By Victoria Tran, the Communications Director at Kitfox Games, an indie studio in Montreal. Currently working on Boyfriend Dungeon, Lucifer Within Us and publishing Mondo Museum and Dwarf Fortress.

This was originally posted on their blog. 

Thousands of games come out, with thousands of dollars in marketing. How are you supposed to compete with that? How do you stand out… with a marketing budget of $0?

Let’s talk a little about the strategies we use at Kitfox. For some context (and you can understand what resources we have/do not) — we’re a team of 9, released 5 games, developing 2, and publishing 2 more. It’s my full time job to do the community, PR, events, marketing, social, etc. Tanya, our captain, helps out with marketing and any key decisions.

Among all these projects, one thing has remained: we haven’t paid for ads, influencer deals, most of the PR has been done solely by us, etc. It’s $0 marketing.

Or… is it?

This was a clickbait title

So the first thing we need to talk about is the fact that there is no such thing as $0 marketing. Any time, resources, networking, or abilities spent on promoting your game counts as money being spent on marketing. I have a salary. Time spent prepping for an announcement costs money. So on and so forth!

Why do I bother pointing this out? Because failing to account for these things in your budget and time management means your plans may swing wildly out of control. But also to combat the idea that “free” marketing is somehow not worth putting a lot of consideration into!

The Modern Online Buyer’s Journey

Briefly I wanted to talk about what a lot of marketers refer to as the buyer’s journey — some of you might have heard of the marketing funnel. This is kind of an updated version.

                                                                   Image from Blue Corona

I bring this up because whatever marketing activity I’m doing, I’ll keep in mind where the marketing activity I’m doing fits in. For example, tweeting about our new game is in awareness while our newsletter updates go into consideration.

I like to take mental notes of this because if not, you might not realize all your marketing activity is skewed and mainly just focused on one phase. For example, maybe we do a lot for the awareness phase, without much put into the purchase phase. You need to balance your marketing and see where it all fits for context. Cool? Cool.

Your Game

I could write a whole blog post about how important it is to know how to frame and differentiate your game among the sea of games. Oh wait, I did!

Here’s the thing though. A lot of the time when we say you should have a “unique” game, a lot of people get caught up thinking this means they need to make an Extremely New Game Idea. But that’s not what we mean. It doesn’t actually have to be ~the most unique game in the world~ . What we mean is that you need to form your marketing in a way that makes it seem unique to the player’s mind.

                                  Dwarf Fortress, the most unique but also not unique but also very unique game

And “being better” isn’t the key point here either. Avoid just trying to compare yourself to other games in your strategies. Not a lot of people are interested in what’s better — everyone wants to know what’s new.

Hooks

Now — one of the hardest hooks to nail is the “hook” of a game. This is basically the initial sentence or pitch you’ll hear about a game AKA how you’ll capture someone’s interest and hook them into learning more. I’m going to talk a bit about it here because I find that’s the one people struggle the most with.

What game is this?

The thing is, you could probably fill it in with any number of games. Boyfriend Dungeon, Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, The Messenger, etc. They’re all viable games you could use to fill in the blank.

My favorite thing to do is to remove your game name (and all proper nouns) from the description. Replace it with a game that is a competitor/similar to yours. Is it basically indistinguishable? Then you need a better hook. Looking at your competitors and seeing the hooks they used may also prove useful. Did they work? If they didn’t, why not?

If you need some help making something unique, take out everything you would usually use to describe your game and try to describe it again WITHOUT THOSE WORDS. (E.g. no using the words story-driven, puzzle, narrative, mystery, action, metroidvania). Does it still sound interesting enough to play? Is it easy enough for a non-gamer to understand? Can you embed a feeling of excitement or intrigue into the customer when they read it, even before they start playing?

                                 A description taken straight from Crypt of the Necrodancer. Note the simplicity.

As a marketer, you NEED to have the ability to think like how a customer would. It’s easy to get caught up in thinking everyone understands your game because we’re surrounded by game developers and like minded game enthusiasts. But not everyone is like that!

And when you’re ready to test if it’s a good hook or not? Do A/B testing on social media! Pitch your game to people at events! Tell your non-game friends or family! Is it a sentence that’s easy enough to repeat?

tl;dr : Hook Strategies

Note that your hook should actually refer to some core part of your game though!

Store Page

Alright, so now we’re on the store page portion of your game.

It’s always good practice to assume that people are too lazy/have no time to actually scroll through and read what’s on your page. So you want to optimize the first impression as much as possible, meaning you should put a lot of attention into:

Your Steam Capsule

So one of the things we have to consider is how your game looks when someone is casually scrolling by it.

This is where your Steam capsule comes into play. Here are the different iterations of the Boyfriend Dungeon ones.

                                                      From left to right: Capsule A, Capsule B, Capsule C.

Our first one, Capsule A, is mainly “romantic”, but doesn’t really reflect much about the game other than the name. It did well in attracting attention in the beginning, but that was likely because it was new and the Boyfriend Dungeon game announcement was new.