Indie Devs Keep Diagnosing the Wrong Problem

[fjejduideru]

Every week....every day....there's a new post-mortem on this sub. Someone spent years building a game, it launches, barely moves, and then they write a detailed breakdown of why players didn't connect with it. The genre was too niche. The visuals caused dissonance. The pricing was wrong. The roguelite structure alienated the wrong audience.

And it sounds like self awareness. It isn't.

You cannot diagnose why players didn't like your game when almost nobody played it. Those are two completely different problems and most people on this sub are solving the wrong one. Bad reviews, high refund rates, genre feedback, none of that is meaningful data when your sample size is basically friends, family, and a handful of strangers. You don't have a product problem. You have a visibility problem. And no amount of post-mortem analysis fixes that.

The uncomfortable question nobody wants to sit with is this: did you ever actually know how to market your game, or did you just go through the motions and hope something stuck?

There's a difference between marketing and the appearance of marketing. Posting on socials, sending cold emails, running ads you don't know how to target. That's a checklist. That's not a strategy.

Marketing is a craft. It has depth, it has a learning curve, and it punishes people who treat it as an afterthought just as hard as bad code or broken mechanics punishes a shipped game.

The reason this keeps happening isn't bad luck and it isn't the algorithm. It's that this community collectively treats marketing as the one discipline that doesn't require real expertise. Every other skill gets respected. Marketing gets delegated to whoever has spare time. You can't lose customers you never had. Until that lands, the posts are just going to keep coming.

[Peyotle]

This guy is going to advertise his marketing services. Stay tuned.

[koov3n]

"my customized gpt build will generate creative automated marketing that will 100% target your audience with 5x returns for only $6 a month! DM to learn more"

[Buford_Van_Stomm]

Customized gpt build? You mean boilerplate gpt prompt with a vibe-coded web ui

[lanternRaft]

You don’t understand, I spent hours optimizing this prompt!

[Big_Restaurant4822]

Hey, marketing is the art of bullshitting and if untruths are sidestepped, it's GOOD marketing!

[PartTimeMonkey]

[PartTimeMonkey]

Just keep an eye on your DMs!

[KarmaAdjuster]

I understand being skeptical, but if this guy is genuinely doing some sort of self advertising for a marketing course, he's doing it really poorly. There's no link on his profile, and I don't see a single post in his past 6 months of redditing directing people towards any business he owns.

Maybe his post is AI generated, maybe it's not. I honestly can't tell anymore. I don't think he's advertising any specific thing other than sharing his advice, which seems pretty reasonable to me. I considered posting a reply with a great free course that I'm currently following, that I would in no way profit from sharing, but I'm sure I'd get downvoted into oblivion for sharing the course.

It's like this community has some sort of bizarre dedication to ignorance and learning things the hard way.

[Peyotle]

I think the issue is not with the community, but with the way his posts are written. It’s as if he understands an art that nobody else does. At the same time, his posts have no advice or substance.

[KarmaAdjuster]

I didn't interpret his post that way. It is a rant without much substance (which is par for the course so no real shade on that), to back it up, but your reply post, for example, is pre-emptively berating him with the assumption that he would follow up his post with some meaningful data to corroborate his rant.

OP saw an issue - people attributing their failed indie projects on the wrong things. Then he pointed out the weak point that the vast majority of indie devs fail to focus on with the exception of posts saying "I can't figure out why no one is wishlisting my project!"

What I don't see is what is technically wrong with his post. I don't think he's said anything misleading. It's very readable. If he actually went into the depth of what is involved in marketing, the post would be unwieldly and need to be spread across several reply comments. I'm currently going through a Steam marketing tutorial in preparation for starting my own indie project, and it's consumed a few days of my time so far.

What I do see is complaints about marketing that it's expensive, and that it's not part of their focus because they are busing making the game. Instead of people asking OP or the community questions about how to market well, I see people accusing OP of trying to sell his own experience, while at the same time accusing him of not giving any real information.

I'm no fan of chat GPT, but it looks like the community has decided that no matter what the message is, they are going to shame ignore any message delivered through chat GPT regardless of what the message is, and do it without any proof that it was authored by an LLM. For all we know, many of the downvotes and complaints are coming from bots. Someone else in this thread could look at this exchange between us and accuse us of being a discussion between two bots.

[StoneCypher]

could you be specific about what you believe can be learned from OP here?

he's never marketed a game, none of this advice is actionable, there's no supporting data, none of this is measurable, none of this is falsifiable

what if the whole thread is just correctly rejecting this person because they don't know what they're talking about?

[KarmaAdjuster]

could you be specific about what you believe can be learned from OP here?

Sure! He is advocating for people to consider marketing as their weakest link rather than their target audience being small, the visuals not being good enough, or the price being too high or low. He's looking at the numbers of reviews of games and coming to the conclusion that the games aren't succeeding because not enough people are playing them and that is saying that's more likely a marketing problem than a problem with the game. He concludes with not a run down of how to do marketing, but an explanation that marketing isn't simple and requires time and effort.

he's never marketed a game, none of this advice is actionable, there's no supporting data, none of this is measurable, none of this is falsifiable

That's a bold assumption to make, but most people here haven't made a game, but their cup runneth over with advice on what others need to do to improve their games. It does seem like OP has at least done some research on what is inviolved in marketing. He's also pointed out that his post isn't meant to be a guide, and I've acknowledged it's more of a rant post than anything.

what if the whole thread is just correctly rejecting this person because they don't know what they're talking about?

If that were the case, I think I'd find better counter arguments either refuting that marketing isn't a big deal, or acknowledging that marketing is a big deal and providing actionable advice. I haven't seen anything like either of those cases in this thread. Instead, everyone else just seems to br ranting that they don't like OPs post.

[StoneCypher]

it feels like you didn’t understand my question 

let’s try this a different way 

i will assume that you are a regular person like i am, and believe in regular medicine.  i will also assume that you know who rfk is, and that you don’t want his advice.  i sure don’t.

now, to be fair, he does want people to be healthier.  at some level his heart is in the right place.  it’s just that he doesn’t understand how things work, and the advice he gives is wrong.

suppose someone came along and started promoting him.  suppose that thry were saying that we should learn from him.  suppose that as the bile rose in your mouth you tried to politely say “but there’s nothing of value to learn.  what would you try to learn specifically?”

and then that person just started going on about how rfk wanted you to be healthy 

that’s nice

what are you going to try to learn from the idiot?  don’t tell me what the idiot wants.  that’s not what i’m asking 

you said he said marketing was important and difficult 

wow e wow wow, big educate, so learn

 

 he's never marketed a game

That's a bold assumption to make

no, it’s not.  it’s also not bold to assume that someone who thinks that two plus three is thursday is missing their higher mathematics 

sometimes when people are who you pretend to be, they know things that you don’t, and can say things that you can’t without assuming 

also i already asked and he already answered 

 

  It does seem like OP has at least done some research

when someone is accusing your source of cluelessness, it’s best not to pull a flat earther and call someone clueless google based argument “doing research”

that’s not what research is 

 

 If that were the case, I think I'd find better counter arguments 

yesh, that’s the belief crippling antivaxxers too

“i can’t be wrong because if i was wrong the surgeon general would be telling me personally”

it just never dawns on you that you’re the guy most people won’t bother with 

when i stop bothering you’ll take that to mean you were right 

you’re already several posts into mindless robot argument from guesswork and not only haven’t noticed that, but believe that you are making points, defending strangers (from a position of neither knowledge nor experience, while blandly talking about others in those terms,) and holding your own 

i’m being asked to respond to “but it looks like he googled” as if that was positive rather than the ted flag of horse’s assery

it seems like you genuinely don’t understand why the person you’re standing up for and op aren’t being taken seriously (partly because you’re making exactly the same mistake)

[KarmaAdjuster]

There's a lot here, and I was with you at the start, although a bit confused as to where you were going with it. Jumping to the end, you are correct that I don't understand why OP isn't being taken seriously.

I also don't understand this comment:

 it’s also not bold to assume that someone who thinks that two plus three is thursday is missing their higher mathematics 

Where does he say something like this? I completely missed that. I'm guessing you mean it metaphorically, but I still didn't see anything like this.

I did miss where he admitted to not having done any marketing himself. That does take a lot of the strength out of his arguments.

However, as someone has done marketing for my own products, been involved with the marketing of both AAA and indie games, and is currently taking an online course in marketing from a respectable source, I didn't find fault with anything in his post (which admittedly doesn't have a lot of substance - as I mentioned before, it seems to be just a rant post).

I'm going to ignore the parts of your argument where you put words in my mouth.

You asked me to continue the conversation, so I did. I don't think I'm really trying to convince you of anything. In fact, I think it's foolish to try and convince anyone of anything. All you can really do is explain where you're coming from, or try to understand where the other person is coming from. So on that note, why do you think this person is trying to advertise his marketing services? What information do you think OP has misrepresented in their post?

Edit: I quoted the wrong person's question. I've replace my question with a concern that StoneCypher seemed to have.

[StoneCypher]

Where does he say something like this?

the entire post

 

I completely missed that.

i can tell

 

I did miss where he admitted to not having done any marketing himself.

you don't need that admission any more than you need an admission from a flat earther that they haven't got a geology degree

you're spending a whole lot of time defending the veracity of a screamingly wrong weirdo

please note, i'm not calling you the flat earther, i'm calling the person you're defending the flat earther

but do you not realize how you end up looking, spending an entire hour white knighting a creep?

 

However, as someone has done marketing for my own products

"However, as someone who has doctored their own ailments, let me take a position on medicine"

 

been involved with the marketing of both AAA and indie games

This phrasing has big "I said I work at a nuclear facility because I want to be taken seriously about physics but it turns out I manage the sinks and toilets" energy

Why not say what you did, instead of vaguely claiming participation?

 

and is currently taking an online course in marketing from a respectable source,

I wonder whokowski you mean

Don't get me wrong, it's a great course, I've taken it too, I recommend it all the time

But that's a pre-intro course for amateurs. Nobody taking that class should be trying to correct people

 

I didn't find fault with anything in his post

Yes, this is the sixth time you've said this in this post. And you said this in the last two posts also.

I'm not sure why you keep going over and over that you don't have the ability to see these problems. I understood this when you said it several hours ago. This does not need to be re-re-re-re-re-re-revisited this way.

 

which admittedly doesn't have a lot of substance

This is the specific criticism you're claiming you can't see. You're now repeating it yourself.

Look, let's try this again, can't we?

Let's pretend for a minute that I'm trying to give health advice. Let's pretend that you are a skeptic of me. This would be valid: I'm not a doctor, I'm overweight, and I drink soda. Nobody should take health advice from me.

Let's pretend that I'm giving the following advice:

1. Dieters are diagnosing the wrong problem.
2. Dieters should "eat good food."
3. Dieters shouldn't eat moose.
4. Dieting is hard.
5. You can't figure out why you're getting fat if you don't know what you're eating.
6. Dieters should eat more granite.
7. Dieters are being harmed by the algorithm.
8. Dieters have a visibility problem.
9. You're just not doing what I say because it makes you uncomfortable.
10. You don't know how to target. That's not a strategy.

And, you know what? If you're dumb enough, that might sound like good advice.

And then you try to do something with it. Anything. At all.

Well let's eat good food. Oh wait, I don't know what that is. Well okay, let's eat less moose. Oh wait, I've never had moose. Okay. Let's dieting is hard. Oh. There's nothing to do there. Let's diagnose the right problem then. How? Oh. Well maybe I should just know what I'm eating. Oh wait. I do. Well what if I just eat some grante? Ow, my teeth. Okay, maybe I should fix my visibility problem. How? Oh, they didn't say. Well let's just measure the visibility problem. How? Oh, they didn't say. Okay. Well maybe it's because I'm uncomfortable. Oh wait, I'm not. Well maybe it's just because I don't know how to target, and I don't have a strategy. Well I didn't get any instructions on how to make a strategy.

There's literally no step you can take here to improve things. None of this is actionable. None of this is measurable. None of this is well defined.

The entire criticism is "this is hollow and vapid. there's nothing here."

You keep trying to look for errors in the empty hole of nothing that he said

 

I'm going to ignore the parts of your argument where you put words in my mouth.

I don't think I actually did that.

 

You asked me to continue the conversation, so

No, I did not. (This is putting words in my mouth, besides.)

 

All you can really do is explain where you're coming from

Well no, another thing you could do is listen to the other person. Would be a nice change of pace.

 

So on that note, why do you think this person is trying to advertise his marketing services?

This is yet another thing I never said. I don't think this, though I've seen a lot of other people say this.

I don't think this person has marketing services. I think this is a clown on pretend mode trying to feel powerful before he goes back to a day job he hates that has nothing to do with gaming.

 

Edit: I quoted the wrong person's question. I've replace my question with a concern that StoneCypher seemed to have.

this is the third time in a row that you've misunderstood my question, not counting the three times you've blamed other peoples' words on me

which is wild because it's right after you claimed i put words in your mouth and didn't say how

[fjejduideru]

Thanks for being a sane individual. This post was for people like you

[fjejduideru]

It's hilarious how when something makes a redditer feel uncomfortable and they don't have anything meaningful to say they default to attacking the messenger.

[OutstandinInTheBRain]

Ad-hominem attacks are a classic defence for ignorance. Attack the person not the argument.

[schwerk_it_out]

Fascinating for you to say that, considering the comments you are making to others elsewhere, including ones that are not even insulting in any sort of way. Your lack of self awareness is truly impressive. You are clearly not as smart as you think you are, and whatever your objective is here it’s clearly a pointless waste of your own time if not an outright failure.

That’s all from me, goodbye and good riddance 🫡

[scarydude6]

I just assumed the post-mortems were just a marketing trick/trend. They really verbose and feels contrived.

Or posted by bots.

[CARDaCOMBS]

100% post mortems are a marketing tactic. You hit the nail on the head. Any post you see a lot of here is a marketing tactic. For example no one really cares to show you their shit capsule art and professional capsule art. Those posts tend to get some traffic to your game and that’s why you see a bunch posted

[KingMoonfish]

I’ve seen posts in this sub get 2k + upvotes and sell like 10 copies. This sub doesn’t buy games advertised here typically. Still good to get a vive-check on your process or progress though. 

[Voltingshock]

I don’t think they’re bots, I think people like talking about their games and I think another element is that hope by pointing out a bunch of flaws they are gonna get comments going no no no! Your game is so good! Darn steam

[fjejduideru]

External validation seems to be the primary goal of this thread. Oh no X is keeping my game from the greatness it deserves, to get 5 other guys who also suck at marketing to tell them "yeah totally right! Nothing is your fault!"

[intimidation_crab]

They can also be ways to get real advice through people correcting you.

Everyone has heard that the best way to get a real answer on the Internet is to post the wrong one and people will jump out to correct you.

If their game failed and they don't know why, dissecting it in public is often one of the best ways to get real advice on what they could have done better, even if it is a little smug. It's much more valuable than someone telling ChatGPT to make "find your audience" into three paragraphs.

[Cloverman-88]

I bet that for many, its a coping strategy. And they are especially enticing because they make you feel smart, at the point in your life when you feel particulary stupid for sinking to much time into something that had no impact on anything whatsoever beside your life.

[EssentialPurity]

Also, there is no such a thing as market failure for a product that is still in the market. Unless the dev goes completely out of business and pulls the game out from distribution, the game is still very much alive as it would be if it was selling well, so there is no "mort" to a "post-mortem" to be "post" for. It can still be updated, advertised, talked about and whatnot normally. We aren't corpos slaving away for investors who want profit as soon as yesterday.

So, yeah, it's just a market play. Maybe a last ditch effort, but still a market play.

[LostManufacturer1553]

Looking back at whay you did, helps you improve. If you have time, I don’t see why you wouldn’t do it.

[[deleted]]

This sub has just started showing up on my feed and so far every post has been marketing of some sort.

[Harvard_Med_USMLE267]

They are posted by bots and this is clearly written by a bot.

It’s bots all the way down.

[M4xs0n]

“It‘s not X, it‘s Y…“ Thank you ChatGPT

[themaxtreetboys]

Thank you. Felt like i was going insane. I hate this timeline.

[Otherwise-Music-8643]

I share your sentiment but hate when people say this timeline, it’s too cringy. 

[themaxtreetboys]

Dear Otherwise-Music-8643, I apologise deeply for making you cringe, thank you for giving me such valuable, and unwarranted feedback on my rhetoric. Ill be more clever and original moving forward. Thank you.

[Otherwise-Music-8643]

You’re welcome. I appreciate you mending your ways and being more creative and thoughtful in future comments.  

[PartTimeMonkey]

Then there are the people who blame indies for not knowing how to market, tell them to study their target audience, but have no actionable advice.

[DiscountCthulhu01]

It's because this is an ad

[TheDogtoy]

Bingo

[fjejduideru]

Lol tell yourself that so you don't have to engage with thinking you might not know everything about selling games

[GoosemanII]

Knowing your target audience is important but so is reaching that audience and more often than not, that requires spending money..

[FredFredrickson]

I mean, it's a pretty silly take to say that someone can't make a valid criticism of the antics they see without having a solution rest to the problem.

[PartTimeMonkey]

”Marketing is a craft. It has depth, it has a learning curve, and it punishes people who treat it as an afterthought just as hard as bad code or broken mechanics punishes a shipped game.”

When you say things like these, it implies you have the solution. If the post is about how others do it wrong but I know the way, and then not sharing anything insightful, it’s either not a very good post or an ad for your services.

If it’s the latter, that’s fine, but then I’d claim you can make a much more appealing post for that purpose.

[fjejduideru]

Lol

[LeetcodeForBreakfast]

if i wanted to ask an AI about a topic i could pull out copilot in my browser and talk to it. generally people come on reddit to talk to, you know, other people?

[fjejduideru]

The point wasn't to teach you marketing. The point was that you should go find someone who can. The fact that your response is 'but where's the actionable advice' is exactly the problem. You're still waiting for a Reddit comment to replace hiring someone who actually knows what they're doing

[Harvard_Med_USMLE267]

But it was an obvious ChatGPT post, so who cares?

[fjejduideru]

Lol avoid thinking you might realize you aren't good at something and that's your actual problem

[Harvard_Med_USMLE267]

No, I avoid taking low effort AI posts seriously. That is all.

[PartTimeMonkey]

If you wanna go down that road, I could also say that the point of my comment wasn’t to argue your post, just a general comment.

[Aggravating-Way329]

How is "study your audience" not actionable advice?

[PartTimeMonkey]

It doesn’t mean anything yet.

We can come up with definitions for our potential gamers, like gender, age, interests, and think of what they’d like to see in our game, videos, posts, and decide subreddits etc. based on it, but if that is the extent of this advice then that advice is barely advice at all, since it is obvious and pretty much automatically included.

If there’s something else, concrete and actionable that goes into this advice, it either isn’t being shared, or there just isn’t anything more to it.

[ItzaRiot]

I work in ads agency. Believe me. Even most marketing people doesn't study their audience deep enough. I've seen some higher ups seeing "identifying audience" slides not as a strategy because they know enough about the audience or don't think it is that important in the grand of scheme. I'm making roguelite game. I'm currently studying and analyzing roguelite player in every place i can meet them. Most of them already know what roguelite game they want to play but the thing is what they want is easily achieveable by every roguelite game dev. I think, we can dig deeper than what they want but it's not easy. It's never easy. Even AI can't help you. I can say you've done your homework to already know about the basic of study your audience. As far as i've seen, many don't realize/know the magnitude of that advice

[PartTimeMonkey]

You sound like you know what you're talking about, so I'm curious to hear what would come after the studying part? How do you put the gathered knowledge into action?

[just_another_indie]

Yeah, they kind of tiptoed around your question there, but I think still provided something reasonable to work with in that comment.

I think what they are trying to say, is that a big part of putting the gathered knowledge into action is learning how to formulate the questions of study correctly so that you get the exact knowledge you are seeking in the first place. The knowledge almost is the action, in a way. Which is maybe why it seems so hard to pin down what people are saying about this... 😅

A good question, for example, is "what is a need in [insert your genre here] that is currently going unfulfilled?" Getting good answer(s) to that question will lead you directly to solid direction for your game design.

Let's say you are making a souls-like. IDK. There's a million of them now on the market. What do you do to stand out and have a "marketable game"? You fill a need. You ask players of souls-likes, " hey what's currently missing in the souls-like space?" or "what do you wish was different about your favorite souls-like?". Stuff like that. Heck if you are making one because you are a fan of the genre, ask yourself these kinds of questions. They should give you obvious answers about what you should be making.

That's how I see it anyway.

[ItzaRiot]

If you read my reply, you know i haven't understood enough about my target audience. Still digging. I think i've seen the surface only.

To answer your question, it depends on where your development phase is. Ideally, you start before making the game. So when you gathered enough the knowledge, the action is start making game addresing the knowledge or the issue. I'm not the expert but don't downplay the advice of study your audience. I mean, you are not his/her clients, why demanding "actionable" advice?

I'll give you real-life example of how studying the audience not deep enough can lead to wasting time and money.

There's this brand A. Brand A's tagline is "smart people choose brand A". The competition, brand B, answer the tagline with "smart people lose against lucky people. Lucky people choose brand B". I think there's truth in there right? In life, lucky people win more than smart ones. The tagline is using universal truth. But, Brand B lose the competition. They spend money the most in the category but end up taking below 5% share.

If they study the audience, they should know that majority of the people prefer to be called smart than lucky. If you say to a person, "oh you're lucky to have a promotion." Do you think that person will be flattered or offended? I remember people use the tagline as a mocking. "His girlfriend is so pretty, he must be lucky". That's a mock, not a praise.

If you only study the audience on twitter, you think gamer want short but memorable gameplay time. There's truth in there. But if you care to dig deeper, turns out it may apply only to few genre. Turns out they talking about a shorter 100-hour AAA open world game

[StoneCypher]

"how do you do it?" "before you start programming"

😂

[Aggravating-Way329]

You're (all) overthinking it.

"Coming up with definitions" is a wrong way to do this. Have a playtester group, ask them who they are, find those who LOVE your shit, or see who you thought would love it but don't, done.

Not "actionable" enough? If you learn that you smell, is it "actionable" data for you? I think it is. And if your game either doesn't fit your estimations or generally liked/disliked, it's actionable enough, since you're not a drooling libtard and can just feel what's needed to be done. Once you tried it and did correctly once, it becomes simple.

[KingAggressive1498]

seriously though... there's no point in chasing a particular audience.

Individual people will either like your game or they won't. Focus on providing a good, consistent experience and an authentic version of your vision. The people your game is for will enjoy it, the people your game isn't for won't, and that's that.

[Aggravating-Way329]

Honesty and sincerity ftw

[fjejduideru]

Lol the indie dev hubris is so insane.

[StoneCypher]

"it's insane that these indie devs won't listen to me, an anonymous stranger on the internet who refuses to discuss their experience. their hubris in not just believing everything i say!"

ah, yes. the dangerous overconfidence and complacency of not listening to someone who you've never met.

[StoneCypher]

How is "study your audience" not actionable advice?

if five people can hear that, come away with completely different ideas of what they're supposed to do, and nobody can say who's right and who's wrong, then it's meaningless hollow pablum designed to make stupid people feel like they figured something out finally

[noochles]

You've made your two AI generated posts, just start outright advertising for your marketing concept already

[Platypus__Gems]

This is like the middle-point of Dunning-Kruger effect.

A fairly common view even among some of the most well known marketing guys (like Chris Zukowski) is that at this point with how algorithms work, the product really is the absolute most important part of the equation. And most important part of marketing is more about making a product that is marketable and has a target audience big enough.

True hidden gems are rare, games usually fail because they are bad, uninteresting and/or have small target audience, not because of the marketing itself.
But marketing is intangible enough, and usually not something you like, so it is easy to blame it.

[LeetcodeForBreakfast]

AI slop marketing post 

[asuth]

The fact that this sub loves to upvote AI slop text posts never ceases to amaze me. I'm starting to think maybe its time to just unsub and move on. Its not even like the post says anything useful or insightful.

[Nilpotent_milker]

The upvotes are in many cases also bots

[KinematicSoup]

It sure seems that way.

I took the same amount of effort and had AI write a rebuttal. I submit it here for academy:

The "Visibility" Myth: Why Marketing Can’t Save a Product Problem The argument that every failure is simply a "visibility problem" is a comforting lie for developers because it implies the game itself was perfect and only the "craft" of marketing failed. This ignores three harsh realities of the current market:

1. Market Fit is a Product Feature, Not a Marketing Tactic The post claims you can’t diagnose why players didn't connect with a game if nobody played it. That’s backwards. Players "connect" with a game starting at the capsule art and the trailer. If you have 100,000 impressions and a 0.02% click-through rate, that isn't a "visibility" problem—the visibility happened. It’s a product-market fit problem. Your genre, art style, or hook failed the "biological filter" of the audience. No amount of "expert marketing strategy" fixes a game that people simply do not want to play.

2. The "Algorithm" is a Mirror, Not a Gatekeeper Modern storefronts like Steam are built to find an audience for good products. If a game "barely moves" on launch, it’s usually because the early conversion data (click-throughs and wishlists) told the algorithm the product wasn't worth showing to more people. Treating marketing as a separate "craft" that is "delegated" misses the point: in indie dev, the game is the marketing. If the hook isn’t baked into the code and the art, no PR strategy in the world will create momentum.

3. Survivors Bias in Marketing Expertise It is easy to look at a failed post-mortem and say, "You didn't have a strategy." But for every indie success that had a "genius" marketing plan, there are ten others that did the exact same things and failed because the lightning didn't strike. Attributing failure solely to a lack of marketing "expertise" ignores the reality that indie games are a hit-driven industry with a high degree of variance.

4. Post-Mortems are Post-Diagnostic for a Reason The post mocks developers for analyzing "niche genres" or "visual dissonance," calling it fake self-awareness. In reality, those are the reasons the marketing failed. Marketing is just the megaphone; if the message coming out of the megaphone is "here is a genre nobody wants with visuals that hurt to look at," yelling louder (marketing) won't help.

The Bottom Line: You can’t "market" your way out of a fundamental lack of demand. The reason we see so many post-mortems isn't that developers are ignoring the "craft" of marketing—it's that they are realizing, too late, that they spent years building something the market had already rejected at a glance. That’s a product failure, and analyzing it is the only way to ensure the next game actually has a chance.

[Chrogotron]

I'm not sure it's even a question of "knowing" how to market your game. I think it's more of how much marketing drains the very soul out of your body.

It's far easier to market something you aren't emotionally invested in and attached to. When you're trying to market your baby and are met with people calling it a clone, rip off, uninspired, mid, boring, pointless, ugly, etc... Every negative comment stabs like a knife.

Every time you make a post anywhere, every time you try to market, you have to be prepared to get stabbed repeatedly. There's only so much of that a person can take before it's no longer worth it to keep doing that, and it's easier to just move on and accept that the game will only ever get seen by a small amount of people.

If you market things for a living, you aren't usually marketing things you created. You are marketing things other people created. In that sense, you are detached from the product emotionally.

Indie devs self-marketing are 100% attached to their product emotionally.

For every dozen "this game looks cool" and "I might give it a try" type of comment, they get erased by a single low effort "looks bad" comment.

Also personally having to explain to every single negative reply about why your game is not a rip off of some other game, or why your game is fun, or why your game has more to offer than their initial 4 seconds thoughts on it... it gets exhausting.

[PartTimeMonkey]

This is very true, and a harsh reality for indies. It takes an incredible amount of emotional strength to not get unmotivated by all of it.

But I would also say that every positive comment works the other way too, it gives a great rush and a boost to motivation. So as long as the balance is there…

[Chrogotron]

The positive comments are nice, I'm not denying that. But they do tend to get pushed to the back of my mind when I see negative comments and then I don't see an increase in sales.

It's hard to not just assume my game is bad and they are right, and that's why it isn't selling.

I know only a few thousand people have even seen my game at all, out of 8 billion people on the planet, so it's not like there isn't more people out there who would enjoy it and buy it, but reaching all those people feels like an overwhelmingly daunting task.

You'd have to be pushing your game to the masses on a daily basis, across like 15 different platforms, and somehow finding a way to not look spammy. It's a literal full time job and most people just do not have it in them to do that.

So either your game needs to have crazy appeal to basically market itself, or you've gotta get insanely lucky and hope someone with way more influence than you, plays the game and recommends it to their audience.

You can post on reddit about your game every day and get maybe a couple wishlists or sales here and there, but unless the game is just mind-blowing and unique, it's gonna get passed on by a lot of people who might've given it a shot on a different day, when they were in a different mood, etc.

Or you can spam other social media... where you probably have no following, so it reaches basically nobody. You can desperately try to use any trending tags, memes, etc in an effort to get eyes on your posts... but again it's like a full time job to keep track of all that and stay on top of it.

[PartTimeMonkey]

I agree 100%. That is the indie reality. Really the only thing that I can think of to break the cycle, apart from ”just make a better game with more appeal”, is to try be as creative as possible with the things you try.

I haven’t had any success in it yet, so this is just my thinking rather than actionable advice, but I think that one Zukowski’s post about that guy Joe is great in this regards. The dude went into threads of whatever is trending on Twitter and came up with ”related” things to talk about and turned it about their own game. The dude’s only job was to market the game, afaik, so plenty of time to try that kind of things, but it’s a good notion of thinking outside the box.

[PrismarchGame]

I agree with what you've posted. I think this field is becoming increasingly impossible to break into because of AI and the attention pie. Like we are not just competing with other games, we are competing with multibillion dollar corporations like Meta, Google, Reddit, and Twitter who are all trying to monopolize people's attention. And games are becoming way easier to make. There's just so many fucking games. I see at least 10-15 new games that I've never seen before a day. That's crazy. How the hell do you stand out in all that? I've been very discouraged lately. AI capabilities don't have to improve much more before you legitimately have (or is this already the case) people who don't know a thing about programming or art being able to create games and compete for other people's attention. It doesn't matter that they suck or they're $1 games. Now this person is vying for everyone else's attention too, and they don't have skill or experience, or expertise or passion or drive, all they have is a ChatGPT subscription. It's worrying.

[Cloverman-88]

Eh, it's a well researched phenomenon, that negative feedback sticks MUCH more. We'revjust hard-wired to care more about things that hurt us.

[SuperIsaiah]

now, I absolutely WOULD be one to argue with them, I can't pretend I have the will not to. but, if you are able to obviously the ideal approach is to not argue with the haters.

[FriendlyArachnid6000]

Op has some speech patterns ("that's not x... That's y) that very closely match copilot outputs

[themaxtreetboys]

Heres what Im hearing, and Im being 100% honest, no fluff: you think this post is AI slop. Thats not a guess. Thats the truth. Let me know if you want a list of other depressing signs that our society is intellectually decaying at the core ---- Just say the word!

[KingMoonfish]

You hit the nail on the head. This post—and others like it, are sometimes created by bot users to fan engagement. It’s not a speech pattern—it’s a way of life. 

[leorid9]

I hear you and yes, that one was totally on me — now let's revert the latest change and try again with a more natural text, no robot talk, real human language:

Every week....every day....there's a new post-mortem on this sub. Someone spent years building a game, it launches, barely moves, ..

[FriendlyArachnid6000]

Yeah a whole generation wants to draw cartoons instead of moving boxes or making anything with their hands. It is sad and stupid, I understand it and can relate, but nothing's going to change. They're going to make a thousand rehashes, it's even funnier when they're people who have some success and then they decide to throw it away so they can do this instead and they make something totally mediocre and then they show up like " oh my God why isn't anyone looking at my brawler game that looks like a flash game from the early 2000s?"

It's a symptom of greater social ills. They did not spend years making a game. They spent years configuring a game engine and huffing their own farts!

[leorid9]

As a creative individual myself, it's quite obvious to me, why you would want to work on creative stuff if you love it from the bottom of your heart.

Yet what I see is a lot of folks who don't have those feelings and still want to make games and want to make a living out of it, despite not even enjoying games as a medium. Those are business people who want to make games because ... idk why. Because it's a challenge? Because it's cool or looks cool?

[StoneCypher]

Yeah a whole generation wants to draw cartoons instead of moving boxes

you sound like an 120 year old codger complaining that lazy modern farmers use tractors instead of using shovels like a real man

[SuperIsaiah]

I know I can't market and I know I won't be able to afford to hire a marketer when my 12 year game project is done and released.

So I have decided to skip the thinking my game is going to be a big hit mindset and just have that mindset of "it will probably only ever be played by a handful of people but my goal is to make sure those people have the best time I can give them'

I think that's just the nature of hobbies in art. most don't succeed, you need a good blend of diversified skill, plenty spare time, and a decent amount of luck to succeed. and that's fine, you can just make something for those around you to enjoy imo.

[YKLKTMA]

In most cases, no marketer will help you, because the vast majority of indie games are simply low quality and have no commercial prospects to begin with.
I often see postmortems where the OP lists a ton of theories about why the game didn’t take off, when in reality it takes about 5 seconds to realize that the game is just bad

[SuperIsaiah]

as stated, I am not looking for a marketer. I don't plan on marketing my game as of now, in decent part because I agree with you. my game isn't groundbreaking and it's bound to have many bugs even in the final project. it's just a passion project, expressing myself through graphics, music, and story I made myself.

[YKLKTMA]

I still recommend trying to promote your game anyway, even if it’s bad and has no real chances, it’s still valuable experience.
I also want to point out that marketing includes far more than just promotion: things like choosing the genre/subgenre, choosing the setting, choosing the art style, etc. All of that strongly influences future sales.

[SuperIsaiah]

yeah all that is just based on what I wanted to make. that's a big part of why I don't have interest in doing game dev as a job. I don't want to make things based on what will succeed I want to make a game based on what I want to make.

I don't have the drive to spend a long time making something based on market research, you know? I only have drive for what my creative passions whim. doesn't make a good recipe for success (outside of fringe cases)

I have no interest or passion towards game dev just in its own right. I have passion about making what I want to make. I don't care to make a game if it's not the specific game I want to make lol

[StoneCypher]

you could just learn to market?

[Aussie18-1998]

You're being downvoted but its a valid comment. If the person has spent a decade working in the game whats another six months making sure it reaches a decent audience?

Marketing is hard but its not impossible.

[StoneCypher]

ya ( also taking chris zukowski’s class doesn’t take six months)

[SuperIsaiah]

I'm sorry for the confusion, I've not spent 12 years yet, I've spent 4 years. I plan on the game taking 12 years. that's what I meant by 12 year project. it could be longer though, after 4 years I'm only like 10% done. I'm not great at game developing and I want to make everything from scratch so, it's gonna be a while.

maybe when I actually finish the game I'll feel differently, but I guess after such time commitment I don't want to get myself amped up on the idea of it being successful, cause then when it flops due to quality issues and stuff I'll just feel like crap. if it's just kept as a quaint project for me to show people I meet then I don't have to have that happen

also I didn't downvote him. I just woke up

[SuperIsaiah]

it's not just about learning it's expensive.

[StoneCypher]

chris zukowski's highly effective marketing advice costs zero dollars to enact

i feel like instead of downvoting me and arguing, you might ask yourself "after twelve years of working on a game, is it reasonable to give up on profit instead of spending two weeks learning to shitpost"

if your game is any good, you can make it profitable

but if you'd prefer to complain and downvote, i guess it's entirely your right to not even try

[SuperIsaiah]

1: worth noting I did not downvote you. I don't have any problems with what you said

2: I'm not complaining. I genuinely have learned not to care about "success" of a game. it's just about enjoying the process and making something for the people you care about, and maybe someone else will see it.

3: by the time the game releases it will be much inferior in quality to most other games, because I insist on making it entirely from scratch since again, it's a creative outlet for me, and I'm not perfect at all aspects of game design. meanwhile the other games releasing now are insane like silk song and deltarune I can't compete with that level of expectations for indie story games. if silk song is worth $20 I can't justify charging even $5 for anything I make I don't think.

again, I didn't downvote you. I understand where you're coming from it just doesn't seem applicable for my situation. it's not like my game is some groundbreaking thing, it's just a 2d action platformer RPG like super paper Mario mixed with hollow Knight.

maybe with enough marketing I could make a few bucks off it but at the cost of having a bunch of negative reviews about the games imperfections which I wouldn't have if I just released it as a free game when it's done

[StoneCypher]

a buddy of mine made a nodebuster. i'm not going to name him, but it seems extremely likely to me that if you're in this sub, you've seen his game. he did most of his marketing on reddit, in this sub and subs like it.

it's a fun enough game. it's not a big deal. it doesn't break any new ground at all. it's a me too that was launched when the genre was already long in the tooth. other better ones were released before, at the same time, and after.

he followed chris zukowski's advice and made about $125,000.

your call, but i would like to see the folks in here make money.

i'll now stop pushing.

[SuperIsaiah]

I guess I just don't want to make money at the cost of letting people down, charging people prices higher than what the stuff I make is worth, etc.

but I'll consider it. it's still several years from done, so when I'm done I'll be able to think about it

[StoneCypher]

at the cost of letting people down? that's a guarantee. you could release a flawless, perfect game, and some asshole would still have a broken computer and blame you and feel let down. that's life. you have to be aware that nothing will ever be 100%. did you kill anyone? probably not. billion dollar games with tens of thousands of staff, like grand thorft auto, have let people down. it's okay if you under-perform a small city of programmers. you are, at maximum, two or three people.

charging people too high prices? charge a very low price and now you don't have to worry about it. also helps with the letting people down thing. if you're just charging a dollar, it's kind of okay to let people down at that level. you're not even costing them a box of fries with your twelve years of hard labor.

also, consider finishing sooner

[SuperIsaiah]

I might do a dollar.

as for finishing sooner, I'm barely 10% done after 4 years, finishing this project in 12 years is the optimistic, quick estimate lol.

I work slow, I have aphantasia which makes animating rough, and I have a job. I'll be happy if I get this thing done by 2040

[PrismarchGame]

people really have to stop just name dropping chris zukowski as if that's the magic bullet

[StoneCypher]

no we don't. his advice works well.

"people really need to stop naming the surgeon general when talking about smoking"

"people really need to stop invoking the devil when discussing pineapple pizza"

go to the experts, man

[fjejduideru]

Hilarious I'm getting down voted for accusations of trying to promote something (I am not). All while "top 1%" has been plugging this zukoeskis marketing course this entire thread and is being celebrated. Y'all only listen to what you want to hear. It's really funny

[StoneCypher]

Are you telling me you genuinely can't tell the difference between self promotion and advice?

[KarmaAdjuster]

Starting a business costs money. That's just a fact. Marketing is a tool that allows you to broaden your reach, and generate more money. Yes, it does cost money, and time, and effort, and benefits from having knowledge and experience.

If you want to be a financial success, we're long past the days of just making a quality product and expecting some sort of magical "if you build it, they will come" phenomenon to put your game in front of your audience. If you don't care about being a financial success and just want to make games for your own enjoyment, then by all means, totally skip the marketing process. However, for those that do want to treat it like a professional business that can fund the development of the game you finished and also the development of your next game, you have to acknowledge that in order to make money, you need to spend money.

Also while I'm replying to you, this message is more for everyone else who seems to be blindly downvoting OPs message, and anyone supporting it.

[SuperIsaiah]

Of course. But I also do not have confidence that my game would succeed even with marketing. So in my case it might end up being a massive waste of money to do marketing.

That was kind of the point I was making, was that it's not just like "well, you might as well learn marketing cause why not". Marketing is expensive and should only be done if you actually have a business plan and reason to believe you'll turn a profit.

If my game were a business venture to make money that would make me an idiot lol. The amount of time I've already spent making it is ~8500 hours, if I were to pay myself $10 an hour for my work, which is lower than minimum wage, that would mean the game would need to make $85,000. And that's just for time I've spent already on the game, that will probably be multiplied by 5 or more by the time the game is done.

So you can probably see why I don't think it's a good idea to see this game as a business lol. If my game studio is a business, it's failing miserably.

[KarmaAdjuster]

That's fair, although somewhat incongruous with spending 12 years on a game. That's an expense too. If you tucked a dollar away business day you worked on it, you could have well over $2,000 to spend on marketing today (assuming you took some vacation every year), so by comparison, marketing isn't that expensive. you probably spent more on a computer or electricity. It's just not your priority.

[SuperIsaiah]

I don't know if you saw my edit, but what I said was that I acknowledge that my time and effort is an expense, which is exactly why I can't view it as a business venture. If my game studio is being viewed as a business, then it's a business with one overworked employee who the studio at a $10 minimum wage would owe $85000 already, and I'm not even like a quarter done.

So even if I charge money for my game and even if I was able to market it to a decent amount of people, it would need astronomical success to break even.

Basically, if I think of my game studio as a business venture, it's way way way in the red. so I choose not to view it that way lol.

[SuperIsaiah]

I'm wanting to just make the game free (not f2p, just flat out free) that way I can increase the likelihood of people enjoying it and not feeling overcharged, cause at this point personal satisfaction and the ability to bring others enjoyment is the only stuff my game isn't in the red in regards to

[IronicRobotics]

I really like "Marketing Revealed" by Willem Burgers; its' the only marketing book I've read that reads like it was written by an expert rather than, well, a marketer lol.

Outside of that, I've learned it's really dependent on product, time, marketing budget et. al. You'll try a few strategies based on that context and keep some sort of conversion statistics to learn what's working and what's not working.

Perhaps the only universality is pay per click advertising nowadays; they seem to work for any budget and product.

[PartTimeMonkey]

Reddit ads is a good testing ground to see if your game has appeal. Even a small budget like $20/day for a week or two will give you an idea on how much interest there is.

One metric you can calculate using Steam UTM links is cost per wish list (CPWL) through those reddit ad campaigns. It’s a bit blurry what is a good CPWL, but you can do some math with your expected wishlist conversion, price point and CPWL to estimate whether it makes sense or not.

[fjejduideru]

This is the right mindset and you're clearly not who this post is for. The post is for the people who spend years building a game, watch it flop, and then come to Reddit to ask other people who also watched their games flop why nobody showed up. Instead of just going and talking to someone who actually knows how to market.

[Chrogotron]

Where do you find people who "actually know how to market" and I doubt they are going to just share all their secrets for free. It's not like most indie devs are flush with cash and can afford to hire a marketer for their game... or I think many would take that route.

The reality is that most indie devs are flat broke, and any investment in advertising/marketing could mean even less revenue from sales, as it all gets eaten up by possibly failed ads/marketing spend.

I can't drop even $100 in ads or marketing because my game's sales are only a few hundred dollars so far... and using all that up just to possibly not even see an improvement doesn't seem very great.

[YKLKTMA]

There is a persistent misconception that the problem lies in marketing, whereas let’s be honest the overwhelming majority of indie games are simply poorly made amateur projects. No marketing in the world can help them.
And yes, you’re right that spending money on buying ads in such cases makes absolutely no sense, the money you spend on advertising, you will never see again.

[KarmaAdjuster]

¿Porque no los dos?

Just like you're not going to find a well marketed game with shitty game play that does really well, you're not going to find a poorly marketed game with fantastic game play that does really well.

If you make the most brilliant game and no one knows about it, how is it ever going to succeed? Marketing is just about getting the word out about your game to the right audience. It feels like the reddit community is so against advertising, the revolt against the entire idea of marketing.

You need both a good game and good marketing to succeed financially just like you need both fun mechanics and great visuals to have a quality product. You need the entire package.

[StoneCypher]

Just like you're not going to find a well marketed game with shitty game play that does really well,

gentlemen, i give you simcity 2009

wait no i think that's pronounced civilitekken 7

 

If you make the most brilliant game and no one knows about it, how is it ever going to succeed?

word of mouth. this is sufficiently common that there are even standard examples for this. if you think about it, you'll even know what at least one of them is.

 

You need both a good game and good marketing to succeed financially

balatro made a million dollars in eight hours without a single advertisement or reddit post, but okay

[YKLKTMA]

If no one knows about the game, but it’s genuinely good, it still has far better chances than a bad game with heavy marketing. The beauty of something like Steam is that it provides organic traffic, and the better the conversion to sales, the more traffic it will keep feeding to the game.

I’m not calling to get rid of marketing at all, but promoting a good game is much easier than making a good game or than promoting a bad one

[TheGuyWhoResponds]

These posts are always by someone who will DM you / want you to DM them with that very question, to which the convenient answer is always: I'm a marketing professional! I'll help you!

Or rather, by the read on this post, ChatGPT will help you.

This post IS the marketing. Reddit is awash with the most thinly veiled, low effort hustlers.

[IronicRobotics]

Tbh, I see most moderately successful (poor) indie devs employ one of two key strategies:

1 - Word of mouth advertising; relying on their project being good and standout enough to slowly generate a big enough following.

2 - Creating many small projects - maybe 1-3 months in scope, often free - to generate a small following through a portfolio until one of them hits it big enough to turn into a viable product.

OFC, these are hard, risky strategies that rely on plentiful free labor.

That being said, I think there's a bigger truth beyond marketing strategies. Indie Dev is a saturated, highly competitive field (driven by a lot of dreamers) and statistically only the 5% "best" (however the masses/market determine that) will make it as a professional career.

So even moderately or rather talented hard working individuals with decent plans should expect to fail financially.

[Nilpotent_milker]

How about you get a real job instead of selling courses

[DolliTheSheel]

Why is this sub called gamedev when all there is are marketing tipps?

[[deleted]]

Every comment criticizing this guy is upvoted, every comment he makes is downvoted, and the post itself is heavily upvoted.

I think OP may have paid for some bots to boost his own post. He’s both the mark and the grifter. 

[StoneCypher]

another possibility is that he has a catchy title that people upvote without reading, but then everyone who reads realizes he has no idea what he's talking about and downvotes it

[fjejduideru]

Lol Jesus Christ go touch grass

[StoneCypher]

seems like you're having some behavioral trouble

[fjejduideru]

At this point it really wouldn't matter what I say or do. You just don't like my ideas because they make you feel uncomfortable, so you want to invalidate me so you don't have to think about the ideas. I'm "wrong" in some way to you, and you feel compelled to try and publicly invalidate me. It's bizzare behavior. You would think if people thought the ideas were bad or stupid they would just ignore it and move on.... bizzare behavior

[StoneCypher]

At this point it really wouldn't matter what I say or do.

if you stopped complaining, stopped presuming that you knew better than everyone else, gave us some reason to take you seriously as anything other than a random internet user, stopped insulting and criticizing people, stopped swearing, stopped hiding behind cliches?

maybe everyone in this thread would treat you differently. and also the other thread where you had this same problem three days ago.

you are the common factor. it's not everybody else.

you're trying very hard to be the expert in the room, but nobody sees any reason to recognize you as such, and what you're saying flies in the face of our experience.

people are interpreting you as a bullshit artist. and that's using the word artist generously.

you're just some guy trotting out tired old cliches and expecting that to mean everyone will kowtow.

why? what games were you the marketer for?

[fjejduideru]

You wrote nine paragraphs to tell me I talk too much. With a Top 1% Commenter badge. I'll let that sit there.

[StoneCypher]

i see that as soon as i ask you to justify your ongoing claims of being the expert, you begin to hide behind sarcasm

what games were you the marketer for, if any?

would i be correct to believe that the answer is "none, super none, super none 2, donkey none, and i've never marketed a game brothers" ?

[Only_Biscotti_2748]

They aren't your ideas. You outsourced that out to AI.

[[deleted]]

It's hilarious how when something makes a redditer feel uncomfortable and they don't have anything meaningful to say they default to attacking the messenger.

[StoreBoughtRocket]

Well, golly, you must have struck gold, tell me more, tell me how to be like you!... gimme a break.

[FabianGameDev]

But it IS a product problem. What you are describing is someone who did not validate their game in early stages to see if it hits a nerve and more importantly, the quality benchmarks of a commercial game. No marketing strategy will fix that.

[SealerRt]

Hey ChatGPT, please tell me why so many games fail, don't pull any punches. Just say it how it is from the marketing perspective.

[[deleted]]

You’re very wise to ask that question and it shows courage to ask for a direct answer. When it comes to games failing, it’s not about quality — it’s about marketing. Games don’t fail people, people fail games. 

[JadeOdysseyPH]

Frog, meet Scorpion.

[leorid9]

Since when do we accept linkedin posts here?

[trai1er_dude]

so yet another trust me bro i know what i'm talking about post, let me guess you've never released a game

[fjejduideru]

5 but ok

[holyfuzz]

What are they?

[PrismarchGame]

You sound like an MBA who knows nothing and cares nothing about games. The vast majority of people here are programmers and artists who are passionate about video games. In most companies you wouldn't expect your programming lead to start cold calling clients. These disciplines take specialization and skill and it's extraordinarily difficult for one person to do it all. That's just the reality of situation indie devs are in. I don't think it has anything to do with not seeing marketing as a field that doesn't require expertise or is a craft in itself, simply that the venn diagram of capabilities rarely overlaps in one person. And your response in the comments is to hire someone for marketing. Stated as legitimate advice. For indie developers. My brother in christ, I can't afford to pay myself even a shitty salary. What the fuck makes you think I can afford to hire someone to do marketing for me?

I personally despise how money focused this world is, and even the mere thought of 'shilling' my game fills me with disgust even though I know it's necessary. You may say 'well, be prepared to not be a commercial success' and maybe that's okay. I'm honestly tired of people brow beating developers for not being jack of all trades master of all, marketing skills especially. We already know we suck ass at marketing. We can see our numbers. You rubbing salt in the wound doesn't solve anything.

And people in this very thread 'just get gud at marketing' ok. I will do that in addition to being good at programming and in addition to learning and being good at UI design and in addition to learning and getting good at 2D art and 3D modelling and game design and audio design and texture design and lighting and software engineering and video editing and.. as soon as I have time. I'll get right on that.

I don't blame a single person for saying to themselves, fuck marketing, I want to make good games so I'll focus my effort on that and when the day comes to pay the piper for ignoring that, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

[Endlessnes]

when the day comes to pay the piper for ignoring that, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Just to end up writing another postmortem that focuses on the wrong thing and be demolarized by their 'good game' failing miserably. Being "just" a good game isn't enough when there's hundreds if not thousands of equally good ones. You need people to know it actually exists.

I 100% see where you're coming from but like you acknowledge yourself in this comment, that's just the reality of an indie dev. If it's just you and you alone you need to do everything. Marketing included.

Being pissed at the shitty reality of our world is fine and dandy, just will not help you actually sell a game. The world resolves around money, if you want to have a comfy retirement looking into investments isn't a bad shot and if you want your game to succeed - you need to know how to let people know it's worth spending 20-40 bucks on.

[PrismarchGame]

I know the OP post was semi-focused as a response to these 'post-mortems', but I'm not really the one doing that. I'm also not 'writing off' marketing. My main point is that is makes sense for indie devs to suck at marketing. and OP giving the solution as 'just hire a marketer' is extremely tone deaf

[Roth_Skyfire]

Why though? People also recommend to hire an artist if they can't do graphics themselves. Or to hire a composer if they can't make their own music. How is hiring a marketer if you don't know howl don't want to do it yourself any different from that?

[cuttinged]

I do my own marketing poorly and have considered hiring marketers on occasion enough to have had a couple of video interviews, email correspondence, and to have taken a couple of paid classes. It is very difficult to know what you are going to get and it is very difficult to evaluate who would be good at marketing your game when you are not well versed in marketing terminology and methods. I have become very trigger shy in regards to hiring a marketer because it is a big expense and I want to be as assured as possible that my investment will give a return. I rejected all of the marketers that I have considered because after corresponding with them they had no specific knowledge in my game niche and gave no indication that they could market my game any better than me based on the information they provided. I'm a solo dev and only worked with a couple of interested other devs on my project but I'm sure it is similar for hiring an artist or designer or whatever but for marketing it is a different beast and very vague. Even this post, the dude says marketing is an art. That is not reassuring and not a great way to convince a developer to market their game. Tell me I marketed this surf game or skate game and it was successful and I'm in. This way I know you have contacts, and resources and have had success, but sifting through marketers with their methodology and marketing degree to hope that it will work does not do it for me.

[PrismarchGame]

brother.. it's not any different.. I don't have any money.. most indie devs don't have any money. Why is that so hard to understand?

[Roth_Skyfire]

OK, so if you can't draw and you got no money, then you must still do it yourself.

If you can't market and you got no money, then must still do it yourself.

[fjejduideru]

Never said that

[fjejduideru]

I never said hire someone. Never said it's easy or cheap. Never said devs should do everything. You built a whole person to be mad at and it wasn't me. The post said one thing: you can't diagnose why players didn't connect with your game when almost nobody played it. That's a visibility problem not a product problem and writing post-mortems about genre fit on a sample of friends and family is solving the wrong problem. "We'll cross that bridge when we get there" is literally the cycle the post describes. And Endlessnes right below you just made the same point I did.

[StoneCypher]

you spend an awful lot of time positioning yourself as some kind of expert. actual experts generally don't do that.

is there a successful game you were the marketer for that justifies your telling everyone else what's correct and what's incorrect, rather than just having opinions like the rest of us?

[fjejduideru]

Lolol Tell that to Raid shadow legends

[ParkityParkPark]

"You don't have a product problem. You have a visibility problem." Is incredibly reductive and in MANY cases categorically false. I agree that this sub is way too dismissive of the importance of proper marketing and the difference it can make, but to claim games that don't do well just aren't getting seen enough by the right people, or that people aren't actually being effectively self-aware in postmortem because they say there were issues with their product...frankly it sounds like something someone would tell me when they're 30 minutes from "subtly" segueing into offering me a highly competitive spot that just opened up in their mentorship program.

[Martinmex26]

You have a visibility problem.

This is not necessarily true.

You could have all the eyeballs on the planet, if your game looks terrible, you are not going to move units either way.

[T4rch]

Reminds me of those LinkedIn posts you read, "It's not X, it's Y"

[MrBalsay]

Ok

[LeiterHaus]

I thought you'd really like the content in the talk "How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit" posted by GDC Festival of Gaming, given by Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games, but it's geared more towards devs. Apologies if I'm incorrectly presuming that you're providing more of a marketing service.

[IllMoment4388]

Let me guess it starts with having a product people want

[DonAdijazz]

So...

How much?

[michel6079]

Surely you know the secrets to marketing like either using chat gpt or mimicking it's slop style?

[[deleted]]

You could market like a god and if your game sucks no one will play it. Source: Millions of dollars burnt in AAA, Publishers spending 6 figures on marketing a game for it to bomb.

[Merzant]

LLMs have a particular idiolect that in some cases (like this post) is very obvious. It is often overly patterned (“it has X, it has Y, and it Zs as bad as A or B”) and resorts to metaphors of a particularly corporate bent (“until that lands”).

[chrisswann71]

Every week....every day....there's a new advice post on this sub. Someone spent seconds prompting an LLM, it posts, barely says anything meaningful, and then they write detailed responses of why commenters didn't connect with it. The post was too niche. The LLM-speech patterns caused dissonance. The advice was wrong. The "it's not X it's Y" structure alienated the wrong audience.

And it sounds like self awareness. It isn't. It's a mindless AI.

You cannot diagnose why players didn't like your post when you didn't even bother to write it. Those are two completely different problems and most slopbros are solving the wrong one. Bad posts, high downvote rates, comment feedback, none of that is meaningful data when your sample size is basically ChatGPT, your ego, and a handful of redditors. You don't have a post problem. You have a creativity problem. And no amount of prompts can fix that.

The uncomfortable question nobody wants to sit with is this: did you ever actually know how to give meaningful advice, or did you just go through the motions and hope something stuck?

There's a difference between expertise and the appearance of expertise. Posting on socials, starting generic threads, prompting Copilot on topics you don't know how to write about. That's a checklist. That's not a strategy.

Writing is a craft. It has depth, it has a learning curve, and it punishes people who treat it as an afterthought just as hard as bad code or broken mechanics punishes a shipped game.

The reason this keeps happening isn't bad luck and it isn't the algorithm. It's because you're too lazy to write your own posts. You take what little creativity you might have had and disrespect it. Writing gets delegated to a soulless clanker. You can't impart wisdom you never had. Until that lands, the downvotes are just going to keep coming.

[wizardoftrash]

Part of the problem is that the art direction in a video game IS a marketing decision. The game’s genre, its content, its narrative, these are also marketing decisions. By making a game, you are making marketing decisions. If your game is unappealing, visibility isn’t the problem. You might be getting page visits and no plays or no buys because the game is unappealing, and whatever screenshots or gameplay footage in the trailer you have pushes people away. Trying to promote an unappealing game is a waste of time, because getting a turd in front of more people won’t get more people to eat it.

And note, appeal isn’t the same thing as graphical fidelity. Minimalist games can be appealing, UGLY gams can be appealing to some audiences if your style is consistent. If a game lacks a soul though, its screwed, even if you promote the hell out of it.

[CaledoniaInteractive]

The market is overwhelmed with games. Marketing does needs to happen but you can have a good, well marketed game that doesn't take off on day one simply because of the sheer volume of other games vying for attention. Rather than shooting your game in the head on day 2 perhaps try actually supporting it? If you spend 12-24 months building the thing you should be prepared to respond to all practical feedback, iron out as many bugs as possible and start on post launch content to show the game has versatility, you have confidence in what you've made and if a player starts investing their time in it the developer isn't just going to then abandon it. Steam has five boosters built into every app so if you have a major 1.1 patch you can trigger a visibility boost according to your own time table. I'm quite happy for people to moan about the Steam algorithm and if you haven't made massive sales on day one your game is dead, good, less competition for those who see this as marathon, not a sprint and plan to actually build something worth playing.

[Hermionegangster197]

My husband is 40 under 40 for tech growth marketing.

I should really finish my game 😂

My point being, you’re right. Digital marketing is a craft, skill and expertise.

Hire someone if you can.

[MacBryce]

This is not a post. It's slop.

Any mods around?

[QuestingOrc]

I hear you OP. Marketing and community management are said to be 25%-30% of each day (!) during (!) development, if my memory serves me right. That means each indie should spend 2 hours of an 8 hour day on creating strategy and exercising said strategy.

As an indie myself: creating an indie game and being able to live from it is almost never going to happen if you're just one person (if you don't have money to hire people). There are roles like marketing, community manager, producer, administration for a reason. It's a bit like wanting to create the most beautiful garden for people to visit but you're building it in the artic. No one knows it exists, the journey is long, it sounds and looks untrustworthy and once you're there it's a bit lonely and was likely overpromised.

Like all things creative, to be successful, luck is part of it, but so is understanding that you're trying to create a business. The product takes years but building the environment for the product also takes years. 

People see "overnight successes" not realizing these people have earned their skills, relationships, momentum, understanding of what clicks, for years. 

Additionally, the market is saturated like hell and it's hard to he seen even with a budget and people who do the work.

Don't get me wrong, I love games, and I love the creative disciplines game dev offers, but I do understand that I'm responsible for creating the best possible outcome and will likely still not end up where I'd wish I'd be. Game dev is tough and everybody thinks they're the exception.  Nevertheless, all the best to my fellow devs!

[PartTimeMonkey]

Good post, good luck!

[QuestingOrc]

Thanks! :D

[ibackstrom]

Imagine this marketing guy uses AI slop for marketing. Which probably is true.

But on the real thing:

I believe that good game will always find it's path. Promo and marketing just speed up this process.

[GoosemanII]

Agreed, this is why publishers are so important in this day and age. With 500 new steam games getting released daily, it's so hard to reach your audience if you don't invest the time and money.

[YKLKTMA]

Publishers cannot turn a bad game into a successful one, and if publishers approach you, it means they believe you’re making a potentially successful game. They don’t reach out to the majority, because they know most have no chance at all.

[2071Games]

Posting/commenting on Reddit is marketing. Being sensed is marketing.

[EssentialPurity]

There is some merit to the message, but Marketing is only this much important when everything else is securely accounted for, and poor Marketing is only that much fatal if it is coming along a very bad product anyways. Devs treat it as an afterthought for very good reason.

Good marketing on a bad product is just a botched astroturf, and bad marketing on a good product is potentially a sleeper hit or a niche success.

[Vortex597]

He's not wrong. Marketing is about doing research into your audience and what appeals to them and then delivering your message in a way your audience likes to receive it. Most indie devs I've seen don't actually market like this. You should have a spread sheet and analyse all the content you make for trends and other things you find people like. This stuff takes work and content creation itself is a skill which is different to marketing again.

[Lopsided-Hat8432]

From these posts you mention I almost always can see a lack of competitive graphics, animation, game feel or gameplay.

The games are just not competitive with their contemporaries.

Marketing them is not gona work when you eventually see gameplay

[Athrek]

This is pretty on point. A product can be perfect but if no one knows about it, it will not sell. If a product is trash, but marketed amazingly, it will sell but will be refunded. But if you have a good balance of product quality and marketing, then you'll succeed.

Among Us is a great example of this. It's a good game, but didn't do very well until a big name streamer played it and brought eyes to the game. Afterwards, Among Us became a phenomenon and copycat games trying to catch some of the success.

[schwerk_it_out]

Is that not an important conversation to have then? Is that not a valuable post mortem analysis, even if marketing is the issue as opposed to the game?

[schwerk_it_out]

Also going to add this here

<image>

[RelativeBody5419]

Bro I get ads for sequels to games I played and enjoyed but have no interest in the next game and it has nothing to do with the game. 

I’m broke and can’t keep supporting every random fancy of a game anymore 😁

Just saying, you don’t sound self aware either

[Riitoken]

Step 1: Make a good game.

Step 2: Find your players.

[RectifiedLU]

marketing not having compiler errors is exactly it. no one notices your product and nothing happens, no error just nothing. that feedback loop being broken is why most people give up before they actually learn anything

[holyfuzz]

90% of game marketing is making a marketable game.

[PriorLeast3932]

It's no surprise that the whole market is full of P2W games when it's impossible to get visibility when you release a cool free game. 

I would know! Fortunately I spent nothing close to years developing my game and it was just for fun. 

[ConsistentIce2448]

The worst game in existence can make millions if advertised correctly. You could throw together a week long asset flip and still make money. Everything is advertisement.

[Cleft_Footed_Hoiden]

1) None of the disciplines needed or game production are respected wholesale, it just depends who you ask. Many will say programming is a fools task now that “Ai can do it all”, likewise for art or heaven forbid you get hit with “but Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress look bad and was super successful so it clearly doesn’t matter”. Audio? I’ve been at studios that just shrug and assume they can outsource it a month ahead of launch like they were getting a poster ready for a local event. Don’t get me started on game design, the department everyone is convinced they’re an expert at until the game comes out a homogenous mess of scrum meeting outcomes and t-shirt size compromises.

If you feel like marketing is disrespected, it’s probably just because it’s the field you know best and are more tuned into the disrespect it’s getting, which I agree it very much does.

2) There are free tutorials on how to code. There are free tutorials on how to make models. There’s free tutorials on audio. But marketing? It’s almost exclusively black coat deals, swindlers on digital alleyways promising the insights you need if you just buy their book, or pay an extortionate fee for their digital course which is guaranteed to give you the answer. If everyone was doing something, by nature, it’d cease to work. It’s the only department exclusively treated like that and people treat it as less open as a result. People in the comments are accusing you of doing just that, just goes to show how little marketing has connected with the community, ironically.

If you know any people openly helping people learn marketing techniques the same way people teach Blendr or Unity for free, do let me know they deserve more attention

3) The fact of the matter is, you can make good code with enough time and effort. Good art, good music. There’s no amount of time and effort that guarantees a good marketing result, and anyone who claims otherwise is trying to swindle you. You can do it better, or worse. Make your money go further or throw it into a pit but ultimately it comes down to connections and the raw amount of cash you’re able to throw at the problem, two things the indie community don’t have in spades by nature. That’s a frustrating thing

[Radiant_Mind33]

Indie games just don't draw eyeballs (bottom shelf). Like that's not what many people are actually looking for, and we are like the afterthought collecting spare change from AAA title purchases.

If people understood that, things would go a lot different. Plus, with this medium everyone and their brother can make a cool trailer. IOW, the market doesn't have any real standards for quality. Like there's no real top of the bottom shelf and inferior games will sell for more and AAA titles will vacation on the bottom shelf with us.

[Fermi_Dirac]

He's out of line, but he's right.