You've got a fun game. How do you make money from it?

keszegh

@PaulH, when i've published my game i've been contacted by some lesser youtubers and they asked for reasonable money to promote/mention my game. yet i've rejected it, as i doubted if it's worth. so yes, i'm also interested in if it's worth.

oleg

PaulH said:

There's seems to be promise in getting reviewed by a social media influencer. A marketing friend of mine suggested that's the most promising, least expensive path in the current market. Apart from events/competitions specifically to promote games, has anyone tried reaching out to an influencer? Like sending a message to somebody who has a lot of subscribers on YouTube for relevant videos, to try to negotiate a deal to get them to promote or review a game?

The problem of promoting the game through bloggers is that there is no analytics about these people, and if the ads fall outside your target audience - they can harm your game by increasing the number of game deletions by placing 1 star, etc. And the cost of advertising will be greater than in social networks

When ordering ads via Facebook or Adwords - you know that your ads will only be seen by your target audience, from your country of interest, with the interests you need, and most importantly, that audience sits on mobile devices.

Promote game through video bloggers is good for console games, but not for mobile games

PaulH

I think it's time to revisit this topic. I suspect many of us have ample coding skills, but minimal marketing skills, and struggle with acquiring users and monetizing our games. That can result in good games failing to earn anything close to their potential.

Two years ago I wrote that I'd been advised to promote games through social media influencers, but had no clue to do that. I now have clues, at least.

There are sites that exist to connect indie game developers with influencers, such as indieboost.com / catapult.gg. It looks like you set up a page about your game, and get offers from influencers. You see how many subscribers they have, their average views, clicks, etc, and a price for which they're offering to promote your game. Catapult has a free tier, and "boost" packages at USD 99 to 199. I see some negative reports about their "boosts", but perhaps the free tier could be worthwhile just to connect with influencers.

That seems like it might be a good way to promote an indie game. Has anyone used that service or one like it?

There are also many companies that design and manage your whole social media influencer campaign. A few are:

gameifyouare.com (specializing in marketing for small game developers)
gamemarketinggenie.com
gameinfluencer.com

Has anyone contracted with a marketing service to promote a game?

Continuing the quest for the elusive "phase 2"...

oleg

PaulH said:

Once my game came across a review on one site supporting indie games. The game received a boost and it began to be actively downloaded.
I did not order advertising from them, and did not submit my game to their site - they found my game on their own.
The push lifted my game from 500+ places to first place in a google store. Built-in unobtrusive advertising in the game brought about $ 10,000

I created this game in 15 minutes for fun, and did not expect to receive income from it, so for me it was a good result.
***
At the time I was working on another game, with a game development company the company allocated $ 50,000 to develop the game (I worked for hire)
$ 25,000 - the investor has allocated for the promotion of the game through bloggers.

And the game took first place in the Google store -

In terms of the number of installations - that game showed the same results as my first game - but for the first game I did not spend anything, and for the second game the investor spent $ 50,000 - so the game caused a loss to the investor of $ 40,000.

--This is an analytics exclusively for the Google store. The game was also released for platforms other than Android, and I assume that the main income the game received on other platforms and paid off for the investor, but did not bring dividends to the investor.


**This is just an example of two different approaches to creating a game from my personal experience ..