Let’s say there are two types of strategies to get exposure for your game:
- Short term strategies: posts on social media, paid advertising, cold emailing influencers etc. which are based on actively promoting your game.
- Long term strategies: word of mouth, SEO, recommendations from platforms etc. which are based on having a great game that passively promotes itself.
What strategy should you follow?
I’d say it depends on your situation.
If you’re just starting out, you’ll have to use a lot of short term tactics.
They’re actually very efficient compared to the size of your following.
If you have 10 followers and get a reddit post with 10,000 views, you might 10x your audience overnight.
Plus you couldn’t really use long term strategies even if you wanted to.
How do you get word of mouth going if no one knows about your game?
Now let’s say you’re already a legitimate developer with a big audience.
In this case, short term strategies probably account for a tiny percentage of your total exposure.
Having a post with 10,000 views wouldn’t make much of a difference to your 100,000 followers count.
Sending in an additional 2,000 users to your Steam page is barely noticeable when Steam itself is giving you millions of impressions.
At this point, I’d say it makes more sense to spend time working on your game rather than actively promoting it.
So, if like most of us, you don’t have a big audience yet…
Should you spend all of your time trying to make a great game?
Probably not.
Until next week,
Thomas Gervraud