Two Rex Makes #7 - Growing an Audience
One of the first pieces of advice we were given was to build an audience before releasing a game - the logic being that you can design the best game in the world, but if no one knows about it then no one will play it. In such a crowded marketplace it’s unlikely that word of mouth alone will help a game to attract attention, and great designs can slip under the radar. This blog sets out our thoughts on how first-time designers might be able to generate that audience.
First, a quick note on Kickstarter. Like a lot of independent designer-publishers our plan is to use Kickstarter (or a similar platform) to try and get our game out into the wild. But Kickstarter’s main job is not to generate an audience for you, whilst they have some helpful tools (pre-launch pages and a number of live campaign options) they note they expect the designer to do the majority of the marketing.
The obvious next step is to use social media channels to let people know what you’re up to. In an initial flurry of enthusiasm, we setup accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube and built ourselves a website. Basically, this was a ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach.
So what stuck? The clear winner is Instagram. Perhaps it’s the visual medium that lends itself best to the design process, perhaps it’s just capturing the social zeitgeist and people will move on to a different platform over time, but far and away this is the place where we’ve had the most successful engagement. We initially wanted to focus on design blogs and visuals, but it’s been fun to also share our wider views on what makes particular games fun and our excitement at finding something new and interesting.
That doesn’t mean I’d advise ignoring the other channels, but I think it’s good to know in advance where the audience appears to be concentrated, and if you are time pressed, that’s where I’d advise you to get started. Facebook is about broader communities rather than advertising a particular game, and we’ve found this useful for getting involved in groups and making one-on-one connections. Twitter’s place in the puzzle seems harder to define, but it seems to be the best place to join conversations around new and upcoming games. It’s also fantastic for stumbling across spoilers for Obi Wan.
Our website has had the least bang for our buck, and we’ve found that driving traffic away from the social media platforms is a difficult trick to pull off. In the longer term, we hope it’s a good investment should our publisher ambitions come true, but for now it’s just been an interesting opportunity to learn how to get a bare bones website up and running.
I’m writing this at a time when we’ve basically got nothing to show other than a few early design ideas, so maybe these dynamics change once we have a finished prototype. In the meantime, check out my stop motion Tabletop Simulator animation – a rainy afternoon well spent!
Interested in our various platforms? Find out more here:
Website
https://www.instagram.com/tworexgames/
https://twitter.com/tworexgames