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I will talk, from our own perspective and our own (in?)experience, about the struggle indie game developers face when comes the time to get crowd-funded in this massive amount of competition.

Coming out of nowhere and trying to reach out.

Xavier Moiny, Blogger

June 19, 2013

3 Min Read

8 Months ago, we started to work on our first indie title: Space Nomads, at that time we already knew that we had to get the word out as fast as possible.

The plan was to build a momentum of news at least 5 months before the launch date, and to sustain that momentum the best we could until the alpha launch (and hopefully further).

We had the chance to go at an Indiegogo campaign event/conference where John Vaskis (Indiegogo's Gaming Vertical Lead) gave some interesting tips on how to successfully launch a campaign. We were glad to see we were doing what was recommended from the start.

It does sound pretty on paper, doesn't it?

Well, then comes real life, it is where we are at right now: 3 days into the campaign and only a mere 3000 views so far for 59 contributors, and most of it being ''love money''.

When you find yourselves fighting against the ferocious competition in the crowdfunding scene you realize that it will not be an easy task to get noticed.

Even if we had nice coverage from RPS and other websites along the development, and had positive articles here and there as well as thousands of views on our youtube videos, it does not, in any case, give you the certainty that your game will be covered on Launch day/week.

So, how can you get noticed?

You Facebook, tweet, mail, call, post on forums, talk to people, of course. And you keep doing it, rinse and repeat, until maybe some well followed journalist, some big channel will covers you one more time and gives you that so much needed exposure.

Being unknown in this field is very hard, not knowing any journalist personally is even worst, and most of the bigger websites don't even seem interested to cover your game. That is, if only you can actually find these precious journalists emails.

I think a good edge would be to meet these men and women in person, these guardians of the holy coverage. We live in Montreal, Canada and sadly we spent all the money on the development of the game and we will not be able to meet much of the press in real life.

If I have one suggestion, for any other young indie game dev team, based on what I experience now, it is to take that extra time to build your network as much as possible. If you have the opportunity to go to an event and meet some journalist face to face, DO IT!

Any meeting, any event has to be attended to, you need people! You need connections, a lot of them! It s not enough to build a cool game with a distinctive art style (although it is important too), but if you don't have the speaking force behind you, not enough people will see or hear about that special game you are making.

Get out there! That's what we are learning right now.

Xavier

LoadingStudios.com
Spacenomadsthegame.com

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