Dusk is our platform to get your games seen by 1000s of players every day. This is one of things that particularly attracted me to the platform. The most common meme I see on my X/Twitter feed is this:
Why? It’s not that indie game devs don’t market their games. They actually spend a lot of time reading and trying to understand how to optimize their store pages, trying to stand out in the crowd, working out how to post to Reddit for maximum exposure, using unfamiliar social media like TikTok and Instagram, and how to get the journalists to see it.
So why do indie games always seem to struggle with getting out there. Well because it’s hard, like really hard.
- Posting your game and getting lots of retweets on Twitter is marketing to game devs. They do love games but they’re also busy writing them. Unlikely to be players.
- Reddit posting is extremely hard to get right. Your post might just get lost in the stream of the people doing the same thing. Your post might get flagged as an advert and you get banned forever. Your post might get absolutely trashed because someone is having a bad day, hurting your motivation but sometimes increasing your exposure. Your post, if you’re very lucky might get some great up votes and huge traction. Even then you could be all the wrong types of eyes on your games.
- Stores are saturated with indie games. Steam, Epic, App Store and Google Play all have an enormous amount of games being released every day. It’s really difficult to stand out and then of course you’ve got commercial games being pushed out with huge marketing and brand names to compete with.
TikTok and Instagram are ideal places to market games, you’re reaching the players not game devs, or journalists - but the people who might actually play your game. The tricky part is the type of content people want here and how to convert them into actually playing.
Video viewers are looking for short clips, you’re not going to get a lot of time to show how cool and interesting your game is. They also want humor - which in many games doesn’t really happen in a 10 second viewing. Finally they want style and polish. If your game is the next great 3D adventure this can work well, but if you’re building a web game with a stylistic look (pixel art, geometry based, etc) it can easily fall flat.
Time Magazine: Most people now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish
Finally even if your videos are great, you get a great content creator to provide a narrative and you’re seeing huge view numbers - how many of these people are then moving on to play your game? Unfortunately not too many - they’ve done all the work they're willing to do, opened their app and viewed your video. Clicking a link and installing something, that's a big ask.
All of this sounds pretty dire but it is possible. Many of my game dev friends have had huge success stories or even minor hits through consistent and quality marketing strategies. It’s just hard.
Back when the App Store was new there was a gold rush, an opportunity for indie game developers to be visible. Same with Steam and Google Play. There are moments in time in every game distribution platform where there’s room to shine - the only problem is often the player bases aren’t huge at that time. Of course the App Store, Steam and Google Play had huge potential player bases and space to fill.
What we all need to look out for (and what attracted me to Dusk) is a place that:
- Has space to be seen
- Has enough players to make it worth the time investment
- Has a way for me to make a dollar in doing so
Unfortunately I missed the boat on App Store, Google Play and even itch.io, so it’s always worth looking into new ones as they arrive.
As I mentioned above the viewing audience is getting less and less willing to take action to go and find the thing they’ve seen. An interesting trend in distribution platforms is mixing the social aspects of the application (your TikTok / Instagram / Twitter features) with the actual playing of the games. This simply means the barrier to go from seeing something to playing something is lowering - the shared content is the actual game so by the time you’re seeing it - you’re playing it too! You could of course argue that Steam tried to retrofit this into their platform but unfortunately ended up with a largely toxic environment.
The newer generation of players have a lower attention span, they just want it all right now. Platforms that give these players the games in the context of their social media are where we should be looking. Lets bypass traditional marketing altogether and just put the games in front of the players in a familiar social wrapper.
If you’re interested in this topic or want to hear more about how Dusk is doing this by all means hit me up on Discord.
