Don’t be stubborn: Try news methods of promotion
Above: YouTube is just one of several highly effective and cheap marketing tools.
As explained in the last section, having a good rapport with your audience by being forward facing throughout a project’s life cycle can give you an invaluable amount of information on what your fan base wants. A loyal audience can also help spread the word, even over the smallest of updates, as Graham discovered, “We basically time-lapsed our game and every major feature update we’d have; we’d make a video about it and put it up on YouTube to see what would happen. Not every update was an amazing news story for the world, but, sometimes Reddit would really like the blood effects when, you know, guts were splattering on the side of a wall with realistic physics and dripping down or whatever … and Reddit would go crazy. All of a sudden we’d have an inflow of customers we never had before. It’s like, well, what can we do next?!?”
Even if you have broad PR and marketing budget that affords creating buzz through traditional channels, such as a major television or web banner ad campaign, you have some very obvious and very cheap modern alternatives available to you. Allison reveals just how much potential these avenues have. “We have the ability to talk to people through, you know, having YouTube and Reddit. [These things are] so powerful, these things were not around four years ago,” he said. “So learning how to martial them to your benefit is where success is made, because with really good PR based on having a really good product idea and really good execution – you can move people. You can get millions of dollars’ worth of media exposure just by pushing people to things on the Internet. Every YouTube video is a content marketing experience and can get somebody engaged more than a TV spot. If you can get 10 million video views on YouTube, that’s the same as spending $5 million bucks on TV. That’s all new.”
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to try something completely crazy and disruptive, either. Humble Bundle, for example, is a special sales event co-created by Graham, where developers offer their games to be added into a special multi-game pack. For a limited time this pack is sold to customers for whatever price they decide. If a customer buying the bundle wants to pay $50, $25, $1 — they can. It is definitely an idea that would send a traditional publishing executive harrumphing you out of the building, but in practice Humble Bundle was incredibly successful — not only drawing in significant sales, but creating a very positive buzz for everyone involved.
“Now the problem, the main one, is discoverability. Now that everybody can have a try at making an awesome game, how do you get the people looking at your project excited? At Wolfire Games we started in August 2008 and weren’t exactly sure how to make that work…but we kept trying different experiments and Humble Bundle is something we stumbled into as an experiment that started working,” Graham said.