Marketing as an Unknown Indie: My Internship at FishPotato Games

Before going into this article, I would first like to thank Alan Thomas, creator of FishPotato Games, for the experience he gave me by hiring me as his first intern. Working for a small studio gave me the opportunity to not only fill many different roles, but also allowed me to learn so much more about the game industry because FishPotato Games is a small, independent, and unknown studio. Instead of working with something that was already built, both Alan and I were starting from almost nothing; giving me the chance to really understand how this industry works.

Introduction & First Lesson:

During my time at Harrisburg University (HU), I took a marketing internship with an independent, one-man game company, FishPotato Games. During my time there I was able to experience firsthand what it's like to market, publicize, and release a game in an oversaturated mobile game space.

I originally met FishPotato Games' developer and creator, Alan Thomas, at a game conference held at HU (Let's Play PA) during the fall semester. Let's Play featured both student and professional games. I was showing a demo of a game in development now, Bouncy Box Yeah and Alan was showing Punch a Pickle, a game he recently released with some success. During the conference, I approached him and asked him if he would like an intern. At the time I needed an internship (for university requirements) and I thought a small independent company could give me an interesting experience. Without ever having had an intern before, he said yes; it was an internship at first sight.

Before the internship began, Alan and I went over what I was going to do for FishPotato Games. The list contained different tasks that included marketing, social media management, level design (my main interest), game testing, and audio production. Due to the amount of work I had put into social media and marketing, I was only able to do about half of these items within the amount of time I had allocated for my internship weekly. Marketing is truly a full-time job.

Brand Awareness and Social Media

Before I started working for FishPotato Games I had no marketing experience. During the internship, everything I did, that was marketing related, was based on research and educated guesses. At the start, I had two clear goals. My first was to reactivate FishPotato Game's social media accounts and unify them under one brand. My second goal, which goes hand in hand with the first one, was to create an official FishPotato Games website with all of their games, social media links, news, and contact information.

I started with my first goal immediately, reactivate and unify FishPotato Games’ social media. I first turned Alan's personal and unused Twitter account with seven followers into the official FishPotato Games Twitter account. Alan and I also linked the Twitter and Facebook accounts together so posts on Twitter would go straight to Facebook. For Twitter specifically, I did research on using hashtags to gain followers, retweets, and other interactions. Using hashtags such as #indiedev or #gamedev automatically got retweeted from automated Twitter feeds and helped us get more attention in the independent game community. Early on, I learned that using Facebook is not a way to increase followers, but keep the community we already had, updated. I would also occasionally post in independent game groups on Facebook. Lastly, I set up the FishPotato Games social media accounts with Buffer, a tool that allows users to schedule posts on social media platforms. I would prepare three to seven days in advance and then monitor the posts. I would try to get at least two posts out a day at specific times on Twitter.

During my time at FishPotato Games (January 2016 - June 2016), I was able to raise the number of followers from 7 to over 420 through posting mostly photos and gifs of gameplay and development with the right hashtags (these got the most attention) along with following individuals, companies and groups who would follow FishPotato Games back. Also posting at specific times, such as 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM helped us gain more interactions with the indie game community. While a number of followers we gained is not a lot, we did this without paying for any marketing and just through posting. This was a big accomplishment for both myself and FishPotato Games.

After starting my work on social media, I started doing more work on brand unification. At first, this was done by simply having the same profile images and banners on all accounts, but those were small, easy things. This was done more so by building an official FishPotato Games website. fishpotatogames.com originally sent the user to a portfolio page of Alan Thomas which featured an outdated list of games worked on. This was unprofessional and did not like a company, just a portfolio. Alan agreed with me and we build a new fishpotatogames.com.

Releasing a Game

Releasing FishPotato Games' Voxplode 2 was a challenge for me because I had never released a game before and was not sure how I was supposed to go about it. Alan, on the other hand, released six games before hiring me as his intern. However, in the past, Alan did not put as much effort into marketing when releasing a game. During this time, Alan and I set up a public beta test, worked on search engine optimization (SEO), and connected with bloggers, podcasters, and creators on YouTube to gain more publicity.

Before the release of Voxplode 2 the game had to be tested for both user experience and bugs; this was another part of my job as an intern. Alan and I alpha tested the game together so he could fix the major bugs. We then we decided to attempt a public beta using the Google Play and iOS app stores. This was geared towards trying to get more gamers on mobile interested in Voxplode 2 and to try to get more publicity, while testing. We allotted 1,000 spots for testers then publicized it on Twitter, Facebook, and the FishPotato Games website with a form to become a tester. Unfortunately, we only got about 3 participants through the marketing, so I asked a professor if we could test the game in a class or two. He allowed us to do tests in two of his classes which were about 40 people in total. This helped us gained both interest and awareness along with receiving great user feedback. I also used the feedback as a way to get keywords and phrases for search engine optimization.

SEO or search engine optimization is optimizing an app, website or other product for search engines; in other words, making an app searchable and easier to find. Alan and I were trying to make it so that if users searched different words on the app stores, Voxplode 2 would be one of the top apps that showed up. This involved doing a lot of keyword research; looking up keywords and seeing how many people searched this (or how popular the word was), seeing what apps popped up with different words along with how popular those apps were. For this, we used a service called SensorTower. This was a tedious process that was made easier because, on our Voxplode 2 feedback form, we asked testers to “Use three words to describe this game.” This helped us figure out what people thought when they played it and guessed at what they would search when they’re looking for apps and games.

As the game got closer to release, I needed to find other ways of getting the game out to people. Social media alone was not going to do that. Both Alan and I started emailing and messaging different game publications (websites, YouTube channels, etc.). Eventually, three publications (after contacting about 20) got back to us. The first had technical problems and did not end up reviewing it. The second (TruSkillGames) got back to us and invited both Alan and me onto their podcast to interview us about game development and review the game. They were a small but up and coming YouTube channel and podcast. The last site that got back to us just wanted us to pay for advertisements and with our $0 marketing budget, it was not an option.

Post Mortem

Voxplode 2 did not reach as many people as we wanted. We had under 1,000 downloads for iOS and Android, but more downloads on Kindle (most likely due to it being ‘Actually Free’). FishPotato Games also did not make any revenue on the game through ads or microtransactions within the app. With those results, it is not likely I made much of a difference for Voxplode 2. However, I made an impact on FishPotato Games as a company by increasing its social media presents and showing the importance of marketing and social media management.

What went right

What went wrong

Takeaways/Lessons Learned

I take the experience I have gained from FishPotato Games and measure my success with the lessons I have learned. I hope other getting into games or even in games already can learn from the experience I have had. Here’s what I learned: