Landing page: yay or nay

Hi everyone,

I am a hobbyist game developer nearing the release of my first game, and I am starting to wonder if I need to make a landing page. Making a website seems to be more expensive and complicated than I thought it would be, and since I've never released a game before and I don't have much of a following I don't know if making a landing page will actually be worth it. Most indie game marketing resources I've read say to make one, but I would assume that most of the attention my game gets would be through vendors like Steam rather than it's own website. What should I do? I am releasing a minimal abstract puzzle game if that's relevant.

If you do think making a landing page is a good idea, do you have any suggestions for cheap options?

 

My feeling would be that it's not the most important thing, but doesn't go astray either. On the one hand people aren't going to be piling in on a website to look at screenshots of a minimalist puzzle game, but on the other, without an identity it's hard to gather a following, unless someone else gives you an identity by playing it on their youtube channel or something. If you're aiming at steam, I'd probably do a landing page anyway since your audience will be online on their PC anyway, and it's too much of an opportunity to miss. Think of it as an investment for your future store front.

But if I were you, I would spend most time trying to get other people to review it and "let's play" it, it seems to be the best way to spread the news for that sort of game.

 

You need a landing page, but keep it simple. Steam shoppers often click over to the game's website briefly just to get a feeling that the game is legit. You're going to want a separate site for each game, even if they're all hosted on the same server. Don't worry about setting up a company presence yet. Make a simple, polished scrolling landing page for the game; don't bother with multi-page designs. Basically just a polished game logo, a description blurb, a download/buy button, and some screenshots.

You can use Vlambeer's free dopresskit.com if you want to make a presskit page. If you don't want to fiddle with websites, use something like SquareSpace. It's a trade-off: it may cost a little more, but it's simpler to set up.

If this isn't a commercial venture, and if it's for a desktop-accessible game, instead of setting up a dedicated landing page you might just create a page on itch.io or wherever you're hosting your game.

 

Website isn't expensive. You can pay something about 5 - 10 $ a year for hosting. And there should be (check earlier) some tools, which them you can create your website. Maybe later you will have some fun with webdesign (html + css are not so hard to learn). Think about, that you can earn more money with a website than with a game

 

Yes, every single one of your games should have their own webpage. Or pages. Gamers will wonder if you're serious if you won't even market your game properly, and that includes giving them a way to learn about your game other than the store they'll buy it on.

They don't need a whole domain. But they need at least a page.

 

I have a website landing page and honestly it's a waste of time and money, especially with the low probability you'll have a hit game or app that will be successful enough such that someone will search in a internet search engine for your game rather than a game and app search engine, eg GooglePlay, Windows Store, and Apple App Store.

Your landing page is for what? Wouldn't people be searching at the app stores for your apps? What you do need is a email address and an organized way to address bug reports.

Most gamers don't mess with websites. Hobbyist aka moonlighters might have interest but virtually no one else does.

 

It is possible to host a static website on bitbucket pages for free. You may still want your own domain, though.

It is also possible to host static website for free on github pages, but in this case your site's repository will be visible to the world.

 

The landing page is for contact info and to let gamers know that the game is legitimate (and a dedicated domain name is part of this), so a single polished page with its own domain name is sufficient. Don't bother with A/B testing, SEO, or anything like that. For advertising and visibility, the stores (Steam, App Store, etc.), YouTube, Twitter, etc., are much more important.

 

Ok so most of you seem to be confirming what I suspected: a landing page is more for establishing legitimacy rather than for gathering sales or discoverability. In that case there doesn't seem to be much point in having one unless it has it's own domain name.

I want to spend as little money as possible, since I have no idea how well my game will sell and I am currently a full time student. If I do make a landing page, what would you recommend? The best I could find was BlueHost with $118 for 36 months ($3-4/mo), which includes a domain name. I haven't seen any hosts for $5-10 a year.

 

You could purchase a domain seperately ($12/yr) and direct it to a free hosted website.

 

I tried making a site on Wordpress, but it seems to only support blog style websites, not landing pages.

 

Only by default without a theme. With a theme Wordpress can be made to look however you want.

 

Sorry, maybe in your land hosts are more expensive (because of .com). I have in Germany this: https://www.serverprofis.de/webhosting/webhosting-starter/

Also as neginfinity said, for just one landing page you can find free webspace.

 

The included twenty seventeen theme looks like it probably would work as a decent landing theme. I use a premium theme on my website.

 

You can host your landing page on ZoHo.com for free including domain name but you have to modify their templates and to establish a secure domain, which is almost a necessity nowadays, (https) it costs $4 a month or a small discount if purchased for an entire year. Their templates have it where you can add 'like' FB and 'tweet' twitter and such things should you decide to make 'landing pages' on those sites.

Honestly, I'm dubious of tweets getting you anything but notoriety except from like minded people but probably not many game players; however FB likes could be helpful to get free notice from game players.

You can buy cheap domains at many places. I use a non .com domain name and a cheap one but not the cheapest. I did pic a suffix that was short and easy. It still costs like £21.95/£24 a year after VAT & whatever is added in.

So if the BlueHost includes https certificate it is about 1/2 price compared to Zoho with a monthly certificate combined Freeola plus a cheap domain suffix. By the way Freehola has free hosting if you buy your domain there and mail address for your domain for you could do that. I doubt those Freeola hosting includes certificates unless you pay extra though. I've never tried to host there although I create my domain email addresses there & host them there.

If you just use http at Zoho you can get hosted there free and for 3 years at $90 or less with cheaper domain suffix from Freeola so a small savings but the inconvenience of creating 2 accounts.

And now you're at the point where you have to ask what is cheap enough and not waste a lot of your limited time investigating.

 

Thanks to LetsEncrypt this has recently changed. Everyone can get free SSL certs for their websites now. If your current host doesn't support this automatically then ask them when they will. If you're choosing a host, make sure you pick one who'll support this.

Personally, I'm renting a VPS for ~$5/mo and some control panel software (loads of options, including free ones). With those in place, I can host as many websites as I can fit on my VPS just for the cost of their domain names. At the moment it'd probably be in the vicinity of $20 per site per year.

Edit: The catch with this approach is that you need to be reasonably web savvy to set up and run all of that. If you're not, then I'd say just go with some cheap hosting, and make sure you're ready to move over to something more robust if/when your game generates enough traffic and income to be worth it.

 

If you make a website and if it does not somehow have content that will cause Google etc to send traffic to it, it may as well not exist. Do not have the "build it and they will come" mentality, or the "publish and pray" mentality with websites. It will just sit there and do nothing. The only way someone might find it is if they use search terms which very closely match to your content and you have some kind of unique game name that people know ahead of time that they're looking for. Otherwise you have too start getting into content marketing and other SEO strategies to get traffic. For sure just making a page, it's barely going to even register on the radar and you'll get next to zero traffic. But if you're more serious about it there are ways to make it work for you.

 

But what about using a website to look more professional to potential customers that are already interested, rather than as a way to attract customers via Google?

For those of you that have made landing pages for their games, how do you measure their value? Is there some way that you have seen the effect that a website has on sales or press coverage? A couple of you said the point of a landing page is to establish legitimacy, but I guess I'm asking if you have anything to base that idea on.

 

Use something like Google Analytics and see if page hits spike at roughly the same time sales spike. If there's a correlation between the two then it's almost certainly doing something positive - either people are checking your page before buying, or they're finding your page and then deciding to buy.

 

Check out free hosting options with website builders. Something like Weebly, Wix, SquareSpace or similar.

These days there is little need to learn to write websites on your own.

 

If you're still looking, Kotaku is running a promo with Hostgator right now for sites from $2.43/month:

https://promotions.kinja.com/create-your-website-with-hostgator-save-65-on-all-ho-1786402789

 

Given limited resources, I would prioritise a decent Wilipedia entry over a landing page. Wikipedia will certainly lend an air of legitimacy to the game.

 

if you have the time and skillset to build your own, Amazon AWS and DigitalOcean offer crazy cheap server solutions. If you need something easy to create with i would go with SquareSpace.

May be a thing of the past, but i was always filled with dread every time i seen a Wix site, they are pretty rubbish to be fair.

 

Have to second this. I have an instance of their cheapest server and it has been very stable for my TeamSpeak server. With it being a VPS you could host your website on it as well as any server-side programs that give your game online features.

 

thanks for the heads up...

I'll keep my website but honestly it's not needed at all. I think the main thing on it was the privacy policy GooglePlay asked to link too and the landing page(s) will just be a similar replica to the GooglePlay kiosk listings for my store.

The email address that isn't a free email address is important though, unless Apple and I forget who else has changed their policies.

 

buy a domain and get google apps for business and that problem is solved

 

Email is supplied by the business I buy the domain from. It's not supplied by the webhost. I do think I'll probably drop the webhosting. Those landing pages are mostly redundant to the app store landing pages anyway.

 

Good call!

For my hobby games I got a Google Apps organisation set up back when they had a free option for that, and to their credit they're sticking to what I originally signed up for. From memory, new accounts are $5/mo/user, which is pretty darn good value for what you get (all of Google Apps, not just the email part), but it might be a bit steep for someone just starting out with no income and no use for the rest of what you get.

 

It is good to have a landing page, with information about the game and what it is about. I created one aswell and it cost me $12 per year. Not that expensive.

 

Who did you create it through?

 

I had a template which i bought a while ago and i am using that. I just updated it with contents from my game.

And my site is hosted by godaddy. I got it cheap, because it was on sale. I will probably move to a different provider once when it reaches its expiry date.

There are many website hosting providers who are running promotions every now and then.

 

I think the answer to this completely depends on HOW you're planning to release your game, but in most cases, I disagree with everyone and say: No, you don't need a landing page, as the portals through which you will be selling (e.g. your Steam page, your itch.io page) completely replace this requirement. I guess think about this... how many times have you looked at a game on Steam and/or purchased a game on Steam? For each of those, how many times did you go off and visit the developer's page/site for the game?

 

Continuing down this line of thought, how many times did you go off and visit the Reddit community for the game?

https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/create

 

Yep, it's heavily audience dependent.

 

Just another way of looking at it with a real-world example, I have 2 games that have both shipped in the tens of thousands of units, and both of them have less than 100 hits to their respective pages on my site in their lifetimes. Granted, my site is S*** and poorly maintained by me, but still - they didn't know that before they visited

 

Honestly, I don't think this is terribly irregular. I think with the advent of steam and other storefronts for games, we've kinda moved past the need for a dedicated landing page. I honestly can't remember the last time I checked a site for a game that wasn't like... a dev log, and that's only because dev logs are a niche that I'm very much into.

 

Really depends on the game type. I'll often spend days reading the official documentation for heavy simulation games like Kerball, Factorio, AI Wars, Life is Fuedal or even Mine Craft. On the other hand I don't think I've ever visited the website for any of the FPS games I investigate, these I tend to pick up from word of mouth and gameplay footage.

And with mobile games it's quicker and cheaper to download and play the game then it is to check out websites. It costs nothing to delete a game you don't like.

 

Agree, and for this reason I'm creating a wordpress site to support the game and hopefully get "just a couple more eyeballs" looking at the game content. Even if the site doesn't drive traffic to the eventual store fronts, at least I can make some contacts, and possibly teach a couple people about game development along the way.
I'm also testing the legitimacy of purchasing a domain for legitimacy. Going with free .wordpress.com for now. May update later - if I think it will help. But some of the simplest, nicest game landing pages and devlogs have been on free wordpress and blogger sites. Surprising I saw a nice wix one a couple months ago also. Simple, clean and free.

 

I like Justin Carroll's article How to Make Effective Official Game Websites Really Fast. He has good advice on making a purpose-driven, modern site without spending a lot of time or money.

 

That is an extremely informative article that goes against every single fiber of my instinct. When I was actively developing Uncharted Galaxy, I lost weeks to building the website, and only when I finished did I realize I didn't have a clear goal from the start!

I will absolutely be taking this advice into consideration for all future projects. Thanks for sharing!

 

Sweet! That's pretty much exactly my strategy, so I naturally also think it's a great article.

 

Don't take opinions as gospel, although I agree that article is a great reference, imo the site you lost time on, the site you created was one of the most memorable sites I've visited in the past 5 years, and one I spent extended time on, just goofing around. I don't know if that was wasted time, unless you are talking about a different site.
I'm talking about this site -

 

From a business perspective, the question is "did the work put into the site generate more sales than the same effort elsewhere could have done?"

The job of a website is to:
1. Catch people who search for your game.
2. Help convince them to buy or download it.
3. Push them towards the store / download page as effortlessly (for them) as possible.

Achieving those goals is going to be different depending on your combination of product and audience. But if you spend "weeks" on it where a day or two could have met the same sales/downloads objectives... from a business perspective that's certainly less than ideal.

 

Haha, thanks, but that's just my general portfolio site that I only update when I'm job hunting. I was referring specifically to unchartedgalaxy.com, which I took time away from working on the game to make. Honestly, it was probably because I was struggling to find the game's direction and make meaningful progress that I chose to make the site (which also lacked direction... common theme here?).

Don't get me wrong, I love the theme I put together and am proud of how well it matches the game's unfinished UI, but it's one of those things just was putting the cart so far in front of the horse, it's a reminder of the time I waste. As a matter of fact, I just got an email from Go Daddy yesterday telling me my 2 year lease on the domain had run its course and was being renewed...

 

I completely agree with you.
But ...
One of the benefits of "indie" is the ability to shuck the norms of business, workflows, visual consistency, advertising and other 'standardized' things/processes, which sometimes ends up as extraordinary results. Right?
I've struggled with this, it's a peg that is hard to square - fundamental business "common" sense and indie, although as a part-time indie, I think it may be easier to get away with some things that other full-time indies probably can't, or shouldn't because it might be a bad business decision.

 

It's entirely up to you how you want to do things, present yourself, and so on.

Personally, the game is the important bit. Everything else is in support of that and should do whatever best gets attention onto the game. If your audience is into hand-crafted, artistic, highly custom websites and that will get them talking about your game then do it, because it is useful to you. If your crazy website can be a part of the game experience then that could be great too. Or maybe it's an opportunity to show lots of info to a detail-oriented audience. In many cases, though, literally all the website has to do is help people confirm whether or not someone is interested and get them to the store page if they are, and anything else it does might in fact be adding "friction" to the flow.

 

As a "part-time indie" myself, I think that getting the business stuff right is more important rather than less. I have very limited time to put into making games. As a result anything that doesn't work out is going to have a bigger impact or take longer to recover from.

Also, the success of my current game is going to very directly impact the scope and nature of my next game. The business stuff isn't evil. It's not about being greedy and wanting to get rich. (Though that would certainly be nice!) It's about thinking of game development as more than my current project, and growing the team so that we can make bigger, better games in the future. Ideally, we go full-time and even hire other people into our team - share the success! That's not going to happen if I label myself as "indie" and "part time" and behave how I think those labels should behave.

 

Thanks for your follow up. Insightful.
I agree getting business stuff right is important because of the limited time we have. What I was relating to is having a stream of income that isn't effected by me, as a part-timer, spending more time on one business related element, or iterating on something else, an asset for the 8th time. I'm not locked down to spending the least amount of time that I can on one part or another, although with limited time we should try our best to get it right in the least amount of time as possible.
As non full-time indies we do have luxury of 'wasting' time on one aspect or another without the same worry as full-time indie have - although our time is limited so it should not be wasted.
Yes the business stuff is not evil, but different - kind of foreign to me and time consuming when encountering it and trying to mimic quality, consistent steps others have performed that has resulted in success. This unfamiliar feeling with some business elements causes me to spend more/additional time making sure I get it right, as much as I can anyway.
My comment about shucking norms was in reference to what our short indie game dev history has shown to me anyway, that being eccentric and 'different' seems to draw a crowd. The game is always the most important - yes, but those extremely popular and successful indie games were created by people who, some anyway, said screw that, I'm doing it my way. That seems to be a common theme of a lot of successful indies -

 

I thought about this thread a lot for nearly a week. Yes - we are in the middle of a dev cycle marketing/feedback phase, so this thread is directly relevant to my current tasks.

I thought of another reason why websites/pages are important besides just to push people to the market places.

I've been fussing over a newsletter for our site/blog and while doing so reflected on this discussion and WHY I was actually doing that to begin with.

My memory - based on garbled information and loosely coupled facts, from my own point of view.
Back in the day indie game developers focused some dedicated time and attention to websites. Not only landing pages, but full up websites. This was because there wasn't hardly any market places / stores available to indies where players went to access the games. So the only outlet, other than selling out to a publisher, indies had to try to sell their games were from their own websites. Also an important benefit of a website, it provided the developers the ability to connect directly with customers through feedback systems, most commonly email.
The ability back then, to connect directly to the customer was pretty huge. Developers had a direct line to customers. "Hey the game has been released. Come check it out". And even more so, the developers could add hooks into the sites that could draw in people to check out the content, without the perceived headache for the viewer to download the game. The more time people spend checking out content from the game, (I think) the more opportunity there is for that person to take the plunge and make the purchase.
Additionally - all straight to developer purchases benefit the developer 100%, not just 70% or lower (most stores take 30%).

A couple more recent/modern games to do this - get customers without a store front and be successful are Minecraft, FTL, Papers Please, and Darkest Dungeon who all sold their games, and sold them well, on their own sites long before migrating to the store fronts. (I'm not 100% sure about DD in this case)

I think this is still a beneficial time cost to gain a direct connect following, to be able to communicate directly with players and fans, and to have the ability to offer a direct sale instead of using 'the middle man' store front, which takes 30% of ALL.

Or maybe I'm just trying to justify my time spent working on the website.

But it is a fact - Nobody who sells content on the most popular portals, steam, android and iOS have direct access to there customers - unless they are vigilant in offering lines of communication between them and players and fans.