How To Get More Players For Your Indie Game – Game Marketing Concepts

If you’ve ever wondered about one of the most important processes for marketing, we’re going to talk about that and so much more coming up. What’s up guys, Tim Ruswick from game dev underground and if you’re new here on this channel I share a lot of motivational marketing stuff that has to do with game development. So if you or new consider subscribing and make sure you hit the bell to get notified. But today we’re going to talk about some marketing concepts. And this is the beginning of a series that I’m going to do where I take a specific concept either that I’ve learned I’ve created through all the stuff that I’ve learned and I walk you guys through that concept and kind of what it means and how you can adapt it to your life.

(Video Transcription)

And so being the first video in this series i thought we’d focus on one of the most important concepts out there and that is the player discovery process, pdp, this was adapted from one of the things that we used to do a marketing called the customer discovery process or the the basic process in which your customer discovers you. Now a lot of times for startups and tech companies and stuff like that this process is very conscious this process is designed it starts with like a paid ad or something like that and then it goes to a landing page which is designed for that purpose and then they go through a sign-up process and there’s a whole on boarding process and stufff like that.

So there are there are people out there that actually design this whole process. They don’t call it what I call it because it’s a series of different skill sets right? Like you need advertising, you need a landing page you need all these different stuff. But the process i think is what’s important and it’s what a lot of indie game developers miss when they’re trying to market their their game or their products. So what is the player discovery process, well I kind of touched on it but I want to really get you to understand how this works so.

If you put your game on Steam you have to understand how people are going to find it. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make I’ve made this mistake in the past as well is I just put something up on google play or or iOS or whatever it is or steam and I don’t really think about how people are going to find it. I just assume that these other people these overlords somewhere are going to send me customers right? Or they’re going to send me downloads.

And this is usually a shock for people because they’ll put their app up they’ll put their game up and then they’ll get five downloads or no reviews or some other heartbreaking number and it’s just like I put all this work into this and now oh well that didn’t work. So one of the things that I want to encourage you as i kind of talk through this concept is to consciously think through the process of how someone will find your game. Now this is important for actually getting people to play your game especially for something like launch day right?

Because launch day might be a little bit different than then later time periods, like two years from now you know. So when you design a player discovery process one of the advantages of it is you understand exactly how people come and find your game and if if you design one that works you can have a very sustainable products for a long term, you can have people buying this thing for months or years to come, not just on your launch day so and that’s actually how you build a sustainable business, you can’t just constantly launch new things they’d only make money on the launch, that’s not that’s not sustainable that’s that’s madness that’s crazy to think you can build a business that way, that’s not how business works.

So, I really want you to think about this. So when someone goes on steam how do they search for your game? Or do they even search? Do they just look at the the front page of steam? Do they are they interested in indie games? So would they actually look at indie game category? Or would they search something like meatball rpg right? So or what games do they actually like like? What are some other games that they play? What are some games similar to yours that would have the same audience?

You’ve got to understand the answer to all these questions because how you set up your store page on steam or google play or any of these places needs to take an account not only target market but it also needs to take an account the discovery process, how people are going to find you. So for example if your game is a runner game or let’s just use runners as an example because it’s all i can think of, and it’s a meatball runner and your little meatball running around and you just got to keep running that’s that’s the game.

And there are other games out there that are runners too because you’ve been inspired by all these games. Let’s say there’s a huge group of people that like runner games i don’t know if there is I haven’t done the research but let’s assume there is. If you include just the name of your game so for example just a meatball let’s say that’s the name right? How are people going to find that? Well if they’re searching for a runner game maybe that won’t come up maybe if they go in the genre list and they kind of look through all the games. But do people do that?

What if they search for runner games on google? Is your games your game going to show up there? What if they ask their friends about different runner games that they play? Is your game going to come up in that conversation? So understand that. Because there are a couple of alternatives of how you can set up your sort page so in your store page for example, you could have a meatball as a title and you could say – a runner game.

Or you could change the name to something like run or meatball or meatball runner you could add extra keywords and stuff in that contextually based on what people would do to search to find your game, you could post on relevant forums for people that are avid fans of runner games right? You could go on facebook and you could target other games like yours that has the same fan base, you could target those people and you could run ads to your game.

And say if you like that game you’ll love this meatball game right? So understanding that process is really important because when you understand how it works, you take this stuff a little more seriously you take it a little more consciously you work on it. One of the biggest mistakes that i made and then i see a lot of people make to this day is they spend all this time on the game they work their ass off on the game they work it they work it they work it and then they get to the publishing period and then they half ass the store listing, they half ass the screenshots, they half ass their description or their title or their keywords, they just type in a bunch of stuff they think of.

That is the most important part of your entire game that is how people are going to find you and that is how people are going to decide to choose you. That is how people download your game based on what you put on that page. That is not a page where you just randomly put whatever you think goes there. You need to spend a lot of time researching that understanding that going through the discovery process of different games.

Do you have a favorite game? How did you find that game? Did you search for a certain thing? Were you looking for something? Were you going through the genre list on steam? What were you doing? So, one, I want to encourage you to just understand how people find your game right? So just that step one is just understand how it happens, where they search what they search why they search do they find you – like listings or forums or what? Understand the process that’s step one.

Step two, and this is this goes a little more advanced right that’s when you have to define and design your own process. Because ultimately any process that happens passively is not going to be a super effective process. Even if you make the best game in the world you can get a lot more sales and a lot more downloads by consciously designing and defining what this process is and how it works. So if you are at the level where you have finished a game and you maybe haven’t thought about the process, really think through it. Ask some of your friends ask some of your customers even if you have their emails. How did you find the game? What did you do? What did you search? What did you look for?

You can do keyword research if you just google keyword research you’ll find a few sites where you can do keyword research you can look up search volume for certain terms you can see how many times a month people search certain things so you can see if a keyword is popular. Look through that go through that try and find that stuff go on go on like if you’re making a mobile game go on App Annie or some of these other sites that show you statistics for other games look at those other games, look at their keywords what keywords are they taking look at their titles, how have they chosen the title? Did they choose it brand base?

They choose it contextual base? Or like actual download base? Pay attention. Step 2 is design the process right? So and designing is like a whole nother level, like there’s one kind of designing where you go where your target market is and you get them to look at your game, but the there’s another level of designing and that’s when you get into ads and and actual advertising and landing pages and conversion rates, and you can check out my video on how actual advertising works i’ll link that up, but that kind of goes into depth on how that whole process works, but it’s really important.

But I just i want to encourage you that no matter where you are in your game development where you are in your journey as a game business owner, think about the process, think through how people will find you don’t leave it to chance, don’t be passive about it don’t rush the store listing or the landing page or whatever it is that you’re building, think through that process and really make sure that you understand how people find you, and why they found you what they were looking for.

And that kind of thing that can that that data can help you optimize a lot of different things, it can help you find new sources to find people it can help you optimize your current sources of customers and i think it kind of helped you along on your path to making a more successful game. So that’s all I’ve got for today, i hope you guys found it useful if you did please leave me a comment below I would love to know what your discovery process is like if you’ve ever thought about it. Let’s discuss it in the comments below and until next time once again I’m Tim Ruswick and I’ll see you guys in the next video.