thread: 2014-04-14 : Getting Your Game Played and Talked About
On 2014-04-14, ndp wrote:
The only practical advice I have, based on my lived experience:
- Interest is a funnel. More people will be interested in your game than will read it; will read it than will play it; will play it than will talk about it.
- Nobody will play your first game unless you're running it for them, or you have a personal relationship prior. There are exceptions, but as far as I can tell from having participated in the self-publishing community for 8 years now, it's generally true (tho getting a little less true now as the community has grown, which is pretty great).
- Success breeds success. Without trying to deconstruct why, once you've successfully published your game (for whatever value of publish you're going for), it's easier to successfully interest folks in it, and to successfully broaden your audience for your next game (or project, or whatever).
- Every success you accomplish broadens your audience.
- Eventually, enough successes means that people outside of your personal monkeysphere start hearing about, seeing, and/or playing your game.
So what does this all mean? Think about what you can succeed at doing. Maybe it's a playable draft, maybe it's a complete game, maybe it's going to a convention and running the hell out of your game, maybe it's blog posts about the theory behind your choices. Success breeds success. The only thing that broadens your audience is putting material out there. What material can you generate that is honest, strong and worthwhile? (Hyperbole and marketing-ese gets you nowhere)
I really, truly think that there's a trap of "finishing" your first game that will stymie you. You only build an audience by putting stuff out, no matter how flawed. Once you put it out you'll have something to build on. You can always come back, or (more often in my experience) take the seeds of that first project and turn it into something new and better later.
Success breeds success. Move the goalposts if you need to, define success as something achievable, and go from there.
