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Comment by dexiwz | Hacker News Reader

I am always shocked at how marketing-adverse indie game devs are. Developers invest a ton of their base commodity (time) into a game, but refuse to advertise it or fail to save cash to do so. Instead they rely on front pages, bundles, and sales. Then 9 months latter they do post mortems, where they correlated sales graphs to events. I want to see a sale graph for conversions based on Facebook ads. Mobile/FB Game companies pump out mediocre games, but maintain huge user bases just because people find their games.

Everything thinks that they are going to be Notch and their game will spread by word-of-mouth, because they have a unicorn. Turns out your time-bending, retro, 2D, pixel-art shooter/platformer doesnt have the genius of Virtual Legos, and no one cares about it.

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As soon as you make a game that's able to compete for conversions on ads, your game probably won't be considered indie anymore. Ads are extremely competitive and the only way to compete and not get priced out is to "sellout" and make games with mass market appeal, AAA price tags, high monetization funnels to increase LTV, etc. Without that, it's unlikely you'll be able to profitably spend on ads through any of the major channels. You're competing against the Game of Wars and Clash of Clans out there on Mobile and the AAA and IP titles on traditional platforms. So your metrics will need to be on par with the likes of those (it at least needs to be on par in a niche target demographic) in order to have any measure of success.

So the typical indie marketing strategy of using social media, press, and word of mouth, is actually very rational and probably the best way to go about it.

In my opinion, if you do CPM/CPC/Facebook marketing for your indie game, you are wasting your money. You are competing with the marketing budgets of industry giants, which are ten to 100 times larger. Your ads won't be seen.

Your effort should be spent convincing influencers to play your game, so that they will convince others. These are not people best reached by advertising.

Have you ever seen anyone try it and report numbers? Ads for Facebook are fairly specific. Its creepy how finely you can segment your audience. Industry giants may have larger budgets, which just means that they can cast a wider net. Well targeted ads may have better returns.

Facebook is not the only platform. Reddit, Polygon, and Twitch all have users that would fit your demographic more. Social media personalities (Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, etc), all will mention your game for the right price. If you have ever seen 'Featured', 'Promoted', or 'Partner' content, then it was paid for. Communities and forums are overvalued for the time investment, especially because they rely on other people to spread your game.

We live in a consumerist society driven by ads. Refusal to use them is silly.

It isn't a one-size-fits-all market, and lumping together "marketing" with the industrial sales funnel does a disservice to the numerous games that used other marketing techniques, on their own or accompanied by a traditional push.

That doesn't mean that marketing isn't important - if your goal is commercial then it really should be up in that 60% of developer time range - but the way in which you do it requires at least as much design thinking as making the game. The whole premise of the game needs built in sales value or else you're part of the crowd, fighting to break out.

Most of the tricks you can do with advertising and production values only reduce reasons for people to say "no" to a game. They don't make people say "yes", and if nobody says "yes" then all you can do is churn people through the sales funnel, because your game doesn't and never will solve anyone's hair-on-fire problem.

I am always shocked at how marketing-adverse indie game devs are.

Ambient level of marketing competence for indie developers is even below that for e.g. "indie" SaaS companies, which is unfortunate. A lot of them could benefit from simple things like aggressively getting email signups and using them to promote game N+1 to their existing fanbase, as opposed to having to buy their customers back from Valve every single time.

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