How to Promote Your Game

Introduction

Hello fellow game developers! At some point, after release of the game, or during the development, you start planning the marketing for your game. It might be an easier task for an established and well known companies with existing customers and subscribers, but also a difficult task for an indie game developers and small companies.

This page is made to help you understand the approximate field of work to be done to successfully promote your game and acquire new users into it.

Cross-platform store presence

It is no secret, but stores have their own algorithms for search and promotion of games. Steam, Google Play, App Store and others can include your game into seasonal sales, category lists, editors picks and such similar offers.

Some of those are controlled by game developers – in Steam dashboard you can submit your game for another sale offer manually. Also specifying tags and categories automatically makes your game visible on pages designated to those tags and categories.

Some other visibility – editors picks, high category ranking is usually obtained through hard work and is a reward for quality of your game. High grossing, great reviews, viral content – will make your game rank higher not only on the category pages, but might also be a factor for your game to appear on the store homepage.

So, obviously, cross-platform presence will multiply all the above mentioned opportunities by the amount of stores your games is listed on. You probably know, that recently even Sony started porting their games to Steam, for the same reasons.

Make a website

Website is your starting point to provide your potential clients with basic information about your game and make an influence on their decision to purchase/install it.

Descriptions, screenshots, gameplay videos, reviews – add everything, make it look great and you are good to go. Whenever gamers will come across your website – you will get another chance to prompt them with a special offer or otherwise suggest to try your game.

Don’t forget to link to all the stores, where users can get your game!

Social Media Marketing

This approach might need a deeper explanation and might also require you to designate few people into it. Maintaining social pages is not easy task at all and will drain some of your time and money. And here is why:

Different Content

To promote your game in social media, you will have to create tons of content. Texts, images, videos. Not only you will have to create this content, you will also have to adapt it for different formats – vertical videos for stories, horizontal for Youtube and so on.

Influencers

Most likely if you don’t have your own subscribers you will have to spend on reviews from influencers, to promote your channel, your website and your game of course.

Regular time commitment

Unlike information on your website, which can be static for years, running a social media channels will keep you busy on a daily or even hourly basis.

Search Engine Optimisation

If you already have a website, you will probably want more potential clients to visit it. Thus your website should be visible in search results when people are searching for games with similar tags or words, or even looking exactly for your game.

From what I can tell about SEO in gaming industry – usually games have Wikis, Forums, How-tos pages and FAQs, that attract the most of the search traffic. Besides, make some guest posting on other Games-related websites.

To rank well you will have to complete both technical requirements (correct use of titles, descriptions and valid HTML, make your pages load fast etc.) and obtain some social activity – shares of your website, time spent on your website and similar metrics.

Don’t forget you can also submit your game to our database as well.

App Store Optimisation

Similar to SEO you will want your game to be visible in stores. To achieve that you will need to create a quality content for your store pages and have nice results in grossing, daily playtime, retention or other metrics.

Those metrics will naturally affect users interest of course, but will also trigger store algorithms and make your game more visible.

External traffic also matters. The more users you bring to the store on your own (from your website, other sites, social media or paid advertisement) the more visibility you will get in store search.

Besides, at some point store moderators might give you a promote manually, but you have to make initial boost on your own.

For that reason also consider adding your game to play-best-games.com

Paid Advertisement

Making paid advertisement for a free game and non-commercial game makes no sense. Cause there will be no return on investment. But if you consider your game a business, one of your goals is making profit. To start paid advertisement you will have to make a deep research, calculate average spend per user and decide how much you can pay per click/install.

Also you will need to use attribution tracking technology and a database for the user acquisition data, to measure effectiveness of the campaigns.

Aside from that, make sure to prepare quality marketing content, that will provide high click/conversion ratios.

Paid advertisement is not a rocket science though, but still should be taken serious, cause you can easily spend money without any effect in return.

Giveaways and Resellers

Some stores like Steam, allow you to generate keys for marketing purposes or for distribution in third-party stores.

There are a number of sites on the web that can run giveaways if you provide them with such keys, you can also distribute those keys to third-party resellers. Both options might bring additional users to your game and is a great initial boost for your marketing during release.

Do you want us to launch a giveaway or sell some of your keys? Send a message to [email protected]

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