Pressing cmd-R every 5 minutes doesn’t help with mental wellness, even less with user acquisition. Creating hype before launching a game is a crucial step that every game developer must remember. What have you done in terms of “marketing” in the last 4 weeks before the release of your brand new game? I bet you were struggling to make your game shine, or you were re-submitting your Apple Store application after it’s been rejected a hundred times. Now that it is on the appstores, you’re left staring at your screen, looking at the unprogressive number of installations you got. OK, you’ve learned your lesson - next time you’ll try to create more hype. This post is intended for indie game developers with their games covered by dust in some cold digital store. As for the pre-launch hype, I’ll cover it in the later posts.
Getting people to play your game might be one of the biggest challenges you will face as a game developer - it could leave you without revenue - and even with a very fun and engaging game, it can become fruitless if you fail to acquire gamers! But don’t fret, I’ll take you through some of the major ways on how to acquire gamers who will lead your game to success.
First of all, let’s start with what you can achieve with your own time: the use of your communication channels. If you don’t get enough organic installs despite of having built a landing page of your game, and social media profiles, then it’s time to understand why. One possible question could be: Is the old-fashioned SEO of my landing page working? Do the keywords I chose make the game findable? Another one could be: How often should I post updates on my socials? At what time is the best time to do it? And so on.
As for the landing page, try to have one per platform. You should identify relevant keywords to use on that page to increase your chances of getting seen. A fancy title with an inviting copy would also help in terms of marketing your game. If you have some budget to spare, try to include a game trailer with a great call-to-action which invites your future players to download the game. Ideally, you must have two sets of call-to-action: the first one stands in the center, while the second one sits in the top-right corner of the page.
For social media marketing, you either spend time with it yourself, or hire a freelancer to do the marketing for you. If you want to do it yourself, determine the best time to post your promotional content - it is preferably during the daytime of your target population. Most importantly, you must engage with your active followers consistently. In my case, I hire a virtual assistant to do the marketing, social media management, and forum penetration for me. There are times that the game you are promoting is something that you don’t personally enjoy. It happens to me a lot, and it is difficult to promote a product that you wouldn’t normally buy yourself. The answer is simple: outsource the job to the people who would enjoy selling the game for you.
OK. Those are all well-known things that you have likely already checked. What about creating an in-game cross-promotion with fellow game developers? What’s the point to be in an indie community if you can’t ask for a little push? I’m pretty sure they’ll also be happy to help you out in exchange of the same little push from you.
One annoying thing to ask your friends that they probably won’t do: ask them to submit store reviews of your game. Push it a little harder by convincing them to share your game trailers on their social media profiles. Alternatively, if you know someone who does YouTube videos, or stream on Twitch, ask them to do a game review, or a Let’s Play video with your game.
If you don’t have friends at all, or they’ve left you because you were too demanding about getting your reviews, here’s a couple of things to reward your time spent so far on this post:
Contact them with game codes and a direct link to play your game! They should create a good buzz.
In this period of time, you can also test the copy of your communications, “A/B testing”. Try to write the same content in different ways and track your links. It’s a good analytical practice, and of course, his kind of testing can be done with plenty of things like game mechanics, in-game pricing, in-game messaging, and app notifications. I might not have mentioned it before but it should be clear that this process is part of a wider user acquisition plan, which is a unique part of your live game operations. Hang around for the next post where I will cover other UA sources.