Welcome to week 4 of the module indie game startup.

By the end of this week, we will be able to: 

1. Create a marketing plan for an indie game.  
2. Use social media and content marketing to build product awareness. 
3. Use email lists and community forums to capture sales leads. 
4. Evaluate the return on investment of different forms of promotion.

The challenge this week is to work on our marketing plans, taking these points into account:

1. Discuss what platforms and channels you would use for marketing, and create a marketing timeline.
2. Explain how your marketing strategy supports your particular genre, game design, marketing hooks and USP.
3. Where possible use references and evidence to support your decisions and explain your choices.

As this challenge forms part of our assignment, I’ll keep my notes private for now, but I have had a few reflections whilst working on the marketing plan.

Differentiation

There is a wealth of information and guides out there on how to market your game. Every game developer today knows exactly which channels are available to them, knows the tone and voice of those channels, has plenty of examples of marketing via those channels, and has access to plenty of blog posts and post-mortems (post-morta?) by other developers about how not to do marketing, or which pitfalls to avoid.

I guess the missing piece of the pie is now just how to differentiate yourself in this very crowded market.

Assumptions during market research

I read a marketing book more applicable to regular businesses who sell widgets in multiple markets, and have historical sales, so the assumptions made there didn’t feel natural to indie gamedev, like “assume currency doesn’t fluctuate”.

But then I read this article:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/postmortem-toem

A good thing to keep in mind is currency fluctuations. The TOEM developer got funding, but it was not in their own currency, and they lost some funding this way, as the exchange dipped against them.