When to start promoting your game

Hello,

I was wondering when you should start promoting your game and where is the best place to promote it?

 

Start promoting it as soon as you have something to show for it that looks good.

Where you promote is going to depend on what platforms you're targeting among other things, but you might be interested in the Indie Game Promo Facebook Group.

 

Highlighted the important part.
Ask yourself this question:
"If I saw screenshots, would I look up the game for more information?"
If the answer isn't an immediate "Yes", go back to work.

If you don't have anything that can generate interest, you don't have anything worth showing.

 

Thanks for the advise, I am making a rts and i have 2 buildings finished, My friend has almost finished a building placement system. so i guess I should wait a few weeks

 

Here's an advice that pretty much always works:
If in doubt, unaltered gameplay footage.

If you feel comfortable showcasing your gameplay in motion, you're 100% ready.

 

When you have something that looks like a game

 

Yesterday. Failing that, try for today.

If you have an established fan base, you can worry about keeping promises and not alienating them. But if you have nothing, it's never too soon to start sharing.

 

You should start the hype train when you can keep the hype train going full speed till release. That's how publishers do it.
You can always post something early under unnamed project so you don't ruin your brand and hype train.

 

Well it really depends on the type of development you want to do.

I for one, loved the style of the Overgrowth's development, showing the development process of the engine/game, so i (we back then) decided to make something similar and started making videos of the development 2-3 weeks into it.

There are pros and cons to this:

Since you are showing the game in early stages, it's guaranteed that it will take awhile to finish it ( i'm 4 years into development, but in my defense, i had 1-2 years of programming knowledge back then so for me this was (is) a learning project and a hobby ). You also need to be ready for people constantly asking you when the game will come out, asking to join development, asking to test the game, etc ( i used to have about 2-3 messages per day asking that ), now it's 3-4 messages per week.
People will also start to lose interest if it takes a lot of time, and will forget about the game.

The pro's are that since you are starting very early, and if you do it properly, you will start having a fan base, and when you release your game, you will most certainly have many people wanting to try your game. My game currently has ~8K people following on facebook and close to 20K on Youtube. I was lucky because i think i was one of the first people to start doing this type of development using Unity.
One other thing that i really like about this approach, is that you can see the game changing over its development time and getting better and better with each video update, and people really like that.

Personally, i wouldn't recommend starting too early like i did. Maybe wait until you have much more content and quality and have things planned and figured out.

In case you're wondering, this is the very first video of this development series: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vzuaFvBzbE and this is the last update video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=c280WDPnesw

If you don't want to show development very often, then definitely start showing the game only when you think people will like it and care enough to go back when a new video or information is released about the game.

 

Your game look really cool, and 20000 youtube subs is a lot. But how did you reach all those people.

 

I've been told, as a general rule of thumb... about 6 months before release. In other words don't wait too much.

But you also asked where to promote it, which important. Try to reach relevant game sites, for which you should prepare a press release, so game sites can easily say 'hey, this gonna look good in our site'... this means cool screenshots, what's the game about, etc.

 

I didn't do anything special if that's what you're asking

I just made posts on Facebook and here on the forums, along with the videos on Youtube. If people like it, they will share it. Also take into consideration the time it took to reach those numbers.

One thing that i really like about how things turned out, is that the support of the community is amazing. It's what kept me going through all these years. Hearing people say that the game looks good, they are following for a long time, are happy when a new update is made and are really looking forward to playing it, is probably the best feeling in this industry. I even had a few people tell me they started doing game dev because of my game and that i was a huge inspiration for them, and that is amazing.
Definitely helps me focus and not lose interest in the game. I wouldn't have lasted all this time with this game without the fans and community

 

I think that i am going to wait untill I removed all the programmer art and than I will post on the age of empires site(my game is highly inspired by age of empires) I also noticed that steam has a concept page under greenlight that is free. I think that i will upload some screenshot there too.

 

6 months prior to launch is indeed a good rule of thumb at minimum. However, if you have interesting things to say RIGHT NOW that can attract attention, then right now is the time to start. Basically as soon as you have something interesting to say/show and ideally if you can keep saying interesting things every week. month. day. second... whatever is when and how you should start promoting

Looks aren't everything, but they're a lot, so waiting for real art isnt a bad idea.