Publicity Is the Hardest Part of Game Development

The largest outlet we were able to get on our own was Joystiq, which featured our story for the first week. Otherwise, cold calling, submitting news, and trying to get in contact with editors/writers was pretty much a bust. We did get a few news articles or mentions on several more well-trafficked sites, but the only reason we ended up on Giant Bomb was that Patrick Klepek contacted us. There aren't any definite solutions to this, just keep meeting people and keep networking.

We gave Steam keys out to anyone who wanted to review the original Auditorium's rerelease, and we did a bunch of interviews with anyone who asked. It was a big time commitment, for probably a minimal amount of eyes, but we thought it was still important to build relationships with budding game writers and sites, and it still gets our company's name out there for search engines. You also meet a bunch of cool people.

If someone wrote a story about us, we went a little out of our way to answer people's questions or clear up misconceptions about our company and Kickstarter. There are limits to this, of course, as this sort of stuff can suck up all of your dev time, and not all comments have good answers.

We have a roughly 24k person mailing list, built up over the years, which we hit once at the beginning of the Kickstarter, once at the midway point, once at the beginning of this week, and we're planning on at least one more. You must reach out to these people, because they're the ones interested in your work in the first place. If you don't have a mailing list for your company, start one and encourage people to sign up. Just don't abuse it.

Philly's game dev scene is really small, so we can be called a "Philly game studio" and have it mean something. If you're in a location where a place can "own" you, definitely take advantage of it. Local tech sites are happy to feature you, and even smaller news outlets are way more willing to talk and write about you. We also participate actively in our local IGDA chapter and other small groups, and were one of the sponsors for the Global Game Jam here in Philly. The friends you make help you out big time. We know they were our most vocal supporters throughout the Kickstarter.

Before the Kickstarter went off, we updated our two iPad games to display a little flag in the menus that links directly to the Kickstarter. They will disappear after the Kickstarter. We also timed the launch of the Kickstarter to coincide with the rerelease of our first game on Steam. The Steam description promotes the Kickstarter as well.

Our two highest trafficked sites are cipherprime.com and playauditorium.com, they both have very prominent Kickstarter banners.

We love, love, love Starcraft 2, and we've started an at least monthly online tournament where you compete for pizza (we call it Pizzacraft). We held the first one last Saturday. We kept it small because it was an experiment, but we wish we'd started it months ago because we're just getting started and we think it has big potential for getting our name out there.

We really should have more educational stuff out in the aether. We participate in monthly Unity technical meetups in Philly, and occasionally give talks at local educational institutions about design or music in game development. We have a lot of in-house knowledge that we could potentially share. These are the sort of things we should be putting on Youtube and providing to the community at large.

This was something that is potentially very useful, but we're a small team with different opinions about the business consequences of giving away large amounts of product, and for the sake of team harmony we decided not to do a big game giveaway.

We have really lopsided social media use. Twitter we're great at (follow us!), but we never really contribute to gaming forums or social news sites. We'd like to improve on that, because we think that's a huge piece missing from the formula. If you don't use social media because it's tedious and irrelevant to making games, that's fine and partly true. But it's a different story when you're trying to sell games.

Twitter.

Facebook.

Haha, we wish.

Our Kickstarter had pretty good timing, coming in the wake of the Double Fine and Wasteland 2 successes. We were a fairly sizeable project (read: more than several thousand dollars) that was aggressively pursuing our project. I know we benefited immensely by just walking in the shadow of titans, because we could be a project that was held up as a counter example. Would we succeed? Would we fail? Were we riding on Double Fine's coattails? Were we doomed because of their success? The portrayal is less important than the readership. As time passes this story won't be as compelling, but there will always be something interesting about projects, and you have to leverage that something into news.

You can't please everyone, and not everyone will like your games. But there are people who love your games more than anything and they go out of your way to support you. We are so incredibly grateful to these people and are willing to go out of our way to make sure we deserve that support.