GDC 2009: The Art of Promoting Indie

By Brendan Sinclair, GameSpotPosted Mar 24, 2009 1:14 pm PT

Developers behind World of Goo and Fez explain how small-scale creators can draw large-scale attention to their work.

SAN FRANCISCO--When it comes to competing with the Electronic Arts and Activisions of the world, independent game developers have a number of significant disadvantages. First, they have to make a great game without the benefit of a multimillion-dollar budget, and then they have to market it with the same financial constraints.

Gabler noticed screens from this level coming up in all of the early coverage of World of Goo, so he redesigned the rest of the game to be more like it.

To help developers with that very problem, 2D Boy's Kyle Gabler (World of Goo) and Polytron's Phil Fish (Fez) gave an Independent Games Summit presentation on the art of promotion. According to Gabler and Fish, it's an art that many independent creators are not well practiced in, perhaps due to a stigma surrounding self-promotion.

"It's not an effective way to promote your game to just make something and stick it on a download service," Gabler warned. He then referred to Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, and the PlayStation Network as "a graveyard of shattered dreams" due to the abundance of unheralded and underpromoted games released on the services. Although Gabler said that he'd heard of developers on these services--specifically on Xbox Live Arcade--as being prohibited from marketing their games themselves, he stressed that they should push back against such policies.

To prove what can be achieved by a self-promoting developer with a little creativity and even less money, Gabler showed the audience a picture of Amazon.com's regularly updated list of best-selling games, with World of Goo second only to World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, and ahead of heavily advertised hits such as Fallout 3.

Set for release later this year, Fez is an unusual 3D take on the 2D platformer.

"It is possible, you just have to be a little bit of a media whore," Gabler said, after acknowledging that World of Goo's tenure on the best-sellers list was brief.

"Marketing is mostly b*******," Fish said. "It's lies. It's big statues at EB Games of the guy from Fallout. You don't want to spend money buying banners or Google ads. What you want to do is talk to people. Talk to the blogs, do interviews, do podcasts, things that are free and will get you great exposure."

Gabler suggested cozying up to the gaming press from indie-focused sites on up, entering competitions such as the Independent Games Festival as much as possible, and giving talks at events like the Game Developers Conference. Gabler noted that not only do organizers let speakers attend the show for free, but the talk itself is also a wonderful promotional tool to get the word out about a game through other developers and in news stories on gaming Web sites. It's also a great platform to show off trailers, he noted, before running the latest trailer for Fish's upcoming Fez.

Though trailers can be helpful, Fish said that developers need to be careful about how they manage hype for their game. Specifically, he said that they shouldn't show things too early. As an example, he pointed to Spore's unveiling at GDC three years before it made it to stores, all the while building expectations in the gaming public that would prove impossible to meet.

Fish encountered a problem along the same lines with Fez. When he decided to scrap and redo a number of the background-art assets for the game, people who had been taken with its original look were vocally upset with the change.

Finally, Fish stressed to the audience that an independent developer is half the story of his or her game.

"That's my game," Fish explained. "There's a lot of me in there."

For more from the show, check out GameSpot's complete coverage of the 2009 Game Developers Conference.

8 Comments

  • brian_13un

    Posted Oct 28, 2009 6:22 am PT

    The worst indie developer is ladyluck ^_^ creator's of terrawars

  • Koi-Neon-X

    Posted Mar 25, 2009 11:26 am PT

    Fez looks great!

  • retrofraction12

    Posted Mar 25, 2009 10:00 am PT

    I have no problem with inde game, but i hate causal games that pass them off as inde

  • Humorguy_basic

    Posted Mar 25, 2009 8:04 am PT

    "Gabler showed the audience a picture of Amazon.com's regularly updated list of best-selling games, with World of Goo second only to World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, and ahead of heavily advertised hits such as Fallout 3."

    This could also show how few games services like Amazon actually sell! It was the same on Steam, with a small casual game No.2 with Crysis No.3. When I saw that I also wondered not how many games does a casual game sell, but rather what does this mean for Steam sales?

    We hear over and over that if downloads where added to PC sales it would be seen as very successful. Well, from the above examples, all that would happen is a) the chart would be full of these casual games from small independents (based on their chart position on Steam and Amazon), or alternatively would hardly improve at all because Steam and Amazon just don't sell as many games as we think (hence the high position of low selling casual games..!)

  • Gohan_Egret

    Posted Mar 24, 2009 10:03 pm PT

    Content coming out on WiiWare is notoriously underpromoted. It truly bothers the heck out of me that games just show up on the service with absolutely no fanfare. How does anyone expect these titles to sell on the premise of zero exposure?

    raahsnavj makes a solid point, though. Not every game is a World of Goo or Fez. When your game is yet another Bejewled clone, it must be hard to sell it to anyone.

  • Aphallatosis

    Posted Mar 24, 2009 9:21 pm PT

    Fez needs to hurry up and come out... for whatever systems(PC?) it's coming out for! Looks spectacular.

  • star77241

    Posted Mar 24, 2009 6:27 pm PT

    Advertisement through the discussion of advertising. Brilliant.

  • raahsnavj

    Posted Mar 24, 2009 2:29 pm PT

    I think it helped that they had a good game to talk about when doing their self advertising... If they were trying to promote Atomic Tank or something like that via these means I don't think they would have had any success.

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