Ok, just watched the first few minutes of that video. She had to become a content creator/influencer as a NECESSARY EVIL to promote her game.
Yeah....that's something a lot of people want to avoid doing. Again, I think the answer comes down to money. You need a budget, a large budget, to pay influencers to play your game and tell others about it. Unless you want to do what she did.
Hey Torin, I must admit, i found it hard to listen to her 😂 but it's a common and relatively simple way to get visibility, but still effort for sure. If people want to avoid creating content (and I include myself in that) then personally i'd look at two other options:
1) Ensuring your game fits into a niche high-demand niche where as soon as you even mention it in the right places you will get at least a bit of traction. For example, a point and click game pushed out to the many point and click facebook/reddit communities. That does of course mean a more money focused and less passion placed approach, which I'm not particular fond of.
2) Appoaching publishers with a polished demo. This is where watching some Thomas Brush content can be very useful. Then the publisher is the one who budgets for the marketing
3) Emailing journos, magazines, etc
Other than that, attending game shows, approaching streamers and trying to get visibility without creating content ourselves seems like less effective but practical ways too. I was responsible for the marketing for my last project, I built a community of about 7000, on some days got over a million hits on the site (bringing it to it's knees) with very little content creation, no youtube channel, just emailing bored games journalists and networking as well as attending EIGF one time. We then got investment but ultimately the game didn't pan out. I took a more traditional dev news approach, a blog, screenshots and then posting them about the place and back linking to the blog. I also ran a publically accessible community forum (unlike discord) which helped with the SEO.
Regardless of all this, if the idea doesn''t strike a chord then no amount of content marketing, emailing etc is going to help.
