How many ways can you effectivley market a game?

[Gnatinator]

Hiya, im very new to these forums. My name is Nathaniel, and I am writing a large research report entitled "Improving Internet Marketing For Independent Game Developers". I am currently searching for as many effective marketing methods as possible, so far I have:

- Large Download Sites (eg. Download.com)
- Review Sites (eg. Gametunnel.com)
- Banner Ads <- Ive heard these were ineffective (please comment)

I have already interviewed a few of you but I would now like more information on the exact methods you have come up with to help market your games (which has inticed me to post here). Please add as many as you can and comment on them.

I will be releasing this report over the internet once it is complete to help fellow start-ups

Thanks :)

[Emmanuel]

Hey,

That would be a useful report, if you make it available to the public.

An important question in marketing. once you've answered "what do my customers want" (and developed a product), is "how do I reach my customers". I assume your report is mostly about the second question?

The ways that you have listed are all great, I would add: give. If you host free and useful articles on your game/game company website, people will read them, recommend them, link to them, and that will help show that you're not just out to part people with their money, but you have a higher standard of giving and contributing. Pragmatically, that will boost your google pagerank in a legitimate way. Of course your free articles boast prominent buttons for trying out your games.


Hiya, im very new to these forums. My name is Nathaniel, and I am writing a large research report entitled "Improving Internet Marketing For Independent Game Developers". I am currently searching for as many effective marketing methods as possible, so far I have:

- Large Download Sites (eg. Download.com)
- Review Sites (eg. Gametunnel.com)
- Banner Ads <- Ive heard these were ineffective (please comment)

I have already interviewed a few of you but I would now like more information on the exact methods you have come up with to help market your games (which has inticed me to post here). Please add as many as you can and comment on them.

I will be releasing this report over the internet once it is complete to help fellow start-ups

Thanks :)

[Gnatinator]

An important question in marketing. once you've answered "what do my customers want" (and developed a product), is "how do I reach my customers". I assume your report is mostly about the second question?
Yes.


The ways that you have listed are all great, I would add: give. If you host free and useful articles on your game/game company website, people will read them, recommend them, link to them, and that will help show that you're not just out to part people with their money, but you have a higher standard of giving and contributing. Pragmatically, that will boost your google pagerank in a legitimate way. Of course your free articles boast prominent buttons for trying out your games.
Ok so:
- Search engine page rank
- Give cool/useful content away for free (people will then advertise for you)

Great ideas, keep em coming guys

[James C. Smith]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but the best way to get your game seen by gamers is to put it on the web sites they go to when they look for games. I don’t know if your definition of Large Download Sites (eg. Download.com) would include game retailer sites like Real Arcade, Shockwave.com, Pogo, zone.com, BigFishGames and Reflexive Arcade. I also don’t know if you would consider it “marketing” to just put your game in the retailer. But this is the most effective way to make potential customers aware of your games existence.

[cliffski]

thats fine for genres like puzzzle and arcade which have established indie-friendly sites like that, but what about strategy and sim games? Unless you have a big marketing budget sites like gamespy etc wont give you coverage, and your average portal site thinks its the wrong genre.
any ideas how to promote such games? :)
Cheers!

[Emmanuel]

what about strategy and sim games?


If you're self-publishing out of your website, the question is how to get players that want strategy games to visit your site (then it's up to your game to be good, and your sales pipe to be comfy and hassle-free to close the sale). The free content as explained above helps to drive traffic, as long as it is genuinely useful and not a plug for your games, but features keywords so that people looking for strategy and sim games find your site.

Guys and girls, how did you successfully market your strategy and sim games? I'm new to this board (and intending to stay), and I am impressed with the amount of quality games produced and marketed.

[Greg Squire]

How can I market thee? Let me count the ways... :D

Seriously though there are many different ways to market your product (too many to count), but only a handful of them could be considered effective. As James mentioned in another thread it's about lots of "eyeballs" and good "content" (you need both). Using portal sites is probably the best option to get "eyeballs" currently. There may be some other guerilla marketing techniques that could be helpful, maybe even some that others haven’t tried but still might be effective. Don’t be afraid to try some of these, but also don’t spend all your time on the “untested”. Do a combination of both the “tried and true” and some creative low cost guerilla marketing.

[Sillysoft]

Guys and girls, how did you successfully market your strategy and sim games?

Google. My most reliable and prolific referrer (by FAR) is google, using a combination of natural search rankings and pay-per-click ads.

[Martoon]

If you host free and useful articles on your game/game company website, people will read them, recommend them, link to them, and that will help show that you're not just out to part people with their money, but you have a higher standard of giving and contributing. Pragmatically, that will boost your google pagerank in a legitimate way. Of course your free articles boast prominent buttons for trying out your games.

Could someone give an example of types of "free and useful articles"? It seems the articles would need to have some real value, not already be duplicated all over the net, and the articles' interested audience would need to have some overlap with potential customers for your games. I'm having a hard time imagining what this might be.

[Martoon]

Google. My most reliable and prolific referrer (by FAR) is google, using a combination of natural search rankings and pay-per-click ads.

Getting "natural search rankings" in Google is a good option for certain games, but this doesn't work for many types of games. For example, I'm sure it works pretty well for your game Lux, because it's a computer adaptation of Risk, and I see a Google for "risk game" returns your link as numbers 6 and 7 in the results, and you probably get a good number of people finding you that way. But for a game that isn't based on a specific theme that people would be searching for, this isn't really an option. But the AdWords could still be useful for general game categories.

[Sillysoft]

Getting "natural search rankings" in Google is a good option for certain games, but this doesn't work for many types of games.I agree that my game lends itself to picking search engine keywords easily, but there are many terms that other games could use. Of course there are terms like solitaire, hearts, spades, etc. but people could also optimize for sports games, space trader game, political game, etc. I haven't checked any of these terms out but I bet they would give good traffic and are open enough for the knowledgeable person to get a good ranking for it. If your game is available for macintosh then that also gives you some less-competitive keywords to shoot for.

When I start work on my next game I will for sure plan out a strategy for getting search engine traffic. I view this as an important part of market research.

[Emmanuel]

Could someone give an example of types of "free and useful articles"?

Personal growth articles (http://www.dexterity.com/articles/)
by Steve Pavlina

Software marketing and development (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/)by Joel Spolsky

Same thing (http://software.ericsink.com/) by Eric Sink

...

You can write about whatever is your hobby or interest, and that intersects with your prospective customers' interests in general (even home improvement !)