I was recently sent an email by another indie gamedev wanting to know more about how we marketed The Signal State. I wrote a detailed response that I thought might be useful to others, so here it is in full:
Hi XXXX,
Thanks for your email. The marketing manager who handled our marketing efforts is no longer with our publisher so I can only give you my thoughts as the developer. I think our game was ‘lucky’ in the sense that it had 2 potential audiences with not that much overlap between them, i.e programmer types who like Zach-likes, and electronic musicians who are really into synthesizers, so that naturally increased the potential pool of customers.
We announced the game as part of Steam Next Fest, and that helped get us a pretty decent number of wishlists (which then helps increase prominence in the recommendation algorithm). Next Fest is a lot more competitive now though, so I’m not sure how helpful it would be this time.
We also did fairly targeted marketing efforts to both audiences too, focusing on Twitch streamers and Youtubers who might be into this sorta game. For the musician side of the potential audience, I think we focused on influencers whose content is not purely focused on music production but also covered tangential topics, e.g Benn Jordan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxFtHlOOOTU) was a great influencer we worked with, as while his main focus is on music and sound he also covers related topics, e.g the physics of sound or the economics of Spotify. Naturally that means his audience is probably more open-minded about what sort of topics they’d be introduced to by his channel.
We also sent codes to major press sites, and did successfully get coverage from some of them, e.g Kotaku, PC Gamer. I think the fact that it was inspired by synthesizers and music made it stand out for the journalists there from other puzzle games. Plus the fact that our game is quite visual, with interesting animations and UI design. Some sites like Eurogamer only covered the game when we released our sandbox mode, which delves deeper into the musical side of things, which probably made the game even more interesting to cover.
We had some presence on Twitter and Reddit, but the ROI on marketing efforts there seem pretty minimal and not worth it I think. We also submitted for various awards, and when we got the Indiecade nomination we did have a bit of a sales bump, though not particularly big if I recall. Indiecade doesn’t have quite the same influence as it used to have years ago, I suspect.
Right now in our long tail we still sell decent numbers of copies when we go on discount, a small amount from wishlist conversions but actually a decent number who I think probably got recommended it by the Steam algorithm. I think our biggest sales bump by far was when we got picked for Steam’s Daily Deal. How to get picked by Valve for that, who knows tbh!
We have quite a lot of copies sold in China, as we have a Chinese publishing partner who probably helped a fair bit in getting the word out about the game. We probably should have localized the game to Japanese at release too, as we had a fair number of Japanese players who played it, albeit in English initially. I think Japan is probably a big market for ‘nerdy’ games like ours.
Anyway I hope this helps! If you have any other questions let me know.
Regards,
Benedict Lee
The gamedev responded, asking further if we had any success working with influencers covering programming and similar topics. Here’s my response:
Hey,
We did send keys and worked with influencers who mostly covered indie games, but I don’t think we worked with programming based influencers that much. Our game tends to be on the easier side compared to other programming puzzle games so I think that maybe influenced the decision to not focus too much on programmers, who might find this game too easy. Our publisher also contracted a few other marketing companies to assist with outreach, particularly in other regions. Not too sure how much that helped. The only one I know for sure helped a lot was the Chinese publishing partner.
I think the one way we did go after more programmer nerd types was by cross-promoting with other similar games, though this was all initiated by other devs. Early on, Alan’s Automation Workshop reached out to us to do a bundle, and later on the folks at luden.io (developer of While True: Learn) organized a Ada Lovelace Day sale with a bunch of developers of similar games, which they intend annually I believe. We also had the dev of Neon Noodles reach out to do a bundle with a few other games. Might be worth reaching out to these guys to see if you could collab in some fashion.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Benedict Lee
Tangentially related, but this Twitter thread by the Ghostlore devs is great, and we were basically following the same strategy with The Signal State: