This article is about getting started (late) marketing my commercial game.
The last thing on most indie devs minds is marketing. A reddit post and a tweet are pretty much the only thing most people do. Marketing is an afterthought to these people, and they think: “If I build it, they will come.”. Turns out that I am in fact, those people. I’ve always sat at my desk for hours, and did some sloppy video or social post for what I was working on. Sometimes it got interaction, but most of the time nobody has cared at all. At the time, I didn’t dwell too long on the “failures”, but now I need to. I’m working on my first commercial game, and fell into the same trap. I haven’t marketed it aside from a few social posts. Hopefully, we can fix that.
I don’t have high hopes for this blog in particular for visibility for the game, but I think anything helps at this point. What I’ve done is started reading through the informational materials and articles on Chris Z’s website. He is a game marketing expert who specializes in optimizing your game launch on Steam. This is the first game I’ll be launching on Steam. While I may be late, I think it’s better to put in some effort now than nothing at all. To be honest, I would actually prefer a modest launch of the game as to not be overwhelmed with feedback from end users. The idea of this blog series will be to document my journey and learnings doing last second marketing for my game. At this point, it probably makes sense to talk about the game directly. Myself and an artist/musician/game designer are working on a match-3 rogue-lite game called Necro-Matcher. You use your matches to attack, defend, and create crazy combinations to battle through multiple floors, encountering many enemies, special events, and bosses along the way. We are planning to release the game in November of this year. I am developing the game using an engine I created myself written in the Julia Programming Language. If you’re interested, check it out on GitHub.
Like I said, this is the first in a series of blogs where I will document my marketing journey for the game. We are starting from zero here basically, so hopefully in the next one I can talk more about marketing techniques I tried and the results from that. I will leave you with our current wishlists count.
Regards,
Kyle