Creativity vs Marketing… (part 2/2)

Disclaimer: This DevLog is intended to help anyone, who is in a similar situation we are in at the moment. Everyone has to make their own decisions. This merely is our own honest view and opinion, based on our experience. We would love to hear from you, what you think about it all. We wish you all the success and fun you deserve with creating and marketing your game! eXplore Studio

So when panic strikes and the days before release are counted, we tend to search for various ways to market our game. We watch countless tutorials and we get overwhelmed rapidly. We hear phrases like ‘Get inspired by games that are similar to yours’, ‘Find your niche’, ‘Know your audience’, ‘Get in touch with influencers and YouTubers’, ‘Send your press kit to the press’, ‘Are you attending this X convention?’, ‘You need to be on X social media platform’ etc… Some days we hear one thing and two days later, something else. Too much information to process, too many variables, too much confusion!

In my humble opinion, there is unfortunately no magical recipe to market an indie game when you work on your own or in a small team: we need to do what feels right for us in line with our understanding of the current market, the resources we have, and above all, the time we have. We’re juggling between publishing a game and marketing it at the same time, while also trying to preserve some sense of normal life and sanity! We personally have focused our energy on two digital platforms where the game will be released and on three social media platforms. It’s already a lot to manage and to learn about as they all have their individual characteristics, settings, audience, algorithms (still a mystery to us!!) and more. We try, we succeed, we fail, we try again. Will this post get more likes? Is now a right time to publish some screenshots or videos? Which music should accompany my video? We continuously question ourselves and learn from our successes as well as from the parts that did not work so well. Yet, we are proud of our achievements, and we have already come a long way. Our community is growing, and we are immensely thankful for their support and encouragements.

So, if you feel like your situation has some similarities with ours, or is rather different, we feel you and we support and encourage you. We should not be discouraged if we don’t reach the number of followers we wanted, if the number of views doesn’t exceed our threshold or if we don’t get the number of wishlists we anticipated. We should be grateful to have been given the opportunity to follow our dreams, to meet amazing people on the journey, to learn new techniques...and to have made mistakes that will help us grow. We are passionately and proudly creating something beautiful, a game that will be published worldwide and be a testimony of who we are. Our legacy.