Marketing seems to be one of the most common challenge faced by indie developers? Like most indie developers, without much funds, I seeking low cost methods to market my upcoming games. Quality of the product aside, the marketing strategies that I read online mostly talks about using of social media, getting reviews, keyword optimization etc. Then I dawned upon the thought of building a community for the game even before it is launched. (it's going to be tough i think..but worth trying?) For those who are interested.. this is the site that i draw reference on for community building... http://www.feverbee.com/ Anyone have any thoughts on this? Tried and tested any other marketing strategies before?
That's what this Toucharcade forum is for..no? lol. Crescent Moon Games Smuttlework Interactive, Rocketcat Games(Mage Gauntlet), MadFinger Games(Shadowgun) and quite a few other developers have started out by building a following in the Toucharcade community. As a game in development in 2010, Aralon’s thread (http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=47272&highlight=Aralon)managed to garner over 400,000 views over half a year or so. The large forum fanbase gathered probably resulted in the popularity of Crescent Moon Games's following games like Pocket RPG, Siegecraft, Topia etc.
Hmmm... good point! Maybe i was seeing it from a different perspective. Like how i always felt we should not solely depend on Facebook page/group to build a fanbase, as the fanbase is at the mercy of Facebook. Like..if Facebook decides to take down pages or ban you as a user etc. (not saying they would. =p ) I guess I would apply that same thought/caution for building a following on TouchArcade? Thus, I was thinking toward building a self-hosted community site independent from TouchArcade/Facebook etc. Though i would say that it is true that there is probably no better place than TouchArcade to leverage on its community to create attention to a new game? =D Have you seen any lesser known indie developers who do not have a completed product yet, but is effectively engaging community forums on their development progress?
There are quite a few examples in the upcoming games section of this forum but one which really stands out is this http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=36465
Many games make their own forum, but most don't succeed in getting a stable community on there. Here's one that succeeded: World of Midgard (forum: http://worldofmidgard.com/womforum/ ) by Veraxon entertainment. But unfortunately the community is less and less interested in the game; Veraxon failed three times in getting the funds by now. But the community there is very helpful to the developers and they test, make suggestions, take polls etc. I think that non-multiplayer dont need their own forum though, because the devs won't get the community on there, example: Madfinger games forum: http://www.madfingergames.com/forum/index.php?sid=3942ee60359d99494767d993b1f65d43 They have very succesull games, but you see that the forum doesn't have much of a community. So a quick sum: don't make a forum if its a single player game, just stick to sites like TA. From my experience you can't make much of a community on social sites (Facebook), it mostly serves for sharing important news about the game or getting new people on the forum.
Noted and agreed! Not sure if I'm right though, but it seems like Madfinger have a Shadowgun Multiplayer coming soon, guess that was why that had that forum in place to be ready for that? But yea, got your point! Single player games doesn't have much of the required mechanics to form a community. Thanks for sharing! Other than TA, does anyone know of similar sites that is as active?