Perfect "marketing" can still lead to a disappointing outcome

Posting on social media is just a small fraction of marketing.

Hallå pals!

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

---

There’s lots of new folks here! Thank you for joining this humble and messy lil’ newsletter. Pleasure to have you here!

Incase you don’t know, I make video games and I draw a comic strip about a deer wearing a space suit.

Last week I wrapped up a short story in Space Deer about a lonely piece of chewing gum. You can read the whole five part sequence over on the website, it runs from strip 64 to 68. Could make for an interesting jumping-on-point if you’ve never read it before.

I’ve been busy with freelance work these last few weeks, so I haven’t had time to work as much as I would’ve liked on my game projects. But I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts and videos about marketing. I felt like I reached a new level of understanding for it recently.

That’s what I wanna try to put into words today. It’s been a while since I wrote an essay, so here’s a long one.

Marketing is doing the right project

I had a gradual shift in how I see marketing.

To begin with I was a “pure artist” to the core type, I was someone who only cared about making stuff which nobody else would ever make, 100% from the heart, and to not allow any forces outside of my own mind influence what I make.

The risk of being a pure artist is I might end up making art for no-one. Which is fine as long as I don’t hope to make a living from my art.

But that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to work on my art and projects all the time. So I need to turn it into a living.

Which is why I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking over the years to understand what can transform my practice into something that can sustain me. And now I see things quite differently. I’m still a pure artist to the core, but it doesn’t make up my whole artistic beliefs anymore.

I’m not all “lofty dreams” anymore, I also have a dose of “dealing with reality” to carry those dreams.

The biggest shift in my thinking is how I see marketing. As a pure artist I used to think marketing meant to post on social media and to buy ads. That’s actually just a small fraction of what marketing is, it’s called ‘promotion.’ And only thinking of marketing as promotion is unhelpful.

What I mean is, I can do a great job at promoting my work. In fact I can do it perfectly and still be disappointed in the outcome.

Let’s take my last big game project Surmount as an example.

In hindsight I would say we did a great job with its promotion. We appeared in a lot of places that gave us visibility, like Wholesome Direct (two times), Day of The Devs and a few big streamers tried the game. I posted a lot about the game on TikTok and on Twitter.

Surmount’s steam page

A bunch of people played it and liked it. That’s pretty much what you do to promote an indie game. Despite doing all these things, the game never took off the way we had hoped. In my eyes there are two reasons for this.

1. The game isn’t quite fun or catchy enough.

2. It’s unclear who the game is for.

If the game had been more fun, then there would have been more of an organic mouth-to-mouth effect. People don’t seem to be recommending the game to each other.

But to me the second reason is the core problem. Even if the game is GREAT, the right people need to be attracted to it. This gets to what I’m really trying to say today.

The most important marketing decision you will make is what you create.

It seemed pretty clear to us while making Surmount; it was a wholesome roguelike. It’s just… these two genres are almost opposites? We didn’t focus enough on either of these aspects of the game.
We should have embraced one of those genres and delivered what those types of players are looking for. There’s a clash between these elements (which I personally find interesting). But this ambiguity makes it hard for either of these audiences to own it.

The game would have looked quite different if we had leaned completely into only one of these genres.
If we had gone the wholesome route it could have had lots of cute animal-like characters, more peaceful visuals, more forgiving and chill gameplay.
If we had leaned completely into the roguelike aspect we could have embraced the challenge and made it a little darker. More epic.

We tried to do both but neither very convincingly.

Of course I don’t know for certain if doing either of these changes would have been enough for the game to find a bigger audience. But take a second to think about what sorts of games you like. Most of them probably fit quite clearly into a genre.

Fitting into a genre isn’t all there is to it, but it is the major factor which decides who your art is for.
Then it’s not enough to make something that is just ok within that genre. Whatever you do needs to be great. By ‘great’ I don’t mean you need to be 100% original or bring ground breaking innovation.
Just check what everyone else is doing in that genre, make sure you do that too. And do it your way, according to your own taste, but fit in enough to not alienate that audience.

I heard somewhere that great poets don’t try to reinvent poetry, they just try to write great poems.

To me that describes pretty well what I should be doing too. I need to stick to the format of poetry and pour myself into it.

Marketing isn’t social, it’s strategic

In this blog post Chris Zukowski described perfectly how I used to think of marketing.

People assume social media is marketing because you can just “do it.” For instance, you go to a site like twitter.com, you fill in a text box describing your game, upload a gif, then hit “Send,” and poof! You did marketing! It is public. It is tangible. It is done!

Posting is not all of what marketing is, it’s just a small fraction of it (called ‘promotion’ as I mentioned earlier).

For me posting on social media rarely pays off.

When we were promoting Surmount, most of the wishlists came out of us being part of different events. And that always happened because we sent an email to the right person, not because of a social media post.

Marketing isn’t something I start doing at some point further along in the project. I am actually doing it from the very start. And so do you, regardless if you’re doing it consciously or not. The decision of what to make is where your marketing decisions begin.

Promotion is a multiplier for how interested people are in your idea.

Understanding this made me feel less helpless, there are some choices I can do to get my art to spread further.

In general we tend to think in binaries, either you’re a pure artist or you’re a sellout. I would say a pure artist has heart. A professional artist has heart and is strategic.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence* is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

*I’m not saying that I’m a “first-rate intelligence.”

---

Side note: I should also mention that your work needs to fulfill some kind of fantasy. That could be a whole topic in itself…

---

Mini Notes

📝 Blog post - You don’t need to be an extrovert to be good at marketing

Excellent piece about strategic marketing for indie games written by Chris Zukowski. He’s really the go-to guy about this stuff. I think his might be the blog I’ve spent the most time reading in general these last years.

🔴 Youtube video - Marketing For Indie Games: Land A Hit Game!

This is a great video interview with Chris about the same subject, but he says it so much better and also touch on other similar areas. I consider this mandatory watching if you’re an indie game developer struggling to make people pay attention to your games.

As I’m processing this I’m also trying to think of ways to apply these ideas to my comic… I mean to have it spread further. Maybe I could do a better job promoting it.

💬 Manga - Shuna’s Journey

This is one of Hayao Miyazaki’s earlier works, I think it came out before Nausicaa and the movies. His style is so consistent with the films, it almost felt like watching a movie but sped up and condensed.

I found it a bit odd that it was told so much like a picture book, relying a lot on text explaining stuff instead of showing through action and dialogue. But it helps move the story along faster. Which is nice.

---

Panel of the week

(from Space Deer)

---

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Take care and have a creative week.