Devlog #6 - The Dark Mine: Marketing
Introduction
In todays devlog we are goig to talk about maketing. It's the hardest part of the game for us, not the graphic design, programming, bainstorming, none of that is as hard as marketing. If you are currently in the marketing phase too or just like our game just keep on reading as this is one of the more informative and long devlogs so far. That is also why throughout this level we'll just show you some Images of our game (mostly unrelated to the text). And as always enjoy this weeks devlog.
The Plan
So before doing anything complex we need a plan which we split into three phases:
- Pre launch
- Launch
- Post launch
Simple enough. Our plan is obviously way more complex than that so let us break it down for you, we won't spoil everything though.
Phase 1
Phase 1 mainly consists of starting a community. First is social media: We use itch and discord and maybe something else in the future. It is important to have one main platform where your community gathers. For us that is discord. Now that we now where to grow a community we need to actually start growing it almost like a plant. It needs to be watered regularly and if you do it long enough you'll have a tree just ike in our discord. But to grow this little plant even more we will reach out to game reviewers and ask them politely to review our game, so we made an email template which we will use when needed. Before we get into how to write a good email here's a quick screenshot
(Level 18 Preview)Now take a look at this:
- Write a catching headline. Think like a reviewer, what do they look for? Why should they review YOUR game? If you were to write an article about your game what would your headline be? Use that as your subject line.
- Make the email personal, if you find out their name and what they like (maybe from a portfolio you've read) you should make the email personal. If you can't find anything about them it's also fine to just use an email template.
- Make the email look good. Make it formatted well and don't do too much, distracting them from your main point, which is getting your game reviewed so keep that in mind when writing the email template.
- Make the journalists job as easy as possible. If you give them 5 links to social media one for your website and one fo your discord and then ask them to review your game without providing easy to find media they will probably not review it. So for instance only link them your website where you'll have all the details they need, like a press kit where all screenshots, videos etc. are located.
If you don't know many reviewers there are lists of hundreds of reviewers online, but you should choose one that fits your audience. Knowing your audience is one of the key parts when growing your little plant. Quick screenshot time:
(Infinite Mode concept art)Now it gets interesting. We currently have a community of about 40 members, how would one go about growing a whole community out of that, we barely have a sappling we need to grow. So naturally we made a absolutely fool proof plan for that too! Don't believe us? Well mathematically speaking you know every person on earth by about 6 - 7 layers of people that know people and so on (6 degrees of seperation sometimes known as 7 degrees of seperation). That means if you know a person that knows a person that knows a person and so on 6-7 times you probably know Elon Musk. Anyways, the point is if you, yes you, were to tell someone about our game and tell those people to tell their friends about the game this would result in exponential growth. So go on dear reader make our game known to every human on earth. Ok that was so much text so let's do a speedrun
(Level 9 preview)
Phase 2
Basically phase 2 consists of maintaining the community and growing it further by reaching out to influencers and other reviewers using past reviews as a resume. Also if we were to make money in phase 1 we would use it now for ads. In this phase we also want to soft launch a game, that means launch the game to a restricted audience for alpha testing. That would happen in the discord server.
Phase 3
More reviews, more influencers, more 7 degrees of seperation and maintanence of the community.
Conclusion
Wow this was a long one but we really hope this helps some developers to start a community if you have questions or similar join our discord. We didn't even have time to talk about everything so if you want a marketing part 2 devlog let us know by commenting. That's it for this devlog if you made it this far that's actually crazy so thank you. Now at this point we would tell you to follow leave a comment or read our last devlogs but we are different if you haven't noticed yet.