Why is marketing still a blind spot for indies?

What early lessons can VR devs take from the indie scene, where the marketplace is already mature and getting crowded? We asked indie game marketer Hannah Flynn to write a follow-up to her Develop 2016 talk about this indie blind spot.

I work within a medium-sized team, covering all aspects of comms with my marketing manager. Our meta-job is to ask questions, raise flags, and encourage the right amount of thought about how the rest of the world will perceive our games. Sometimes that results in changes to the games! But marketing monsters with ridiculous demands are a thing of myth (or possibly just of AAA, I can’t be sure - I haven’t worked in AAA).

The videos of sessions from Develop 2016 have just been released to ticket-holders, meaning you can go back and pick up sessions you missed.

I spent probably three or four days working on my session, You Need to Hire a Marketer, to which about 10 people came, most of whom I knew by name.

Other than making a clear attempt to tug your heartstrings and get you to watch my video, I want to ask: why didn’t people come? Why do so many indie studios still treat marketing as a hindrance?

I’ve got a few hypotheses:

Marketing is evil. Or so the popular narrative goes: marketers are suits who interfere with game designers’ craft. Pushing poor decisions based on what will sell and blaming devs when games fail.

Marketers are expensive. Some of us are. But these days there are different ways to pay people, options for flexible working, and more graduates than ever wanting to get into games. There are ways to afford marketing support which don’t break the bank.

Marketers are scammers. As soon as you’re on Steam Greenlight you’ll probably be approached by marketing firms offering you services. Some of these make sense but others will sound like they’re promising the world, meaning they couldn’t possibly deliver it.

I can do it myself. Anything looks easier from the outside. I’m sensible enough of my abilities to know that I couldn’t make a game, and I’d invite you to consider that marketing is a career path in itself which requires its own skills. Some people are excellent self-promoters, bloggers, tweeters - this is wonderful. Hire someone who can help you with the rest of the marketing mix.

Marketing is scary if you have no experience of it, but releasing is scary without marketing. It’s far better to investigate getting marketing support early than to bury your head - your money, time, life - in a game, in the hope that people will just find out about it because it’s good. That can’t happen for all of us.

Hire a marketer. Give the responsibility to someone who likes doing it. Spend more time on your game. Be happier. Sell more games. Make another game. Survive.

If you can’t watch the video, you can view my presentation here. I hope you’ll have a read and tweet to me @h4nchan with your thoughts!

Hannah Flynn is Communications Director for Failbetter Games, makers of Fallen London and Sunless Sea. She has previously worked for Penguin Books, Tate and the NSPCC.

GUEST BLOG: Vive la punk!

As much as I don’t like to admit it, I’m an old bastard, having been in the industry in various forms for 20 plus years and working with the team at Sports Interactive for 19 years.

Miles Jacobson

In that time, I’ve seen a lot of changes. 20 years ago, hardly anyone was using email for a start, let alone high speed interweb that many people take as a human right nowadays. We’ve gone from bedroom coding, to being told that the only way to survive was to be a huge multi-project, multi-studio indie, from indie being the only way, to publisher owned being the only way, no studio IP ownership to Angry Birds toothpaste, from console being the only way to go, to mobile being the only way, and pretty much everyone up until a couple of years ago claiming that the PC was dead (for the record, we’ve done pretty well on PC constantly through this period).

It’s all been pretty exciting. We’re very lucky to be part of a constantly changing industry – the only stable thing being the entertainment we provide to people who play our games. But right now, for me, it is the most exciting the industry has ever been.

Effectively, we’re going through punk.

Barriers to entry have, by and large, been removed.  You can now make a game using one of the many platform tools available for next to nothing, and publish it yourself for Windows, Linux, Mac or Android with no barriers at all. Getting onto some of the digital retail platforms is harder, but in Steam Greenlight’s case, democratic. There are a few hurdles to cross on some of the others, but none of them unsurpassable. Unless you want to be on Xbox, but I expect that’ll change.

People making games in their spare time, and having hits. People able to make games around themes that they want to work on, rather than what the market tells you will sell. I’m very lucky in that, at SI, we’ve always made the games that we want to make with little interference, but I’m well aware that most in the last 20 years haven’t had that luxury.

Of course, this new punk isn’t utopia. There are still huge problems with discoverability no matter what platform you are on. I can name a lot of games that I thought would be a lot more successful than they have been, and others that have simply not been picked up on at all. When you have tens of thousands of games coming out a month, not all can be successful. But at least people are trying.

I see in the press a lot of the woes the industry has been through and still faces. But I don’t see enough celebration of the success stories, such as the dozens of teams that have gone from being made redundant to releasing their own creativity, the tools that give the power to the devs, the new IP so desperately needed to push the industry forward (hey – sports games are immune to criticism there, OK!)

What’s been really great for me to see has been the camaraderie amongst the new breed, particularly in the UK. I’m lucky to have met many of the devs and teams, both socially and via my work at UKIE, and it’s brilliant to see people helping each other out with discoverability which is the key to success – let’s not go the way of punk and let jealousy get in the way of getting creative work recognised. Or spit on each other. That would be bad.

Some old school publishers are learning, too. Those who aren’t fixated on next gen consoles and hundred million dollar budgets have either worked on their future business models already, or, well, just like so many record labels in the punk era, they won’t survive. They can certainly help with marketing, PR and finances for those projects that need it and, in many cases, will get extra sales on titles – but the best have learnt that they are not the talent who makes the games.

You, the developers reading this, are the talent. Make great games. The rest will follow. Vive la punk.

This blog was written by Miles Jacobson, managing director of Sports Interactive and Develop Conference advisory board member. Contact him on Twitter @milessi

THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

Discovery is a big buzzword in the games industry. As the digital marketplace has expanded and platforms have multiplied, the floodgates have opened for developers of all ages and sizes to create relatively cheap games and market them directly to millions of gamers across multiple territories.

That’s the good news. The bad news is this means the volume of games now being released has grown exponentially and the process of discovering them is now a bit like hunting for a needle in a haystack. It’s easy to understand why some developers feel it’s nothing more than chance that seals the fate of one game over another. It’s not.

The onus is on the developer to enable gamers to make these discoveries; in the same way that big budget marketing campaigns could be accessed to enable gamers to discover blockbusters under the old order. Without developers enabling discovery, games won’t make it into the charts, gamers won’t buy them and months, if not years, of hard labour will go to waste.

Developers should also understand they need to do more than just promote their games. They need to start promoting themselves, too.  Developers who are able to get the world to take notice of their talent are doing themselves a big favour when everyone is competing for attention. Developers by nature aren’t extroverts, but more are going to have to go against their instincts and learn to shout from the rooftops. They need to get social – they need to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube and Vimeo to promote themselves, their talent and their games.

Sitting back and relying on others to talk about their games just doesn’t cut it in this digital marketplace. Why is this so important? Think about any studio with a famous figurehead. Peter Molyneux at 22Cans? Now think how infinitely easier it is for a well-known, media friendly developer to attract that vital first burst of attention to his or her creation. Heard of Curiosity? Exactly. Every snowball has to start somewhere!

The UK has a fantastic pedigree of being at the forefront of innovation and creativity in the games industry. Indie studios are doing some great work but they’re not being recognised for it. They haven’t yet been discovered. It's time they were. It’s time these studios made themselves heard and, in turn, used their voices and talent to energise others within the industry.

A great place to start is Develop’s Indie Dev Marketing conference on 10 July; it launched last year specifically to help indie developers understand – and use – PR and marketing to take their games and their studios to market on limited resources. I’d also encourage all indie studios to enter the Develop Indie Showcase, whose sole aim is to help new studios get discovered. The deadline for entry is 13 May and all of the information can be found at www.developconference.com.

ENDS

Susan Marshall is content director for the Develop in Brighton Conference – 9-11 July, 2013. Speak to her susan@tandemevents.co.uk