Thousand Ant Podcast: Indie game marketing strategy with Chris Zukowski
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- Опубликовано: 1 июн 2024
- In this episode of the Thousand Ant podcast Matt Mirrorfish talks indie game marketing strategy and game marketing tips with Chris Zukowski. Chris specializes in how to market your game and he and Matt Mirrorfish discuss how steam works, picking the right game genre and indie games marketing in general.
Links:
How to market a game website: howtomarketagame.com/
How to make a steam page: howtomakeasteampage.com/
Empathizing with Steam: How People Shop for Your Game:
• Empathizing with Steam...
The orbit model: orbit.love/solutions/for-devrels
00:00-00:54 - Intro
00:54 - The Market Niche of Indie Games
03:58 - The Consumer User Experiment
06:14 - The Psychology of Consumers
07:59 - The Critical Value of a Steam Page
10:39 - The Idea of a Good Game
16:19 - How to Market a Game
22:23 - The Role of Media in Game Marketing
28:38 - Player Retention
30:51 - Generational Factors in the Game Industry
36:13 - When To Make a STEAM Page
41:43 - Advertising Games
44:46 - Pros and Cons of Discord
53:32 - Learning from the Success of Giant Game Companies
57:14 - How the Marketing Funnel Works
01:01:57 - Generating Revenue
01:04:04 - Teaching as a Medium for Learning
01:05:09 - Write a Blog of Your Game
01:08:24 - Learning from Other's Setbacks
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Learn Unity and game development with experienced indie game developers. Subscribe for tutorials, devlogs, and gamedev advice uploaded weekly.
Visit us on Discord, ask questions and share your work: / discord
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Visit our website: thousandant.com
I really appreciate a bigger focus on marketing and legal stuff that the channel is taking, great to see more specific content around these topics in the game development sphere!
Thanks very much! Glad to hear you're enjoying the new focus.
Your zombie 2D-Roguelike tutorial was my first game dev project!
Thanks Christian!
Chris Zukowski is a treasure.
Totally agree, he share so much great information and content.
I already follow Chris for more than one year in him Discord, but it's always helpful to listen these lessons again and again. Great stuff.
Yes :)
Super interesting chat chaps! You always get me thinking about alternative ways of marketing. I've got a good idea of when I'll be opening a steam page now.
Thanks Skeffles! Glad to hear it gave you some good perspective. Definitely a good idea on the steam page ;)
Excellent topic, and guest! Thank you!
Thanks very much!
. My issue with Discord is that it's alot like trying to cook and feed at the same time. You gather and audience, you tell them that you are cooking a delicious meal and it will be ready soon, but while the audience is waiting they are starving and need to be fed samples every week or month until the real meal is done. Managing this can take away time from development.
I think it's better to just have cool info about you game leak to potential audiences through the media. A mysterious screenshot here, some exclusive info there, release date teased here, spread out over the course of months or even years of development, creating interest, and then ramp it up to an all time high before launch. Instead of gathering an audience in discord that will only stick around if you give them weekly or monthly updates of the game. The slow drop of leaks adds up to a full cup to drink on launch day. While big pours of updates to a discord audience are slurped down in seconds and before the month is over they are begging for the next cup. AAA games have mastered the art of anticipation, most indie games have not yet.
I also feel like in the beginning this devlog stuff was a cool indie thing, but now it's starting to feel like it breaks player immersion. Creating video games is the only magic trick in the world where the trick is you creating an interactive virtual world and no one knows how you did it, devlogs now taking everyone backstage revealing this is all just some unity assets and code put together to make content, this is starting to make indie games look more like just a bunch of "game projects" then fully alive interactive worlds, if you catch my drift lol. I feel like these are more interesting after the game is already popular.
I don't think you should try to pattern indie dev marketing after AAA practices, they're very different and different strategies apply. That said I get what you mean about Discord and it's definitely a lot of work to support.
@@ThousandAnt I think the strats are the same but the platforms differ. Indies don't always have access to E3 and big display booths or yt ads and all the outreach a big name publisher can bring. But the strategy of slowly building player interest before launch day is still what both AAA and indies have to do.
Hello
A Very good and informative interview, can anyone link few examples of those data scraping websites for steam that were mentioned?
where we gather data/sells and whatnot?
Young folks don't have money so there are a lot more of us making jam games.
And most of us don't even think of going commercial.
Or alternatively we try to do everything ourself without any market research and get 3-4 years into a game and are still only 20% done at most.
Or just never finish And go through a cycle where we keep spending about 6 months on game projects that will take 2-3 years and never finish anything.
Until eventually you realize that doesn't work. But at least you gained some skills along the way.
Thanks for all the great content Matt 👍 love this channel! Like share and subscribe
Thank you! Glad to hear you're enjoying it!
100% agree with learning from teaching.
Absolutely!
Matt looks like hide the pain harold at exactly 38:00
I'd love to know what the site is that ranks Steam tags by review rankings - mentioned around the 18:00 mark
I actually don't know but if you ask in the how to market a game discord they can probably answer
Not sure if Chris borrowed your voice or he stole it from you Matt 😂?
Hahahah we'll never tell 😎
4 major things I don't agree with Zukowski on is
1. "Look at the "B" and "C" genres and make a game in that genre for high success chance. "
I disagree with this because if those games are doing really well then there's tons of competition and much higher chance of your game not even being seen among the games that are already doing well in those genres. Those genres have hierarchies where there is a top game and everything else will just fall under, so you lost any chance at being the top title. If you do do a game in those genre's it's gonna have to have a key major difference.
2. "Don't look at press when it comes to what's popular just look at the numbers. "
If you get alot of press your game had to rise above tens of thousands of games to get that press, so that is a very good indicator if not THE No.1 indicator of what is popular. And games that become popular are swarmed with a ton of copycat games that end up fleshing out the genre.
(Matt said no one ever heard of Feed and Grow fish, but I guarantee his kids heard about it through RUclips, and didn't just stumble on it through steam.)
3. "The "A" games are just luck."
Alot of these "A" games that succeeded do the exact opposite of what Zukowski advises, they do games outside of the "B" and "C" genres that are popular and do well, that's why they stand out so far and become big hit successes. Whose gonna see your game ifit looks like every other game on steam pumping an overdone genre, like you guys mentioned with the platformers. But if your game is different from the norm it will stand out and has a great chance to be the top title in that genre since there is little competition.
4. "Games are like fashion, you have to make a game in style."
This is false equivalence, fashion can age with time and culture, video games can last decades and even generations. There are old classsic games still played til this day , but you see absoultely no one wear bellbottoms today. Games are not clothes, they aren't status markers or expressions of cultural times that come and go, what was once entertaining can still as easily be entertaining today (Tetris for example). Shoot kids still play CSGO and when did that come out? Kids still play smash bros melee competitively and that game had 4 sequels come out after it, Starcraft, WOW, DOTA2, all games that came out years ago and are still heavily played . People even speed ran (or still run) the old mario games generations after they were released. Games don't age like clothes do, this is a great industry to be in.
And you can absolutely make an old "out of style" nintendo game that came out years ago and make a HIT. Look at Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon was "out of style" for years when that game came along. Look at Tunic, old 2D Zelda games were out of style long before that came along as well. An old success with a new art treatment actually is a good formula to use for a high chance of success in the market.
For your second point - I think he was talking about traditional press ie Rock Paper Shotgun. Not youtube, twitch, etc. I think he was making the point that traditional press is way less of an indicator of success/quality nowadays (and perhaps more an indication of what the editor/author enjoys?)
@@citywizardgames I think traditional press actually helps games get popularity. Buzzing or Controversial headlines often help in a game blowing up and creates the hype before the swarm.
I would love to know which games Matt thinks were really popular in the media but didn't do well. That sounds impossible.
Tacoma and Where The Water Taste like wine both had a lot of reviews followed by low sales. No disrespect to either game of course.
Does Chris Zukowski ever sit down
I never saw that man chill xD