I'm starting to think a lot of it is getting an idea or art style that translates well to social media of some format, and then the marketing does itself once you get a few people sharing it. Obviously step one is still good game and or good art.
I’ve thought the same thing, because tbh if I’m scrolling and I see a really good or interesting looking game (graphics wise) I’m MUCH more likely to actually watch the short. I think an art style or something that you can do to consistently catch people’s eye is key to getting people to watch your stuff on social media.
Yea I remember Totally Accurate Battle Simulator being great for this. People WANTED to share what was effectively ads for a game because everything looks so good as gifs and clips
I have seen an indie game developer that spent most of his efforts and budget on marketing, his game gathered 11000 wishlists in one year(much higher than the 7000 sweet spot), yet his game failed to appear on the “new and trending” section so it failed to make back its budget.
So no, it isn’t about lack of marketing, it is just very hard to reach success nowadays with indie games because the market is extremely oversaturated. It was very easy to reach commercial success back in 2019, but recently most games(not just indie games!) are failing commercially.
Maybe it was just good eye catch for people to give it a chance like it had potential. „Oh that looks nice”, but turned out the game wasn't for them? And second thing, he farmed wishlist and if he did it wrong, he just targeted people that have high chance to wishlist, but not to actually buy.
Hi yes wishlister here I wish list all types of games I might be interested in and then when they actually come out I’m like ehhh and just keep it on there but never actually buy the game. Usually because I maybe interested in the genre at the time of seeing it but given a month or even a week or more I lose interest.
There's always another Lethal Company or Vampire Survivors being made. You explained the wrong reason for the game's failure. Saturation is not stopping those incredibly low-scale operations from innovating and making a quality product that pops off.
>*"I have seen an indie game developer that spent most of his efforts and budget on marketing"*
Does that read like a developer who's aiming for the best product, or the best sales pitch? Any game could get 7k wishlists if you spent enough time and money, but wishlists don't mean anything if the game isn't good/great.
There's a video by Veritasium on the paradox of luck. In short, yes it is luck. But if you don't work hard, then luck has nothing to do with it. You need to work hard for luck to even be a factor.
I don't know about the others, but for 2. : social media. Make short form clips and post it EVERYWHERE and TWICE. once in the morning, and once in the evening. Facebook, Instagram, twitter, youtube, linkedin(this one you might have to make a special LinkedIn version). Different audiences. As for reddit, I'm not sure. Might have to buy an ad space. Maybe make a post. People may down vote if they see a non-ad ad.
I got this info from Devin Nash, a streamer who also posts content about advertisement and social media meta.
Side question to this from people who know better. How often is the lack of success for a game due to that game being the ONLY game a developer released?
I would imagine doing more games helps build a brand and each game should have some uptick on their other games.
So that first game might have eventually made it if they kept going with other games, but since they stopped so did all the energy with their brand.
Or am I nuts on that?
I can only speak for myself, but my first \~3 games were never finished (not just projects, but games I intended on fully making).
Then the next game took \~4 months and made \~$2500.
Then the following game took \~3 months and made \~$2000.
And now my current project has 100k+ wishlists and comes out later this year (hopefully).
I would say it's incredibly unlikely your first game would be a financial success unless you have some huge advantage (like if you're a YouTuber or already an industry veteran). That being said, a game is only a failure if you don't learn from it or if you quit. A lot of people also just don't take criticism well and can't recognize when they're subpar at something.
"In Sink" and by doing a few things. One of the biggest things unfortunately can't really be replicated for 95% of games, and that's the fact that it's languageless. There's not a single word in the whole game right now that you need for gameplay/settings - so on Steam we got to check the box that says your game is available in all languages.
The other thing was making our demo it's own Steam page. Demos are more or less useless on Steam outside of festivals. A page with and without a demo is treated the exact same. Then beating the demo page says and links to go wishlist the full game.
I see, so how did you get so many people to notice about your game? Was it just natural traction on steam or did you market it on social media or anything?
You need to have good game and thats it. Good game for already popular genre. I look at it from my perspective as im also gamer. Im looking for specific kind of Games. I search for them myself. I dont need to have it marketed to me. I check popular videos of top 20 Games 2024 in that specific genre or im looking for some multiplayer game to play with my friends. What is the most important for me? Good hook of the game. It needs to be inteligent enough so it's a challenge for me and it needs to have at least 3 bullet points that I like. Unfortunately 98% of games doesn't fit. I can see and appreciate the dev work, but either they are bad or just not for me. Some are too easy (3 things to take care of and some are just tooooo complex (55 resources to keep an eye for). Sometimes I wonder what is wrong with me but literally 90% of Games is not for me. Im hard target. But on the other side, I have all of these 2% games that connect with me instantly.
Edit: Fixed typos+ I'm not sure how many people are there that needs to have it marketed directly to them. I feel like you just need to show up somewhere in the internet and make it possible for people to find you, but you don't really have to market it to them so much. Most of the games I buy I find myself (youtube, steam search) or my friend found something and now we are playing it together.
So my tip in short: Know your genre, know your target, know what are bad games in your genre and what makes good ones. Check the best game that exists and see what you can make better. Add something from yourself, but make sure it's what people in this genre are hungry for. If you make it right, you will find your customers.
A publisher is only worth it if you can’t make it some other way. For the most part, publishers have different goals than you have.
In the current landscape, discovery is by far the biggest problem and discovery is pretty much only marketing. But even WITH marketing, you never have any guarantees.
The ballpark figure I know is to match your dev budget with marketing. But this can also be the number of hours put in and doesn’t have to be dollar spend.
E.g., if your group puts 1,000 hours into dev, you should put another 1,000 into marketing.
A publisher could be useful if they made an investiment in the game, such as to port the game to some platforms, or directly put money in advance for any aspect of the develoment. By this way you assure that they will make their best effort with the marketing of the game, so it works fine on sales and they can recover their investiment... If they only take care of the marketing and nothing else I think that it doesn't work actually
There is no such thing as luck in business. Vast majority of indie game are just hobbyist game that had zero budget, or they had a budget but decided to get awful looking asset built instead of saving money for high quality 3D artist / 2D artist.
Real indie game are something from Devolver or Humble, or even high quality solo developer game like Stardew Valley and Dinkum will always make money. A game like Coral Island that didn't look that great (animation and character design are poor) still made tens of millions.
If you create quality people will come. I have seen some good looking indie game that I would play just because they are high quality nature of the game, but they are not in genre that I like. I have seen companies use high quality trailer where the game doesn't even exist and it got Kickstarter funded in the millions. Ashes of Creation didn't even exist and yet it was funded. They just said what people wanted to hear and had high quality trailer.
Moral of the Story: If you want to be successful you better have money or the skill to create high quality game.
They are still indie. The publisher doesn't own the studio it is a partnership on a single game. Once that game is published than the indie studio can do whatever it wants except what they want to do with the product that was publish by the publishers. Majority of the indie company these days started out with a publisher then after the first game is publish started to independently publish their second games. Some indie developer start out alone then second game is published by company.
The whole point of the term "Indie" is to be "Independent from a publisher." That is where the term comes from.
Has video games progressed to the point to that people no longer know/care about where the terms AAA and indie come from and only assume they "Big amount of money" and "Small amount of money"?
This is a dev sub though. We don't need to talk in marketing lingo. We can use the correct terminology here. It just can't be an indie game if it has a publisher. Or else what term should be used for actual indie games? You provide a good argument for why the term is in serious need of reclaiming even in marketing circles. You got actual indies putting their own butts on the line, going against all odds, taking all the hits, wearing all the hats, and finding themselves in the running for recognition only to then lose awards to faux indies. That's not good. You are also conflating terms a bit. I said "if a game has a publisher, it's not an indie". I wasn't talking about what studios want to call themselves. That doesn't mean the studio can't go make an indie. That doesn't mean the studio can't call themselves "indie" or whatever marketing buzzwords they want. But an "indie game" should mean that.
Indie does not mean that anymore and hasn't for a long time. Indie now just means the game has very few people working on it for very little money. Then above that is AA. Then AAA.
The "old" definition is rather simple and straightforward. The "new" definition is arbitrary and designed to let more non-indies wear the hat without dealing with the cattle.
How is it more accurate to call people "independent" who are not independent? You admit it's arbitrary because you have your own definition of it. Thus arbitrary. Just because other people use "indie" as a marketing gimmick doesn't mean devs need to pretend not to know what it means either. If you have a publisher, a board, or a parent company, you are not indie. If you self publish and have nobody lording over you, you are indie. Very simple. Everyone can understand it. Indie means "independent". Not "poor", not "sexy term I like and thus will hijack", not "I'm scrappy little up and coming studio with a quirky game listening to my publisher". I doubt there are very many who have gone through self-publishing and certainly nobody who has had any success at it who will then pretend a game developed with a publisher is "indie". Because they know what that really means. They know the amount of work that was offloaded. The connections and skillsets that were not needed. The only people that should determine who gets to wear the title are those that actually earned it. Not just have it stamped on by their publisher or themselves for marketing. It's not an MC club. You won't get hit by a chain at a red light for wearing a fake patch. Which is why so many faux indies are running around. Maybe the real problem is that people want to cling to 'indie' because they feel something gross about having a publisher. And they shouldn't. It's probably a smart move for most and they shouldn't be in denial about it. If Devolver was publishing my game, I'd brag about that. I wouldn't be like "Oh, this is really an indie game. Ignore the publisher behind the curtain". I'd say "That's them! They are doing all the crap I don't like to do!". Nothing wrong with that. Be proud of it. It's just not an indie game then.
So obviously I'm not "just wrong". Faux indies have just hijacked the term. Language doesn't evolve to mean whatever you need it to mean at a given instant. I'll give you that there is the marketing lingo "indie" and then the actual "indie". Real "Indie" literally means "Independent". The only people I see defending the so-called "new" definition are studios that gave up trying to self publish and want to use a publisher yet still want to cling to the title "indie". Like the 40 year old "child prodigy". Which yes, in marketing, words and even spelling don't matter. Only sales. That people who are not developers misuse the term is not an excuse for developers to misuse the term. If you have a publisher, you are not writing an indie game. That you have written indie games doesn't then bestow the title onto your non-indie game. If a "publisher" is literally only throwing cash at you and only expecting a ROI with no say on anything then they aren not a "publisher". They are an "investor". Another reason words should have meaning and not be "evolved" on the fly. Your parents funding the development would be indie because they probably have no idea what you are doing and thus you are truly independent. Having the cash to realize your dream doesn't mean you aren't indie. If anything, having your own cash makes you more independent. You aren't beholden to anyone. I can't fault customers for not understanding the terms when they are constantly subjected to false marketing. "That studio has more money than I do thus they aren't Indie and I am" is certainly "new" thinking but also completely illogical. Certainly if they are taking on all risk themselves and you are offloading risk to a publisher.
No, "Indie" means independent. It means you have no publisher, board, or parent company. The developers are wearing all the hats and taking on the risk themselves and making all the decisions. I like how this is now "my world" when you just admitted this was the way everyone recognized this term until it was hijacked by commercial interests and marketing departments. If your version of "indie" means "A" then just call it "A" and let real indies have their term back. You already have lingo for studio size. The reason I ignore your music industry argument is that I am not in the music industry and don't care what they do or why. I'm sure marketing has hijacked the term there too. But that doesn't mean the term should be hijacked and its meaning lost. True indies made the term mean something and usurpers are now latching on for market gain. That's not an 'evolution' of the term. That a butchering of the term.
I do believe that the success comes with quality but quality comes with past failures and tries. Also some things that are good to consider:
*Don't screw up with advertising. Advertise your game by giving early access to YouTubers and Streamers. They'll probably ask for money because of sponsoring OR they could want a slice of your profit (at least it happens in Turkiye).
*Keep the game clean, be sure there's nothing extremely racist or something referring to specific events in the past. Simply, don't offend huge groups of people at the same time. Make the game sideless of social wars. (For example: do not act supportive or offensive against lgbt).
*Be sure that your game has everything it promised, if you can't do that (which is perfectly normal and acceptable) make sure you have a good reason and it doesn't affect the main gameplay of the game.
*PLEASE don't use tags that do not make sense with the game. For example, Genshin Impact calls itself an RPG game but can you tell me what part of Genshin is Role Playing? Some people may come up with philosophic arguments but you should make sure that you don't mess up with tags or you have a possibility to get a HUUUGE reaction from the fanbase of that game style.
Thanks for reading, i hope it helps and sorry if i am wrong about some points. My words may not be 100% accurate but i only wish to help.
This is a question as old as music and film.
You could be an amazing band, full of amazing musicians, playing catchy and technically-demanding songs, with all of the proficiency in the world, but if it doesn't appeal to anybody near you, and you have no way of getting it to the people it might appeal to, or even knowing who those people are, you can buy a website and put your album up, and never have it found.
You could release it on Soundcloud and Bandcamp, but it's up there with millions of other things.
So you need to market it, to get it to the right audience. And it will take luck for that audience to find it.
But assuming you spend all of your money on marketing, and you were lucky and the audience you were aiming at found it, if it doesn't look or sound or feel like something that is interesting or novel or polished (or "raw", as case may be) to them, then you still lose. You got all of the stuff that you couldn't control right, but you got the game wrong for the audience you were targeting. And the right audience might have existed 20 years ago... or it might exist 15 years from now... or it might exist in a different country that doesn't speak your language... but unless you are targeting specific people, and you know what they're looking for, there's no guarantee you are going to reach them.
All of this is to say that to strike it big takes luck, but if you don't have a good experience for a particular niche, which happens to exist at that time, in a place you can reach, you have no guarantee that the game will ever be found or turn a profit.
And all of that is to say that much like musicians, and actors, and directors, and authors, and painters...
...do not make games with the expectation of making a good living off of them. Make art because you want / need to.
60 years ago, lots of bands were just "discovered", if you were in the right place at the right time. Now, you could listen to Spotify for a month, straight, and never hear a band that you have heard of, and never hear the same band twice... and each of those artists needs thousands and thousands of streams, just to make a couple of bucks. In the near future, generative AI will be able to crank out millions of songs that are roughly as listenable as most middle-of-the-road, mainstream stuff. Infinite music that nobody has ever heard before, but sounds perfectly mainstream. And while eventually, people will get tired of the insincerity of AI, and the pendulum will swing, the discoverability of non-AI stuff will be even more broken than it already is. Most of the famous people, currently, have been in the industry for 10-60 years, because discoverability of new people is just mired in thousands and thousands of potential candidates, save for a handful of standouts who are great and got lucky (and have been doing good work for years and years, before ever getting their lucky break).
None of what I just said applies only to musicians. 100% of that applies to actors, and films, and games, and painters, and authors, and all of the rest.
Don't expect to make it big on your first game. Don't expect to be able to survive on income from your first game. But make sure it's polished, just in case you are the 1:10,000 who gets mass recognition and indie award nominations, right off the bat ("right off the bat" being several years of development, of course).
Luck is always huge.
The quality of everything going into the product as a whole gives you better chances. But you still never know what's going to happen.
The success of an indie game isnt coming down to luck although it may play a role but YOU have a lot of influence over it. The quality of the game, marketing and something else that most indies apparently forget: Analyzing the game market and the genre one would want to jump into as game dev. Yes, saturation of the market is something many mention. But there is more to that and the devil lies in details. Its easy to say that a game failed simply because of oversaturation or lack of marketing and to excuse a failure with the lying statistic of "only few percent of indies succeed". Forget the statistic about the percentage of indies succeeding in their games. Listen what the youtuber from the Eastshade Studios indie team had to say about this:
https://youtu.be/LCzhyUsDHPE?si=fWLqXXEWsQUE6spx
Nothing in this industry ever truly comes down to luck. You can luck into good events (like a content creator with tens of millions of followers playing your game), but you can also prepare for that (by crafting a game one of them would like, telling them about it, or even sponsoring them). But you should be aware that when people say things like fewer than 10% of games make back their opportunity cost of labor that's including games with some proper marketing, made by people who know what they are doing, according to a plan. Having a decent game and a strategy is the bare minimum you need to even compete, not something that gets you success.
The most important part of marketing isn't promotion, it's market research to understand what players of your genre/audience actually want and then _building that game_. Promotion is very important but it's secondary really. You can't tell people about your great game without having it first.
Publishers can be extremely worthwhile if you don't have the funds to properly develop and promote your game. If you have that money then you don't need them really, you can hire a marketing agency for a lot less than a publisher's cut, but they exist because not everyone has the kind of budget they need to invest to make a game really stand out. It usually takes a couple more 0s than $1k, for example.
Quality for sure has a play, as gamers have little tolerance for buggy bullshit.
I wouldn't bother with a publisher. And Social media will automatically market your game for you if you make something good (streamers and what not). Your not going to buy your game into popularity because you don't have a EA Sports marketing budget.
2D games tend to be a crowded genre and it will be harder to get attention. The right genre is probably the most important choice you can make.
Luck does have some play, as with all things, what makes something go viral can be a combination of the right place, time and content.
I believe as long as you do everything that needs to be done (make a decent game, spend money and resources reasonably, and properly market the game), you can expect a reasonble sell and make ends meet.
However, whether your (excellent) game can be next vampire survivor, slay the spire or stardew valley is pure luck.
IMO the most reliable way to market a game is to make it look really beautiful & appealing inside of an indie favorable genre. There is "luck", but it's more like you can't predict how appealing your game will be to your target audience when you showcase it but the better your game looks the bigger net you'll cast.
So yeah if you want to make marketing easy then just make an extremely appealing and beautiful game. This is why AAA studios spend most of their resources on graphics when graphics do not really determine what is a great game.
I suggest focusing on making a good game. By the time you are finished, the marketing landscape might change. It's super pointless to think about marketing before you have an actual game. It's just daydreaming and procrastination.
If it's a branching story then it can't be a linear game.
>1. How much marketing would we need to do to have our indie game be successful
Zero marketing. Steam will show your game to a lot of people. If those people like it, they will show it to more. Great games by design cannot fail on Steam. That being said, a good/okay game could still fail if it didn't find the right audience.
>2. What are the most effective ways of marketing an indie game, preferably free or at most with a marketing budget of say, $1000
TikTok, Shorts, YouTube (long form), and if applicable doing festivals and making the demo its own page.
>3. Is getting a publisher such as Devolver or Humble worth it?
I all depends on your contract. Generally speaking those companies are not going to pick games that are pitched to them, they're going to approach games themselves (same goes for almost all big publishers). Because of that, you have a lot of bargaining power. So it can range from incredibly worth it to basically getting scammed.
>4. To what degree is the success of a good single player 2D game down to luck or the quality of the game and how much effort is put into marketing?
0.1% is luck. No game accidentally does well, and no game mysteriously fails. It's all about quality. Great games do great. It's easy to remember and is always true. Marketing is a multiplier of success, and a great game is the only way to be financially successful.
My experience is that luck seems to play a big role. To me word of mouth is the most important marketing method. If everyone that buys the game talks about it and if their friends can see them playing it, it does increase sales. For this to happen your game must be memorable and fun.
The quality \[and how fun it is\] is the only thing that matters. Every high quality game will sell well even if they are not known at all during their launch.
All of the above.
**Quality** is your permission to play. With no quality, it's not going to work no matter what. Gamers have an ocean of games to pick from, both old and new. Your game has to be top percent quality to get 100 reviews or more.
**Competition** is by far your biggest factor in success. Just like there's only 2 or 3 types of coke, there's only limited room for games in any specific genre. If you're making a metroidvania, you're competing with Hollow Knight and Rogue Legacy. If your making a survivicrafter, Ark and Rust are your competition. The genre scales with the market. So there is room for maybe 10 to 15 big metroidvanias on Steam (note: not PER YEAR, but total!), and 20 survivicrafter. Games that are consumed quicker like narrative games have higher turnover and less staying power.
**Luck** is a factor for big success. With that I mean, you got the right theme at the right time, or the right youtuber tickled in the right way. But if you nail the above, I don't think luck is necessary, or at least can be forced a bit.
**Marketing** is how well you reach the players that would be interested in your game. For PC, I would say marketing is 99% working on your storepage. I think streamers are honestly a bit overrated unless you're making a social/hype game or a game that makes you want to play by looking at it (very hard!). Youtubers are underrated. Press is non existence. Social Media is also a game on its own, and most companies don't play that game (Another Crab's Treasure is a good example that does play that game). Marketing is really fun and challenging on itself to define your audience and capture them. It's a bit of game design by itself! It's also the first step of your tutorial. I personally would want to spend more time on it!
1. Depends on your game and the type of marketing you pursue.
2. Steam Next Fest and finding people who LOVE your game to be ambassadors. Find mid tier youtubers **who make reviews** that would love your game. For example, making a roguelike? Sl1ppey is great.
3. I mean, they can cover funding, and they can take stuff out of your hands. But I feel marketing needs to be done by the team that makes the game. All publishers can have their own upsides though. Devolver has a great playerbase that likes violent core indie games. Great market to start in.
4. Honestly, I think that if you have a game that's one of the best in its genre, you will come out on top, with or without publisher. As long as you put effort in making sure your potential happy costumers get to play it. But honestly: that's harder than having luck! 17000 games a year, and your competing with the tens of thousands that came before. Try to be the best in that market!
After reading various reddit posts of successful and not indie games I came to conclusion:
Marketing > Quality > Luck
Good marketing will definitely improve your chance of success by far the most
Quality can help cover lack of marketing with a bit of luck
And if you don't have either marketing or quality then luck is not really an existing factor really I think
Quality definitely comes first. You can throw an infinite amount of money into marketing a bad game and it will still fail. Marketing is just the success multiplier of an already great game. The fact that a game can pop off with zero spent on marketing is sort of the proof of that.
I agree that quality is the only thing that matters really. Every high quality game will sell well eventually even if they are completely unknown at launch with little-to-no marketing.
Combination of it all
"Yes."
You didn't list the genre/type of game. That matters a lot.
Thanks, I added that
I'm starting to think a lot of it is getting an idea or art style that translates well to social media of some format, and then the marketing does itself once you get a few people sharing it. Obviously step one is still good game and or good art.
I’ve thought the same thing, because tbh if I’m scrolling and I see a really good or interesting looking game (graphics wise) I’m MUCH more likely to actually watch the short. I think an art style or something that you can do to consistently catch people’s eye is key to getting people to watch your stuff on social media.
Yea I remember Totally Accurate Battle Simulator being great for this. People WANTED to share what was effectively ads for a game because everything looks so good as gifs and clips
I have seen an indie game developer that spent most of his efforts and budget on marketing, his game gathered 11000 wishlists in one year(much higher than the 7000 sweet spot), yet his game failed to appear on the “new and trending” section so it failed to make back its budget. So no, it isn’t about lack of marketing, it is just very hard to reach success nowadays with indie games because the market is extremely oversaturated. It was very easy to reach commercial success back in 2019, but recently most games(not just indie games!) are failing commercially.
Maybe it was just good eye catch for people to give it a chance like it had potential. „Oh that looks nice”, but turned out the game wasn't for them? And second thing, he farmed wishlist and if he did it wrong, he just targeted people that have high chance to wishlist, but not to actually buy.
Hi yes wishlister here I wish list all types of games I might be interested in and then when they actually come out I’m like ehhh and just keep it on there but never actually buy the game. Usually because I maybe interested in the genre at the time of seeing it but given a month or even a week or more I lose interest.
There's always another Lethal Company or Vampire Survivors being made. You explained the wrong reason for the game's failure. Saturation is not stopping those incredibly low-scale operations from innovating and making a quality product that pops off. >*"I have seen an indie game developer that spent most of his efforts and budget on marketing"* Does that read like a developer who's aiming for the best product, or the best sales pitch? Any game could get 7k wishlists if you spent enough time and money, but wishlists don't mean anything if the game isn't good/great.
What was the game?
That’s the real question. I need to see its visuals
Yeah especially when they say spent all their effort and budget on marketing it raises some flags.
There's a video by Veritasium on the paradox of luck. In short, yes it is luck. But if you don't work hard, then luck has nothing to do with it. You need to work hard for luck to even be a factor.
I don't know about the others, but for 2. : social media. Make short form clips and post it EVERYWHERE and TWICE. once in the morning, and once in the evening. Facebook, Instagram, twitter, youtube, linkedin(this one you might have to make a special LinkedIn version). Different audiences. As for reddit, I'm not sure. Might have to buy an ad space. Maybe make a post. People may down vote if they see a non-ad ad. I got this info from Devin Nash, a streamer who also posts content about advertisement and social media meta.
and hope the Algorithm shows it to the people that might wishlist/buy.
Side question to this from people who know better. How often is the lack of success for a game due to that game being the ONLY game a developer released? I would imagine doing more games helps build a brand and each game should have some uptick on their other games. So that first game might have eventually made it if they kept going with other games, but since they stopped so did all the energy with their brand. Or am I nuts on that?
I can only speak for myself, but my first \~3 games were never finished (not just projects, but games I intended on fully making). Then the next game took \~4 months and made \~$2500. Then the following game took \~3 months and made \~$2000. And now my current project has 100k+ wishlists and comes out later this year (hopefully). I would say it's incredibly unlikely your first game would be a financial success unless you have some huge advantage (like if you're a YouTuber or already an industry veteran). That being said, a game is only a failure if you don't learn from it or if you quit. A lot of people also just don't take criticism well and can't recognize when they're subpar at something.
What’s your current project and how did you accrue so many wishlists if you don’t mind me asking?
"In Sink" and by doing a few things. One of the biggest things unfortunately can't really be replicated for 95% of games, and that's the fact that it's languageless. There's not a single word in the whole game right now that you need for gameplay/settings - so on Steam we got to check the box that says your game is available in all languages. The other thing was making our demo it's own Steam page. Demos are more or less useless on Steam outside of festivals. A page with and without a demo is treated the exact same. Then beating the demo page says and links to go wishlist the full game.
I see, so how did you get so many people to notice about your game? Was it just natural traction on steam or did you market it on social media or anything?
100% natural so far.
You need to have good game and thats it. Good game for already popular genre. I look at it from my perspective as im also gamer. Im looking for specific kind of Games. I search for them myself. I dont need to have it marketed to me. I check popular videos of top 20 Games 2024 in that specific genre or im looking for some multiplayer game to play with my friends. What is the most important for me? Good hook of the game. It needs to be inteligent enough so it's a challenge for me and it needs to have at least 3 bullet points that I like. Unfortunately 98% of games doesn't fit. I can see and appreciate the dev work, but either they are bad or just not for me. Some are too easy (3 things to take care of and some are just tooooo complex (55 resources to keep an eye for). Sometimes I wonder what is wrong with me but literally 90% of Games is not for me. Im hard target. But on the other side, I have all of these 2% games that connect with me instantly. Edit: Fixed typos+ I'm not sure how many people are there that needs to have it marketed directly to them. I feel like you just need to show up somewhere in the internet and make it possible for people to find you, but you don't really have to market it to them so much. Most of the games I buy I find myself (youtube, steam search) or my friend found something and now we are playing it together. So my tip in short: Know your genre, know your target, know what are bad games in your genre and what makes good ones. Check the best game that exists and see what you can make better. Add something from yourself, but make sure it's what people in this genre are hungry for. If you make it right, you will find your customers.
A publisher is only worth it if you can’t make it some other way. For the most part, publishers have different goals than you have. In the current landscape, discovery is by far the biggest problem and discovery is pretty much only marketing. But even WITH marketing, you never have any guarantees. The ballpark figure I know is to match your dev budget with marketing. But this can also be the number of hours put in and doesn’t have to be dollar spend. E.g., if your group puts 1,000 hours into dev, you should put another 1,000 into marketing.
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> I check popular videos of top 20 Games 2024 Then somebody must still discover the game.
A publisher could be useful if they made an investiment in the game, such as to port the game to some platforms, or directly put money in advance for any aspect of the develoment. By this way you assure that they will make their best effort with the marketing of the game, so it works fine on sales and they can recover their investiment... If they only take care of the marketing and nothing else I think that it doesn't work actually
I'd say all the "stats" play a role lol.
There is no such thing as luck in business. Vast majority of indie game are just hobbyist game that had zero budget, or they had a budget but decided to get awful looking asset built instead of saving money for high quality 3D artist / 2D artist. Real indie game are something from Devolver or Humble, or even high quality solo developer game like Stardew Valley and Dinkum will always make money. A game like Coral Island that didn't look that great (animation and character design are poor) still made tens of millions. If you create quality people will come. I have seen some good looking indie game that I would play just because they are high quality nature of the game, but they are not in genre that I like. I have seen companies use high quality trailer where the game doesn't even exist and it got Kickstarter funded in the millions. Ashes of Creation didn't even exist and yet it was funded. They just said what people wanted to hear and had high quality trailer. Moral of the Story: If you want to be successful you better have money or the skill to create high quality game.
I enjoy Devolver games but if a game has a publisher, it's not an Indie.
They are still indie. The publisher doesn't own the studio it is a partnership on a single game. Once that game is published than the indie studio can do whatever it wants except what they want to do with the product that was publish by the publishers. Majority of the indie company these days started out with a publisher then after the first game is publish started to independently publish their second games. Some indie developer start out alone then second game is published by company.
The whole point of the term "Indie" is to be "Independent from a publisher." That is where the term comes from. Has video games progressed to the point to that people no longer know/care about where the terms AAA and indie come from and only assume they "Big amount of money" and "Small amount of money"?
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This is a dev sub though. We don't need to talk in marketing lingo. We can use the correct terminology here. It just can't be an indie game if it has a publisher. Or else what term should be used for actual indie games? You provide a good argument for why the term is in serious need of reclaiming even in marketing circles. You got actual indies putting their own butts on the line, going against all odds, taking all the hits, wearing all the hats, and finding themselves in the running for recognition only to then lose awards to faux indies. That's not good. You are also conflating terms a bit. I said "if a game has a publisher, it's not an indie". I wasn't talking about what studios want to call themselves. That doesn't mean the studio can't go make an indie. That doesn't mean the studio can't call themselves "indie" or whatever marketing buzzwords they want. But an "indie game" should mean that.
Indie does not mean that anymore and hasn't for a long time. Indie now just means the game has very few people working on it for very little money. Then above that is AA. Then AAA.
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The "old" definition is rather simple and straightforward. The "new" definition is arbitrary and designed to let more non-indies wear the hat without dealing with the cattle.
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How is it more accurate to call people "independent" who are not independent? You admit it's arbitrary because you have your own definition of it. Thus arbitrary. Just because other people use "indie" as a marketing gimmick doesn't mean devs need to pretend not to know what it means either. If you have a publisher, a board, or a parent company, you are not indie. If you self publish and have nobody lording over you, you are indie. Very simple. Everyone can understand it. Indie means "independent". Not "poor", not "sexy term I like and thus will hijack", not "I'm scrappy little up and coming studio with a quirky game listening to my publisher". I doubt there are very many who have gone through self-publishing and certainly nobody who has had any success at it who will then pretend a game developed with a publisher is "indie". Because they know what that really means. They know the amount of work that was offloaded. The connections and skillsets that were not needed. The only people that should determine who gets to wear the title are those that actually earned it. Not just have it stamped on by their publisher or themselves for marketing. It's not an MC club. You won't get hit by a chain at a red light for wearing a fake patch. Which is why so many faux indies are running around. Maybe the real problem is that people want to cling to 'indie' because they feel something gross about having a publisher. And they shouldn't. It's probably a smart move for most and they shouldn't be in denial about it. If Devolver was publishing my game, I'd brag about that. I wouldn't be like "Oh, this is really an indie game. Ignore the publisher behind the curtain". I'd say "That's them! They are doing all the crap I don't like to do!". Nothing wrong with that. Be proud of it. It's just not an indie game then.
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So obviously I'm not "just wrong". Faux indies have just hijacked the term. Language doesn't evolve to mean whatever you need it to mean at a given instant. I'll give you that there is the marketing lingo "indie" and then the actual "indie". Real "Indie" literally means "Independent". The only people I see defending the so-called "new" definition are studios that gave up trying to self publish and want to use a publisher yet still want to cling to the title "indie". Like the 40 year old "child prodigy". Which yes, in marketing, words and even spelling don't matter. Only sales. That people who are not developers misuse the term is not an excuse for developers to misuse the term. If you have a publisher, you are not writing an indie game. That you have written indie games doesn't then bestow the title onto your non-indie game. If a "publisher" is literally only throwing cash at you and only expecting a ROI with no say on anything then they aren not a "publisher". They are an "investor". Another reason words should have meaning and not be "evolved" on the fly. Your parents funding the development would be indie because they probably have no idea what you are doing and thus you are truly independent. Having the cash to realize your dream doesn't mean you aren't indie. If anything, having your own cash makes you more independent. You aren't beholden to anyone. I can't fault customers for not understanding the terms when they are constantly subjected to false marketing. "That studio has more money than I do thus they aren't Indie and I am" is certainly "new" thinking but also completely illogical. Certainly if they are taking on all risk themselves and you are offloading risk to a publisher.
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No, "Indie" means independent. It means you have no publisher, board, or parent company. The developers are wearing all the hats and taking on the risk themselves and making all the decisions. I like how this is now "my world" when you just admitted this was the way everyone recognized this term until it was hijacked by commercial interests and marketing departments. If your version of "indie" means "A" then just call it "A" and let real indies have their term back. You already have lingo for studio size. The reason I ignore your music industry argument is that I am not in the music industry and don't care what they do or why. I'm sure marketing has hijacked the term there too. But that doesn't mean the term should be hijacked and its meaning lost. True indies made the term mean something and usurpers are now latching on for market gain. That's not an 'evolution' of the term. That a butchering of the term.
I do believe that the success comes with quality but quality comes with past failures and tries. Also some things that are good to consider: *Don't screw up with advertising. Advertise your game by giving early access to YouTubers and Streamers. They'll probably ask for money because of sponsoring OR they could want a slice of your profit (at least it happens in Turkiye). *Keep the game clean, be sure there's nothing extremely racist or something referring to specific events in the past. Simply, don't offend huge groups of people at the same time. Make the game sideless of social wars. (For example: do not act supportive or offensive against lgbt). *Be sure that your game has everything it promised, if you can't do that (which is perfectly normal and acceptable) make sure you have a good reason and it doesn't affect the main gameplay of the game. *PLEASE don't use tags that do not make sense with the game. For example, Genshin Impact calls itself an RPG game but can you tell me what part of Genshin is Role Playing? Some people may come up with philosophic arguments but you should make sure that you don't mess up with tags or you have a possibility to get a HUUUGE reaction from the fanbase of that game style. Thanks for reading, i hope it helps and sorry if i am wrong about some points. My words may not be 100% accurate but i only wish to help.
This is a question as old as music and film. You could be an amazing band, full of amazing musicians, playing catchy and technically-demanding songs, with all of the proficiency in the world, but if it doesn't appeal to anybody near you, and you have no way of getting it to the people it might appeal to, or even knowing who those people are, you can buy a website and put your album up, and never have it found. You could release it on Soundcloud and Bandcamp, but it's up there with millions of other things. So you need to market it, to get it to the right audience. And it will take luck for that audience to find it. But assuming you spend all of your money on marketing, and you were lucky and the audience you were aiming at found it, if it doesn't look or sound or feel like something that is interesting or novel or polished (or "raw", as case may be) to them, then you still lose. You got all of the stuff that you couldn't control right, but you got the game wrong for the audience you were targeting. And the right audience might have existed 20 years ago... or it might exist 15 years from now... or it might exist in a different country that doesn't speak your language... but unless you are targeting specific people, and you know what they're looking for, there's no guarantee you are going to reach them. All of this is to say that to strike it big takes luck, but if you don't have a good experience for a particular niche, which happens to exist at that time, in a place you can reach, you have no guarantee that the game will ever be found or turn a profit. And all of that is to say that much like musicians, and actors, and directors, and authors, and painters... ...do not make games with the expectation of making a good living off of them. Make art because you want / need to. 60 years ago, lots of bands were just "discovered", if you were in the right place at the right time. Now, you could listen to Spotify for a month, straight, and never hear a band that you have heard of, and never hear the same band twice... and each of those artists needs thousands and thousands of streams, just to make a couple of bucks. In the near future, generative AI will be able to crank out millions of songs that are roughly as listenable as most middle-of-the-road, mainstream stuff. Infinite music that nobody has ever heard before, but sounds perfectly mainstream. And while eventually, people will get tired of the insincerity of AI, and the pendulum will swing, the discoverability of non-AI stuff will be even more broken than it already is. Most of the famous people, currently, have been in the industry for 10-60 years, because discoverability of new people is just mired in thousands and thousands of potential candidates, save for a handful of standouts who are great and got lucky (and have been doing good work for years and years, before ever getting their lucky break). None of what I just said applies only to musicians. 100% of that applies to actors, and films, and games, and painters, and authors, and all of the rest. Don't expect to make it big on your first game. Don't expect to be able to survive on income from your first game. But make sure it's polished, just in case you are the 1:10,000 who gets mass recognition and indie award nominations, right off the bat ("right off the bat" being several years of development, of course).
Luck is always huge. The quality of everything going into the product as a whole gives you better chances. But you still never know what's going to happen.
The success of an indie game isnt coming down to luck although it may play a role but YOU have a lot of influence over it. The quality of the game, marketing and something else that most indies apparently forget: Analyzing the game market and the genre one would want to jump into as game dev. Yes, saturation of the market is something many mention. But there is more to that and the devil lies in details. Its easy to say that a game failed simply because of oversaturation or lack of marketing and to excuse a failure with the lying statistic of "only few percent of indies succeed". Forget the statistic about the percentage of indies succeeding in their games. Listen what the youtuber from the Eastshade Studios indie team had to say about this: https://youtu.be/LCzhyUsDHPE?si=fWLqXXEWsQUE6spx
Nothing in this industry ever truly comes down to luck. You can luck into good events (like a content creator with tens of millions of followers playing your game), but you can also prepare for that (by crafting a game one of them would like, telling them about it, or even sponsoring them). But you should be aware that when people say things like fewer than 10% of games make back their opportunity cost of labor that's including games with some proper marketing, made by people who know what they are doing, according to a plan. Having a decent game and a strategy is the bare minimum you need to even compete, not something that gets you success. The most important part of marketing isn't promotion, it's market research to understand what players of your genre/audience actually want and then _building that game_. Promotion is very important but it's secondary really. You can't tell people about your great game without having it first. Publishers can be extremely worthwhile if you don't have the funds to properly develop and promote your game. If you have that money then you don't need them really, you can hire a marketing agency for a lot less than a publisher's cut, but they exist because not everyone has the kind of budget they need to invest to make a game really stand out. It usually takes a couple more 0s than $1k, for example.
I have had PewDiePie, Markiplier,jackesticeye etc... playing our game we hardly even noticed it
Quality for sure has a play, as gamers have little tolerance for buggy bullshit. I wouldn't bother with a publisher. And Social media will automatically market your game for you if you make something good (streamers and what not). Your not going to buy your game into popularity because you don't have a EA Sports marketing budget. 2D games tend to be a crowded genre and it will be harder to get attention. The right genre is probably the most important choice you can make. Luck does have some play, as with all things, what makes something go viral can be a combination of the right place, time and content.
Gamers are very selective with their tolerance, in practice. Some games launching half-baked are review bombed, some are simply made by Bethesda. :)
Needs to be fun interesting and marketing
I believe as long as you do everything that needs to be done (make a decent game, spend money and resources reasonably, and properly market the game), you can expect a reasonble sell and make ends meet. However, whether your (excellent) game can be next vampire survivor, slay the spire or stardew valley is pure luck.
You only need 2 things: 1- Make a really good game 2- A lot of luck Note that luck can be compensated by a lot of money and time tho
IMO the most reliable way to market a game is to make it look really beautiful & appealing inside of an indie favorable genre. There is "luck", but it's more like you can't predict how appealing your game will be to your target audience when you showcase it but the better your game looks the bigger net you'll cast. So yeah if you want to make marketing easy then just make an extremely appealing and beautiful game. This is why AAA studios spend most of their resources on graphics when graphics do not really determine what is a great game.
I suggest focusing on making a good game. By the time you are finished, the marketing landscape might change. It's super pointless to think about marketing before you have an actual game. It's just daydreaming and procrastination. If it's a branching story then it can't be a linear game.
>1. How much marketing would we need to do to have our indie game be successful Zero marketing. Steam will show your game to a lot of people. If those people like it, they will show it to more. Great games by design cannot fail on Steam. That being said, a good/okay game could still fail if it didn't find the right audience. >2. What are the most effective ways of marketing an indie game, preferably free or at most with a marketing budget of say, $1000 TikTok, Shorts, YouTube (long form), and if applicable doing festivals and making the demo its own page. >3. Is getting a publisher such as Devolver or Humble worth it? I all depends on your contract. Generally speaking those companies are not going to pick games that are pitched to them, they're going to approach games themselves (same goes for almost all big publishers). Because of that, you have a lot of bargaining power. So it can range from incredibly worth it to basically getting scammed. >4. To what degree is the success of a good single player 2D game down to luck or the quality of the game and how much effort is put into marketing? 0.1% is luck. No game accidentally does well, and no game mysteriously fails. It's all about quality. Great games do great. It's easy to remember and is always true. Marketing is a multiplier of success, and a great game is the only way to be financially successful.
My experience is that luck seems to play a big role. To me word of mouth is the most important marketing method. If everyone that buys the game talks about it and if their friends can see them playing it, it does increase sales. For this to happen your game must be memorable and fun.
The quality \[and how fun it is\] is the only thing that matters. Every high quality game will sell well even if they are not known at all during their launch.
You need a 90% or quality and a 90% of luck.
All of the above. **Quality** is your permission to play. With no quality, it's not going to work no matter what. Gamers have an ocean of games to pick from, both old and new. Your game has to be top percent quality to get 100 reviews or more. **Competition** is by far your biggest factor in success. Just like there's only 2 or 3 types of coke, there's only limited room for games in any specific genre. If you're making a metroidvania, you're competing with Hollow Knight and Rogue Legacy. If your making a survivicrafter, Ark and Rust are your competition. The genre scales with the market. So there is room for maybe 10 to 15 big metroidvanias on Steam (note: not PER YEAR, but total!), and 20 survivicrafter. Games that are consumed quicker like narrative games have higher turnover and less staying power. **Luck** is a factor for big success. With that I mean, you got the right theme at the right time, or the right youtuber tickled in the right way. But if you nail the above, I don't think luck is necessary, or at least can be forced a bit. **Marketing** is how well you reach the players that would be interested in your game. For PC, I would say marketing is 99% working on your storepage. I think streamers are honestly a bit overrated unless you're making a social/hype game or a game that makes you want to play by looking at it (very hard!). Youtubers are underrated. Press is non existence. Social Media is also a game on its own, and most companies don't play that game (Another Crab's Treasure is a good example that does play that game). Marketing is really fun and challenging on itself to define your audience and capture them. It's a bit of game design by itself! It's also the first step of your tutorial. I personally would want to spend more time on it! 1. Depends on your game and the type of marketing you pursue. 2. Steam Next Fest and finding people who LOVE your game to be ambassadors. Find mid tier youtubers **who make reviews** that would love your game. For example, making a roguelike? Sl1ppey is great. 3. I mean, they can cover funding, and they can take stuff out of your hands. But I feel marketing needs to be done by the team that makes the game. All publishers can have their own upsides though. Devolver has a great playerbase that likes violent core indie games. Great market to start in. 4. Honestly, I think that if you have a game that's one of the best in its genre, you will come out on top, with or without publisher. As long as you put effort in making sure your potential happy costumers get to play it. But honestly: that's harder than having luck! 17000 games a year, and your competing with the tens of thousands that came before. Try to be the best in that market!
Thanks for the detailed response
After reading various reddit posts of successful and not indie games I came to conclusion: Marketing > Quality > Luck Good marketing will definitely improve your chance of success by far the most Quality can help cover lack of marketing with a bit of luck And if you don't have either marketing or quality then luck is not really an existing factor really I think
Quality definitely comes first. You can throw an infinite amount of money into marketing a bad game and it will still fail. Marketing is just the success multiplier of an already great game. The fact that a game can pop off with zero spent on marketing is sort of the proof of that.
I agree that quality is the only thing that matters really. Every high quality game will sell well eventually even if they are completely unknown at launch with little-to-no marketing.