How many players can you reach?

As a solodev, your marketing plan might look something like this:

  • Make a viral reddit post to get all the players hanging out on reddit,
  • Make a viral imgur post to get all the ones there,
  • Contact a hundred streamers and YouTubers to get all the ones watching videos,
  • And then you’re done! You’ve told everyone about your game!

But actually, even if you’re successful with all of those…

…you won’t even have reached 1% of the players who might be interested in your game.

How is it possible?

Say you make reddit post #1 today and reddit post #2 in a month.

Most of the people who see #1 won’t be the same as those who see #2.

Only a fraction of the total number of a website’s users are there at any point in time.

Same reason why you can retweet the same thing multiple times without annoying your followers. 

People don’t just go through all of your tweets in a linear fashion. 

They maybe see one of them amongst a sea of other tweets. If you’re lucky.

And if you get a second video from a YouTuber, you’ll still get a lot of new people seeing your game.

Now, take a look at Dead Cells and Hollow Knight.

Saying that these games are popular is almost an understatement.

I see people talking about them everywhere I go online. On streams, under YouTube videos, on reddit… it seems everyone has played those games.

But go to their Steam page and look at the number of recent reviews:

If you consider that 1 review roughly translates to 30-50 sales…

…it means Hollow Knight has reached anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 new players in the last month.

And that’s on Steam alone!

What does that mean for us?

You’re never done marketing your game.

You could market your game your whole life…

…and you still wouldn’t be able to reach every player that’d be interested in playing it.

Maybe you tried to do a big marketing push for your game’s launch but it didn’t work out.

Now, you obviously have to look at the reasons why it failed. 

If it got bad reviews, maybe you need to fix some things in the game.

If you got a lot of views but they didn’t convert to sales, you might need to rework your game’s page, trailer and overall presentation. (or maybe the game is not that appealing)

But if the only issue was that you didn’t get enough views, there is still hope.

As long as you keep marketing it, you’ll get new players. 

It’s not all over just because you failed to reach enough people on the first day.

Until next week,

Thomas Gervraud,
Developer of Space Gladiators: Escaping Tartarus