twitter is a platform designed to start back-and-forth conversations, and you should keep this in mind as you use it. Posting thoughts about game design that you are consider as you build your game will create a discussion with game creators and enthusiasts.
Devlogs
Another way to post on Twitter is to post regular updates about your progress in building your game. This creates a behind-the-scenes look into the process, and will allow people to become invested in your work as they watch it grow over time. Posting one screen shot per week on #screenshotsaturday is a great way to develop this habit.
Hashtags
Besides #screenshotsaturday, you use #indiedev and #gamedev in your post to broadcast to the community of game developers. Finding hashtags relevant to your specific game genre will be even more useful in building a following with similar interests.
And, of course, all Core projects should use #CreatedWithCore to get noticed by fellow Core Creators!
Reddit
Reddit is another place to post about your game and draw attention. Each subreddit has specific rules about the types of promotion that are permitted, and general straight-forward advertisement will not be well received. A good approach is to find subreddits related to sharing progress in game development, like r/gamedevscreens, and to frame your posts around your personal experience or feedback and discussion of your design decisions.
Press Kit
A press kit is a way to put all the important information you would want to give someone who is covering or promoting your games. You can treat it as a resume for your game, and make a page specifically dedicated to information for the press on your game’s website. This is your opportunity to explain the vision you have for your games and suggest the language you would want people to use when talking and writing about them.
Essential Information
- History
- A List of Your Game Titles
- Description of Each
- Genre
- Tag Line
- Downloadable Screenshots
- Downloadable Logo
- Videos
- Links to Social Channels
- Credits to Everyone Involved
Reaching Out
When you are ready to start asking game journalists and streamers to check out your game, have patience, and look for people who are covering games similar to yours, since you are most likely catch their interest.
Go Forth and Promote
Now that you have some channels to consider, your success will depend on consistency in putting out content. You will build a community as you build your game, and support its success, as well as the success of all the future games you make!
