[Greenlight] Where do you post to get gamers attention?

I am planning to start my first greenlight February 2 or 9 (depending if I can get enough info)

Where do you post about it to get GAMERS attention?

I know a lot of places to talk with devs but no direct access to a gaming forum or a place where people might be truly interested in playing.

Also, any tips will be appreciated.

 

Before posting your game on Greenlight, build a following using a blog, twitter, Facebook, forums, YouTube videos, etc. Build buzz first. Then tap into that buzz when you post your game on Greenlight.

 

PR I hate PR, have heard of the time a blog can take but I will have to do that. Thanks Shiloh

 

There's a story somewhere on these forums. It goes developer finds a great free way to build hype for his app. Developer tells people on the forums. Soon everybody on the forums promotes the app the same way. There are a couple of endings to this story. Ending 1: The medium becomes so flooded that discovery becomes as great as the google play store. Ending 2: The medium owners figure out they are onto something and start charging. Soon the medium becomes dominated by those who can throw the most money at it.

So you have two options. A long hard slog of building hype with blogs, videos, and general community work. Or you pay to have some professional marketing work done.

 

In a short answer "have someone managing the PR at all times" (me or someone else)
I believe I might need extra cash/partner since I want to develop more than making PR.

Thanks guys ^^

 

Everywhere.

 

If you come up with a good idea, at this stage thousands of other people are already doing the same. Also, just because someone sees your game doesn't mean they'll like it or click over to approve you.

The only sure way is to pay to be seen and hope and pray you come out in the black, unless you're a totally hot babe or you can create connections with media people.

 

0 boobs here

 

Great article that just went up recently:

How to get greenlit in 5 days

Something that I found surprising was: "For our particular case the internal (Steam) traffic took an overall of 92% and only 8% was our community (twitter / facebook / our site)."

 

You need to build your audience before hitting greenlight.

 

Well, from observation, the best way to get your game noticed is to create a cult around yourself. Think of Notch and Minecraft or Philius Fish.

Therefor you need to create a blog with pictures of yourself with a big hipster beard and your pet cats. Make it look like you never leave the house. Then create a forum where people can talk to you. Also, start letting people download demos from beta 0.00001. Also make sure you slag off all mainstream games and market yourself as the saviour of the video game art-form.

Finally, you have to create a game with original ideas. It's decidedly harder to create a cult following around your Tic Tac Toe clone. Yeah, that's probably the main thing really.

 

But it would be a lot more fun to do this stuff if your game actually was something like tic-tac-toe. Every once in a while I think about making some ultra simplistic game literally like a few hours worth of effort and trying to build a community around it just to see what would happen.

I can see comments now "it's rubbish", "it's $4!7 dude!!" "THIS is what all the hoopla ia about?!!!!!" And the fun of "yes everybody I know you are as thrilled as I am about awesome new game. Never seen before! Never to be rivaled".

 

What would happen is about half a year later and only 400 downloads!
The ratings are better than what I would rate tho. I made that in about 10 hours, and another 10 to add ads, and polish, because it was my first time and I used unityscript so it was a mess.

 

The thing is I don't know for sure. Have to try it sometime. Maybe like a black screen with colored rectangles infinite shooter. I enjoy doing tests/experiments. And kind of see everything as just a test. Who knows really. If I paid someone to make a professional video for it "AWESOME!" "EXCITING" "NEVER SEEN BEFORE"... Then paid some youtubers to share it. And so forth. Lol

 

I had thought of a website that just had a single button. You click on it and it says "to view the next page. It costs $1. Warning: you may be disappointed." Then on the next page it says. "Thanks for playing." Just to see how many people would pay the $1 just out of curiosity.

Maybe it would have worked 10 years ago.

Or maybe set it at $1000. You never know.

 

This is a great article, thank you!!!

 

lol guys, I also have some simple ideas for mobile. Something like flappy games (not a flappy bird clone), meaning that gameplay length is anywhere between 5 seconds to 5 minutes depending on skill and you can share your score but I want to see if my big project gets greenlit.

Right now I am making some small puzzle and the big game while not on work. (no wonder why I am here at 1 am)

Going back to topic, I got enough hats to take hipster pics XD

 

As the others have stated, you need a following first. The problem with Greenlight is that there's just such an unbearably large amount of crap on there, that you need a considerable amount of work to find anything worth your time.

A development blog on on IndieDB is a great option, if your game is genuinely interesting. If you make the ten-billionth Slender clone, you might as well not even bother posting it there.
IndieDB has the same problem as Greenlight, with too many amateur developers creating their entry too early.
There is countless profile pages for games that contain nothing but a description of the idea and a few pieces concept art.

This completely wrecks your first impression, yet countless "developers" (mostly using Unity) keep doing this. I literally get more spam on IndieDB, than I get on all my email accounts combined. It's ridiculous.

If you don't believe me, look at this.

 

TBH the best way is just to make something that is really really really good. Like Word of Goo. It just looked amazing. And you looked at it and didn't realise it was an indie game so you told everyone about it. "Look at this game!" instead of "Look at this interesting indie game that I only like because I'm a hipster and I like things no-one has ever heard of."

 

I didnt like world of goo

 

This seems to support what I write about market being flooded. And why that is a problem. It truly is amazing how many people are releasing games. Stuff that normally would be dumped out as freeware to download sites several years ago now are being released and a "company" page set up for it. Lol

Still with Unity having a free version this will only continual so people need to find a solution if possible. People are not going to suddenly stop spamming out games unless something changes to cause that to happen. Right now such little investment is required to make something that can be released as a game (the barrier to entry is practically nill) all of this is just a natural outcome.

 

Pff, it's the internet. You could just find an attractive women in person and pay for the right to use her likeness, along with a "pen name".
Every once in a while you just pay her to send you a new selfie to use on your blog/facebook.

In all seriousness I don't know if that's worth it, but it can be done.
I'm pretty sure it's actually a relatively common thing for Authors to do though. Particularly if it is, for example, a guy writing a romance novel aimed at women.

 

IndieDB is great, even better if you put up a demo/in-development version of your game for free. Desura is also great for publishing.

What I love about IndieDB about gathering followers, compared to other places such as Greenlight, is that every time you make an update, your game gets bumped up for everyone to see. Where at other places, Greenlight included, you're pretty much presented with that first opening wave, and if you don't catch enough attention to raise a community from that single wave, your game is pretty much forgotten. Personal experience talking here, lol.

In conclusion, its easier to gain followers on IndieDB (I really encourage it) and Desura, because of their updates and news system, but the amount of people using Desura compared to Steam is significantly lower. Never the less, its a good place to start, and be on, even if you find your self Greenlit. Twitter is awesome too, for quick posts. And you can connect it to IndieDB, Desura, and Facebook, so once you post on Twitter it automatically gets posted on the rest too. Not sure if thats the case with Steam tho, I am yet to be greenlit.

And what I said earlier still stands. Post everywhere, tell everyone. Give your friends, family, random people, and so on, to try your game. And just a side tip, its best to not give them any instructions on how to play.

 

Summary: market is flooded, use a fake face/body (reminds me of the Simpsons when they use Lisa as the face of the book XD), make a community.

I do need to make an IndieDB and Desura pages.

Thank you

 

Look at this game, someone actually paid $100 to try and get that game on greenlight. Now you know why people dont bother to look at greenlight games.

 

Remember that Greenlight might soon be a thing of the past.

In march 2014 they told some people that it would be gone within 12 months. Have not heard about that since, but thats soon....

 

Yeah, I have also read rumors of Greenlight disappearing. Is there any word on what will be replacing it? If it becomes a situation of every developer creating their own storefront on Steam, this would probably be worse than the current situation.

 

"Valve may take its Steam Greenlight service offline within 12 months, according to Curve Studios design director Jonathan Biddle.

Per his post on Twitter, Biddle said Valve announced the cut-off during GDC.

“We met with Valve at GDC, and they say Greenlight will be gone within 12 months,” he said. “They’ll still offer curated space, but otherwise be open.”

During Valve’s Developer Days in January, Gabe Newell stated in his introductory speech the ultimate goal is to make “Greenlight go away,” and not because it isn’t working out to the benefit of all, it’s just Greenlight will eventually cease to exist due to its evolution.

“Our goal is to make Greenlight go away. Not because it’s not useful, but because we’re evolving,” said Newell, adding the goal is to provide developers more control over Steam and how it is used to promote games. Once the service evolves, the blocks between development and publishing on Steam will be removed, thus the need for it will disappear."

 

The news about "no more greenlight" had been here for about 2 years now.
2013: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...re_democracy_less_Greenlight.php#.URWBpKVEGAb

Now, if greenlight stops I would prefer to have my game greenlit before they make it harder XD

 

One thing thats a simple thing but you need a good icon.

 

What do you mean, a square image or are you talking about something else?

 

For steam greenlight. It looks to me like half of the games that tried to get greenlight got through so it cant be that hard.
http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=765&searchtext=&childpublishedfileid=0&browsesort=mostrecent&section=items&requiredtags[]=Sports

 

I think this site may have some useful things for all you hopeful game devs planning to release a game in 2k15: http://www.calastrology.com/good-luck-charms.html

 

Ah, but you played it right? Probably because of the amazing artwork.

 

Why is this animation presented by a chipmunk?

Also, is there a name for these animations which are so literal in their interpretation of the speech? They're like info-graphics but in animation form. Info-mations? I see a lot of these on TV these days. Usually with 2D graphics sort of bouncing in using the inbuilt tween effects of whatever software they're using.

I'm always a bit disappointed by these videos as I keep hoping to find the secret PR skills but it's all just common sense really.

 

Even AAA developers will fail without any marketing.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=902813

 

Is it a AAA company or an Indy? From that article, I got the impression it was one guy who made the game. Selling a game that generated at least $150k (maybe what $105k went to him) I think a lot of Indy game devs will read this as a success story.

 

Its not a 1 man team if you skip to the credits scene at 22:47 youll see its a pretty big team (though I guess small for a AAA).

 

You'd be surprised how many high level skills are ultimately just common sense.

 

Oh yeah. Huge difference from just one guy. Yet in that article / interview just the one person was specifically mentioned by name... his game. Odd.

But yeah $105k split across all of these seems much more realistic of what to expect.

 

$105k is semi-successfull, it would be enough to make some other medium games hoping they would go better.

 

But surely that's $105k so far. Games and movies are like shares, you can earn a certain amount every year as a sort of dividend but the actual value is the potential earnings.

So in it's lifetime over twenty years, if it becomes a cult classic or a game they bundle in with the latest XBOX 90000000 it could still making money. So maybe they could sell the rights to the game for $500k as a long term investment. Someone could double their money in the long term. Just a thought!

Or the company could develop 10 more games over the next 10 years and then after an initial loss be earning $1million per year. OK, that's not a very realistic model but you get the idea.

 

So what do think this means? Will anyone be able to just directly upload there game to steam, without an approval process? I'm guessing if that's the case, those games won't make it on the front page unitl they've generated enough buzz/sales. Or maybe you have to get approved by one of the curators?

 

Unless they're still using Unity Free. An income of $105k is just enough to require upgrading to Unity Pro and, from a quick glance over their credits, that's a lot of Unity Pro licenses.

 

I agree, but you know what?
I see this as a good and a bad thing. On the one hand it's getting much harder to get seen, on the other hand they put a lot of effort into lowering the bar to the point where it's getting much easier to stand out.
The curator system on Steam helps with this. Most S***ty games won't end up on list with good ones. Fortunately those are the lists that attract customers the most.

 

How many games appear on this "golden" list and how long do they stay there for potential customers to see them? I just wonder if at the rate games are being released by Indies these days if maybe a new game will stay on that list a week, a day, an hour???

 

The curator lists actually work like the store page, but instead of showing all games that are being sold on Steam, they only show those the curators recommend.
It certainly gives your game a boost, if it ends up on the recommendation list of a top-curator.

 

Lol that is true, a starting game makin $105k would be a great achievement

 

How much money went into its development? How many people are employed at that studio? It may not be the great achievement you're thinking it is.