I’ll snatch that last question from maniac45 in the Weekly Dev Questions thread.
“Does Star Sonata plan to do any sorts of increasing in the community as to bringing more players? if so what kind of plans are set to action?”
This post might be a little wordy and talk about some pretty boring things, but hopefully it’ll give you some insights into how marketing an indie game is a fun and challenging juggling act. So marketing and promoting Star Sonata is my department, so I’ll give some insights into how I go about promotion. I’ve been starting to heavily work on the marketing strategy for Star Sonata over the course of the last month. That survey you guys have taken, is part of my effort to learn more about YOU so I can know who likes to play Star Sonata and why. From that survey we’ll learn who primarily enjoys SS and where they like to visit online so we know where to focus our efforts.
Many of you guys have often sent me emails & private messages asking me why I haven’t gotten SS on this website, or this blog, or this youtuber’s page. Most of the messages I receive from you guys deal with marketing and promotion! The fact of the matter is, I probably HAVE contacted them. We have a spreadsheet of hundreds of various websites, forums, youtube channels, and news sites that we contact for big things, like T22′s launch, and uni resets. We even subscribe to press release services made specifically for gaming. The problem however is for every 100 places we contact, we’re lucky if even one of them bites. It’s not so much Star Sonata’s fault as it’s the way of games journalism, and even journalism itself.
Marketing an indie game is a juggling act, you don’t want to waste time contacting the big websites that don’t consider you newsworthy, and you don’t want to contact the bloggers or youtubers that made one video or blog and called it all off and never posted again. The strategy is simple. Daily I contact youtubers that have small, but dedicated followings, and research websites that NEED the content. We give these sites something to talk about, and we get promotion as well. The plan is to essentially get press on places that are eager for devs to contact them. There are a lot of great youtubers out there with interesting channels, and awesome videos, but none of them ever get the popularity of youtubers like TotalBiscuit, Tobuscus, or SeaNanners. Did you see MartyrA2J’s review of Star Sonata? Amazing right? We’re all about the indie here at Star Sonata, and if we can support smaller, fantastic channels, then that’s what we’ll do.
Now I know what you might ask next. “Well, yeah okay that’s news, and blogs and stuff, but what about ADVERTISING?” There were lots of changes in web advertising over the last few years that severely gimped us. Old Star Sonata players might remember the surge of activity we got back in 2009-10. This was due to Google’s advertising platform. Unfortunately things have changed, making advertising on specific websites nearly impossible to do cheaply or effectively.
Another thing that costs a ton of money is things like gaming conventions. We prefer this to advertising on a smaller budget because it allows us to actually interact with our players and future players. We went to PAX Prime this year to see how it’s done, and had our first appearance at the Norwich Game Expo this year. If you know of a gaming focused convention close to you, toss me a PM or an email and I’ll look into getting us an exhibitor space!
We’ve also increased our efforts in our outward communications such as social media and blogs. We’re making an effort to focus on writing blog posts that provide useful information to not only our players, but to non-players as well.
So for the Tl;dr of this post I’ll answer maniac45′s question in as few words as possible:
Yes, we plan on increasing our playerbase. Our plan is to finish conducting research into our target audience and contact youtubers, and smaller blogs & sites that cater to that audience. We also plan on attending various gaming centric conventions as exhibitors to make sure our name and game is consistently out there and on people’s minds. Once we start seeing a consistent gain of players we’ll start pushing for the bigger websites, youtubers, and bloggers.
If you are a developer with questions about marketing, toss me an email at marty@starsonata.com! I’d love to chat with you!
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