Intro

After a year of working on how to market my game Ship Miner I want to share part of my experience and learning about it.

It all started while finding which game to make, before having Ship Miner. My approach for “marketing” at that time was to just share images and videos of what I did on Twitter/X only.

In November 2023 I decided to start sharing some stuff on Reddit in the PixelArt subreddit and did my first post of a prototype of Ship Miner. I believe I was super lucky with it and got great feedback for a pixelart game in a subreddit dedicated to pixelart.

While that post kinda worked on Reddit, on Twitter/X I wasn’t so lucky and took more than a couple of tries before it started working, and it did while joining a Twitter’s trend. Between Reddit and Twitter I started to feel more secure with its marketing potential so I decided to continue its development.

After finding the visual aesthetics and marketing potential of the game, it felt reasonable to take advantage of that for marketing. My approach continued being the same but the objective changed from “trying to find something interesting to develop” to “try to get more visibility and get the interest of players”.

Twitter/X Trends

As I mentioned before, in May 2024 I decided to join a trend on Twitter. The idea of the trends is that you have to quote another tweet in the trend with a similar text and share something about your game. Since joining one worked pretty well for Ship Miner I decided to join more as they appear.

This is a list of some of the trends I joined:

Twitter has updated their algorithm to allow users to see more posts from smaller accounts, link, this was before having the steam page.
The indie game I am developing and the inspirations behind it, link
Hi, Twitter! This is my game, link
ATTENTION INDIE DEVS, show off your art style, link
It will cost $0 to rt my game, link

Some of them converted better than others but it was positive in general, and free.

I don’t recall if there are trends like this in other social networks so I don’t have info about how well they work or not since I didn’t join any.

Not so long ago, when Twitter/X was “going do die” and Bluesky and Threads started to get more interest, I decided to create my personal accounts and share Ship Miner content. At first they were not comparable with Twitter. Obviously, I started a bit behind in followers count and had to build that but both social networks also lacked features like sharing GIFs at that point.

Over time, both Bluesky and Threads started to improve by getting more features and also more users. However my experience with Bluesky is that it has no explosive potential yet, my posts don’t get new visibility while the same posts on other social networks do. In the case of Threads after having a good post recently I had a good increase in followers and now my post shows some numbers similar to Twitter/X.

Tumblr?

I recently decided to start to interact a bit more on Tumblr too. The truth is I don’t see any marketing potential there but for some reason I like the community since I suppose it is more niche or something. So my marketing expectations are low but I will keep posting stuff anyways.

Discord

Not sure if I can call it investing in marketing or in community, or maybe in both but when I participate in the gamedev servers I am, I normally use examples of my game and/or share stuff there trying always to be open and collaborative. That was always my behaviour, I didn’t need an ultimate objective since I know that in the long term, being part of communities normally bring something good in return.

What about Reddit?

What happened to Reddit? that’s a question I ask myself several times. Even though the initial good reaction was on Reddit, nowadays I am posting less frequent. Why? well, mainly because the reaction to my posts didn’t match my expectations after the initial successful one. There might be different reasons for that.

One reason is I believe I had a good reaction the first time because it was the typical “hey I am a solo dev making this” which normally is well received while anything else that looks like “I want your wishlist” feels more like it is an ad and reddit users (me included) don’t like that so much.

Another reason that might affect was that reddit UI changed and my lowres 1-bit color game is less visible on first sight when scrolling through reddit posts.

One way to try to take more advantage of Reddit could be to switch to share more about the game development and look for interaction and feedback. That is normally more interesting to developers than players but I am in developers subreddits so it might make more sense.

Another option for the future is to start participating in gaming communities more to share about the game and/or start paying to have ads directly.

Others

I didn’t explore Tiktok nor Youtube Shorts yet. One of the reasons is I am not a user of those networks and would be more difficult to me to create something for that since it is not the same content I already create. However, it is something I have to explore eventually.

I’ve never considered Linkedin as a marketing tool but I see more posts that start to feel like other social networks so maybe it is something to explore too? even though it always felt more “professional” and not to reach potential players.

General Marketing

One conclusion after testing different type of posts is that videos and GIFs work completely better than static images. I believe that conclusion applies to almost all games but for Ship Miner the difference is more obvious since it is more difficult to understand the game by looking at a static image.

Comparing videos and GIFs, videos worked better for me, even considering most of my videos have no audio. Why? not super sure, could be just that the video controls are better for the user, maybe it is the video compression (load faster on mobile devices), or maybe it is just the networks promoting more the videos than the GIFs. In the case of Twitter/X there are more analytics tools for videos like showing how many people watched until certain points, while with GIFs you don’t have that. It might be a combination of all of those.

Funnel data for videos on Twitter/X

The other guess/conclusion is that the better that funnel is, the chances that video could be promoted in some way. Like, not sure if that is natural/organic or if they are doing that on purpose, like hey this video was reproduced completely for 90% of the people who watched it, ok, it has a greater score to show it more since they want users as engaged to the platform as possible. So, considering this, longer ambiguous videos worked worse for me than shorter to the point videos.

Another thing to talk about is the call to action. Normally, after the post there is a reply with the link to steam and the WISHLIST NOW call to action. After doing different tests I am not super sure if it is needed or not, it is not clear for me since I had good wishlists additions from posts without the call to action and bad wishlist additions from posts with the call to action. But my current conclusion is to always try to add it anyways since you don’t lose so much and it is easier for the potential players to find the link to Steam. The only downside is that it makes it super ultra clear that your objective with the post was to get wishlists and not just sharing something cool.

Wishlists

This is the graph of wishlists additions since I created the Steam page, and some of the things I did to get those small spikes.

Steam page Announcement (teaser) + penusbmic shared story with link on instagram

Sep 2 - Steam Exploration Fest
Oct 9 - Hi twitter this is my game trend on social networks + reddit about gifs with transparency.
Nov 9 - Happy birthday to Ship Miner on social networks
Jan & Feb - Just some posts and/or trends + reddit post
Mar & April - Shared multiple videos with audio, Threads discovered the game and started working
More posts and/or trends

And here is the total number of wishlists:

Conclusions

An important conclusion is that a lot of times having luck is a big factor. So you can make a great post but if it isn’t the right time, it will disappear in the void. The opposite can happen to, you can do a shitty post and maybe it got a lot of visibility but got 0 reaction and ends up disappearing in the void. So how do you know the post might be good to keep trying? The answer is you don’t know xD, and my conclusion is sometimes you have to try a couple of times if you believe in it, and some others you have to process that your post is not good and disappear it in the void yourself to leave no traces of its existence.

Another conclusion is that participating in other communities and/or building your own community feels super related with doing marketing but in an indirect way.

And finally, no matter how much effort I put in these small spiked posts, having a good demo available in steam Steam as soon as possible will probably outpace by far the results, or worst case it will be so bad that maybe have good information to stop the game development. But don’t get me wrong, in my opinion both are important and you can’t have one without the other, you have to build interest before having the demo to make it as useful as possible, the demo will multiply the value.

I want to write another dev blog post showing some of the internal tools I did inside the game that helps me when creating marketing content like videos and GIFs.

Thanks for reading!

And before you go, WISHLIST Ship Miner!!!