Zero Budget VIDEO GAME MARKETING // Going Viral on Steam

Marketing. The one thing all indie game developers love to hate. Unfortunately marketing is something you will need to learn if you want to make a living from indie game development. Luckily, marketing with a zero dollar budget is possible. In this video I will talk about timing your marketing and what you should aim for with marketing - namely, what do you need to do in order to go viral on Steam.

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Zero Budget VIDEO GAME MARKETING // Marketing for Indie Game Developers:    • Zero Budget VIDEO GAME MARKETING // Market...  

0:00 Intro
1:26 What to aim for with marketing

Let's assume your game will be on Steam as it’s the most common scenario with indie games.

If your game is not out yet, your number one goal should be to get people to wishlist your game on Steam. Why do you want wishlists? Well, each wishlist is a potential sale. Wishlists also serve another important purpose that I will mention below.

In order to get wishlists you should have your steam page up and running as soon as possible. This will allow you to include a link to your steam page whenever you are doing marketing and ask people to wishlist your game. In marketing world this is called CTA, or Call to Action.

But what if you don’t have a Steam page yet? Well, then your number one goal should be to get people to follow you on social media like Twitter or get them to join your mailing list. But honestly, at this point I would focus all my efforts on working on the game until it’s far enough for a Steam page. Also remember, your game doesn’t have to be finished before you can create a Steam page.

Let’s move forward in time. Your game is now finished and you are ready to release it. Awesome! Now is the time for your biggest marketing push. As soon as you press the release button, your number one goal is to get people to buy your game. Your secondary goal will be to get your wishlists to convert into sales.

3:15 Front page of Steam

In addition to the previously mentioned goals, there is a very important overarching goal that can be critical to the success of your game. And that is getting to the front page of Steam. Specifically the new & trending tab. If you get there, prepare for lift-off. Your game will get millions of impressions and your success is pretty much guaranteed. Assuming your game is not completely broken.

Well, how do you get on the new & trending tab? It’s simple. You sell a lot of copies. There is no trick to get past that. This is why the wishlists are so important and why many sources say that you should have a specific number of wishlists on release, whether that’s five thousand, ten thousand or even fifty thousand. Having a large amount of wishlists and getting them to convert into sales on release will make it easier for you to get on the new & trending tab.

But I wouldn’t get too hung up on any specific wishlist number. Just try to get as many as you can before release. For what it’s worth, I had around 1700 wishlists on release and roughly 15% of them bought the game during the release week. Combined with normal sales, this was enough to get my game on the new & trending tab for a few days. I didn’t get there on my first release day, but at some point during the second release day, I crossed whatever threshold there was and I immediately got a huge boost in impressions.

You don’t need to sell millions of copies to get on the new & trending tab. In fact, there is no specific sales limit. You just need to sell more than the other games that have been released recently. If I look at my traffic data, it’s a bit hard to say at what point exactly I got on the new & trending tab, but I would say it was most likely 24 hours after the release. At that point my game had sold around 400 copies.

Just remember that having a large amount of wishlists is not enough. They also need to convert into sales. The best way to do this is to have a game that looks fun to play. You also want to make sure that your game doesn’t have any major game breaking bugs that could result in a string of negative reviews early on.

If you don’t get on the new & trending tab, it’s not the end of the world. Your game can still sell well and have a bright future. It just means it won’t get an explosive start. I mean, at this point everyone knows how Among Us was basically unknown for 2 years and then suddenly became a huge viral success. So there is always hope.

6:31 Outro