{"id":106659,"date":"2020-01-03T19:43:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-03T19:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/356245"},"modified":"2020-01-03T19:43:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T19:43:00","slug":"dont-miss-indie-game-marketing-tips-with-failbetters-hannah-flynn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/01\/03\/dont-miss-indie-game-marketing-tips-with-failbetters-hannah-flynn\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Miss: Indie game marketing tips with Failbetter’s Hannah Flynn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hannah Flynn<\/a> has overseen the marketing of successful games like Fallen London<\/em>, Sunless Sea<\/em>, and Sunless Skies<\/em> as communications director at London-based Failbetter Games<\/a>. On the latest episode of the GDC Podcast<\/a>, she shared the fundamental guidelines of game marketing, particularly for smaller studios.<\/p>\n

Listen now on iTunes<\/a>, Google Play Music<\/a>, and Spotify<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Flynn spoke at length with Gamasutra’s Kris Graft and Alissa McAloon about effective marketing practices, practical ways to improve your game\u2019s store page, and more.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re marketing by yourself, the way that you start is with a really good store page, with a really good Twitter, and with a press list and press information.<\/strong> You commit to doing those things, you nurture them, you cultivate those things. Start making a press list. Start day one by looking up a game that is a bit like the one you want to make, Googling the reviews of that game, looking up the journalists who worked the reviews, finding those journalists on Twitter, and saying \u2018Hey, I saw you liked X\u2014I\u2019m making Y. Can I put you on the press list? Could I send you a key?\u2019 and do that until you have a list of people who are warmly interested in the sort of stuff that you make and do a little bit of that every day.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe big mistake is feeling like marketing is a big homogenous, single activity thing that you spend lots of money on and if you don\u2019t have any money you can\u2019t do marketing. You can. You just need to account for marketing time within your development time. It\u2019s part of development, it starts at the beginning of development. It\u2019s people who ignore it because it\u2019s daunting that will miss out.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sunless Skies<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt feeds into what I call the health metrics of your store page. I say when you start marketing your game, you should start with the store page. No amount of stuff you do to drive people to your store page will sell your game if your store page sucks.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSo when you put it up, go back to it every two weeks, review it, change things, tweak stuff. We were named a game of the year recently by a couple of wonderful outlets, so I put that up on a bit of artwork and slapped it on the store page. Your store page has to look healthy and alive and a contributing thing to that is review numbers…<\/strong>What you really want is \u2018Overwhelmingly Positive,\u2019 which is extremely hard to get.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026But the rest of the health of your page is if people can understand your capsule image when they look at it. Do they understand the vibe of what they\u2019re getting? Do they get the genre of your game from what you\u2019re putting on the [page]? Genre is so important to convey\u2026Selling the genre and getting the actual verbs that the player is doing and using every bit of the page [is important].<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSo many times, people have not been specific enough to describe their own game in their own tone of voice, they haven\u2019t given enough imagery they haven\u2019t given enough sense of genre, and just a few change of word brings the health rating of the page up. It just raises peoples\u2019 confidence to buy. People look at your page every day, and people decide \u2018Is this something I want to buy or not?\u2019 And you\u2019re just like, \u2018Ugh I just haven\u2019t updated my page in a month,\u2019 people are going to look at it and think it\u2019s crap! (laughs)<\/p>\n

\u201cYou kind of have to give yourself a recurring task and think of it as that\u2019s the shopfront, that\u2019s the book jacket for your game. It\u2019s so important.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cCollaboration and strategic discounting<\/strong>, I would say. The biggest things this year that have moved the needle on Sunless Skies<\/em> have been big sales, targeted sales, and digital collaboration \/ events with other developers.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026Collaborating with other people who are at a similar level to you or a slightly more aspirational level than you is a really good way to reach new audiences. We\u2019re in a couple of bundles now across different publishers which makes our game appear on the Steam pages of other games in a way that we control and not just algorithmically.\u201d<\/p>\n

Listen to the full episode on iTunes<\/a>, Google Play Music<\/a>, and Spotify<\/a><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Register now GDC 2020<\/a>, which takes place March 16-20 in San Francisco. Subscribe to regular updates via Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, or RSS<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent Informa Tech<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hannah Flynn has overseen the marketing of successful games like Fallen London, Sunless Sea, and Sunless Skies as communications director at London-based Failbetter Games. On the latest episode of the GDC Podcast, she shared the fundamental guidelines of game marketing, particularly for smaller studios. Listen now on iTunes, Google Play Music, and Spotify Flynn spoke […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}