Indie Game Marketing 101: Tactics from Tiny Glade, Tactical Breach Wizards, and Yes, Your Grace Snowfall
Lessons from the Trenches: Marketing Tactics from Indie Success Stories
Tiny Glade, Tactical Breach Wizards, and Yes, Your Grace, are three indie games from small studios that used strategic, well-executed marketing to carve out their own spaces in a crowded market.
Now that we’re three case studies deep, I wanted to take a moment to look back and see what actionable insights we can gather. This blog dives into the marketing tactics that propelled these games to success!
Dramatically Oversimplified Marketing Strategy For Each Game
Tiny Glade: Leveraged consistent early content sharing, community engagement, and UGC to build a massive following.
Tactical Breach Wizards: Combined regular dev logs with a strategic use of betas and humor-driven marketing to cultivate a dedicated audience.
Yes, Your Grace: Leveraged there existing fanbase, betas, and festival participation to drive visibility and sustain momentum.
Key takeaways
Know Your Target Audience and Positioning
Market Early & Consistently
Utilize Email Newsletters
Strategically Use Betas, Playtests, and Demos
Combine Game Festivals With Important Updates
The above takeaways are specifically from the strategies used by Tiny Glade, Tactical Breach Wizards, and Yes, Your Grace. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list of marketing strategies and each takeaway will not apply to every game, but I can almost guarantee there will be a useful marketing strategy to copy here.
Knowing Your Target Audience & Positioning
Tiny Glade: The developers of Tiny Glade honed in on the “cozy gamer” niche -players who enjoy low-stress, creative experiences, and everything cute & cozy! They identified this audience early on, tailoring their game’s design, visuals, and marketing messages to appeal directly to this group.
The devs behind Tiny Glade cleverly used social media to identify potential issues with their positioning. Comments on their social media revealed that due to the presence of castles, many players incorrectly assumed Tiny Glade was a tower defense game.
Social media is a great place to test messaging and see what works best with your audience. Armed with this knowledge you can optimize your Steam page and other places players land (website, etc).
Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: For Yes, Your Grace Snowfall, the developers tapped into a well-defined audience that enjoys narrative-driven, medieval-themed strategy games. They understood that their target players were those who loved intricate storytelling combined with strategic gameplay. Fans of pixel art were also a prime target!
Tactical Breach Wizards: The developers knew their game would appeal to fans of tactical strategy games with a narrative twist, particularly those who appreciated humor and unique gameplay mechanics (such as optimizing throwing people through windows).
Analysis
Each of these games deeply understood their target audience. By knowing who they were making the game for, the developers could tailor every aspect of their marketing to appeal directly to these players. This not only influenced how they communicated their game’s value but also shaped the design and development of the game itself!
Actionable Takeaway
Identifying your target audience is one of the first and most crucial steps in any marketing strategy. Start by researching similar games and their communities. Who are the players? What are their preferences? Where do they spend their time online? Use this information to guide your game design and marketing efforts. Remember, the more specific your understanding of your audience, the more effectively you can tailor your game and messaging to resonate with them.
This topic deserves it’s own post so I won’t go to into it now but the best way to get started is always research. I highly recommend starting by looking at what other games around you are doing. Here’s a grossly oversimplified guide on researching how your competition is talking to their audience:
Create a list of 10 similar games to yours (competitors).
Make sure to not only include the famous successful games in your space but also the games that performed “okay” as well as the ones that flopped.
For each game do a small case study on their marketing.
Look at their social media, Steam Page, Subreddit, Website, Games Press, Influencer coverage, Publisher, etc.
How are they talking about their game?
What features are they highlighting?
What language are they using? I’m not talking English vs Spanish here, more Rougelite vs Rougelike.
Where are they talking to their audience?
How are people reacting to it?
Do the comments seem positive?
Do the reviews indicate players got what they expected through the marketing?
Are people clearly understanding their game?
Can you identify who it does and does not appeal to based off the comments?
Are they drawing comparisons to other games. Ex. “Valorant copy”, “COD Killer”.
Are there elements in the game itself that make it more marketable? Such as Tiny Glade being UGC machine.
Identify patterns in the successful games vs the unsuccessful games.
Make note and replicate the successful patterns.
Market Early & Consistently
Tiny Glade: From the earliest stages of development, Tiny Glade’s developers were active on social media, sharing work in progress updates and engaging with their audience. This consistent communication helped build a loyal following long before the game was ready for release or even had a name!
Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: Used social media to echo important updates and participation in game festivals.
Tactical Breach Wizards: Regular updates and in depth devlogs were central to Tactical Breach Wizards' strategy. By consistently sharing development progress and engaging with their audience, they kept interest high over the long development cycle.
Analysis:
In most cases, the sooner you can start and the more consistent you can be the better. This becomes less necessary the bigger your game is. If it’s your first game and you have no established audience, your starting from ground zero and need to build your audience. Start your marketing efforts early to build anticipation and a community around your game. Consistent updates, even small ones, keep your audience engaged and invested in your project. This ongoing communication helps build trust and keeps your game in the minds of potential players.
If you have an existing audience from previous successful games, then you can afford to wait until the game is further along in development to announce and have longer time between marketing beats.
Apply this advice to your own game, there are always unique situations. For example if your like Fuzzy Bot and you have significant investment backing you. You can afford to develop most of your game in secret and drop the trailer for your first game at Gamescom with zero marketing until that point.
Actionable Takeaway:
Begin marketing your game as early as possible. Use whatever social media makes sense for your game. Solo dev? Try devlogs on Youtube. Have a dedicated marketer? Try frequent updates on all major social media platforms. Familiar with Twitter but not much else? Start sharing updates there. It doesn’t have to be polished content; behind-the-scenes looks, development challenges, funny bugs, and even small wins can all be part of your updates. The goal is to maintain a consistent presence and keep your audience excited about the game’s progress.
Consistently posting content about your game is great but the core of your go to market plan for your game should be made of a series of known marketing beats that you go all out for. These are often things like: announcement trailer, gameplay reveal, playtest, demo drop, EA launch, 1.0 release, etc. Around these core beats you’ll want to prepare content well ahead of time and strategize how best to get maximum exposure during them. Perhaps you drop your announcement trailer during a related gameshow or give streamers keys to give their audience to your closed playtest. This is where the hard (fun) part of marketing comes in!
If you need inspiration on how to handle these marketing beats reference what your competitors have done. Or you know, just read my blog and i’ll do the research for you :).
The Under Appreciated Power of Email Newsletters
Tiny Glade: Without a Steam page or even a name, Tiny Glade’s developers smartly used email newsletters to capture and nurture interest. This ensured that they could keep potential players informed and engaged, converting this interest into wishlists when the game finally had a Steam page.
Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: Utilizes one newsletter for their previous game and their in development sequel since it has the same target audience.
Tactical Breach Wizards: The developers consistently used email newsletters to keep their audience updated and announce important milestones. This regular communication helped maintain momentum and keep their community engaged over a long development period.
Tactical Breach Wizards cleverly encouraged newsletter signups by only giving out beta keys through their newsletter.
Analysis:
Email newsletters are an often-underutilized tool in indie game marketing. They allow you to communicate directly with your most engaged fans, providing updates, exclusive content, and early access opportunities. This direct line of communication can be invaluable for maintaining interest over time and ensuring your audience is ready to support your game at launch. Personally, I would rather have 10,000 subscribers to my newsletter than wishlists. But hey why not both.
Actionable Takeaway:
Set up an email newsletter early in your game’s development. Use it to capture the interest of players who discover your game, and keep them engaged with regular updates. Make sure to put effort into your newsletter with theming and messaging that matches your game and target audience. Offer exclusive content and early access to betas to keep subscribers invested. Make sure to not spam! In most cases it’s probably a good idea to not email more than once a month.
Strategic use of Beta, Demos, and Playtests
Tiny Glade: The developers used early playtests to gather feedback and build anticipation. By involving their community early on, they were able to refine the game and keep interest high. These early playtesters were later used to test and improve their demo ahead of Steam Next Fest.
Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: Participation in festivals combined with new betas provided nice marketing beats driving interest in Yes, Your Grace.
Tactical Breach Wizards: Ran multiple closed betas with the only access to keys locked behind signing up for their newsletter.
Analysis:
Betas, demos, and playtests serve a dual purpose—they’re invaluable for gathering feedback and improving your game, but they’re also powerful marketing tools. By giving players a taste of what’s to come, you can build anticipation and get players involved in your game’s development.
There’s a lot of ways you can use betas, demos, and playtests creatively depending on your goals. However there is one thing every dev should use them for - testing your demo ahead of Steam Next Fest! Running a playtest of your demo build months ahead of next fest ensures you have ample time to iron out bugs and improve it.
Actionable Takeaway:
Consider how you might be able to use betas, demos, or playtests strategically. Consider timing them around festivals, using them to increase newsletter signups, or testing specific updates and features. Use these opportunities to not only refine your game but also to build hype and encourage wishlisting. Make sure to gather feedback and show your community that you’re listening and making improvements based on their input. Don’t just say “thanks for the feedback” actually show them how you changed something based on their feedback.
Combine Game Festivals With Important Updates
Tiny Glade: The developers strategically aligned important announcements with major game festivals such as officially announcing their game during Wholesome Snack.
Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: Hosted their own steam event, Pixelated Adventures, and paired beta releases and demo updates with participating in numerous Steam events.
Tactical Breach Wizards: Dominated Steam Next Fest with one of the most played demos earning 108K wishlists.
Analysis:
Game festivals and major updates to your game are both great marketing opportunities. By combining a major update to your game with the reach of a game festival you can significantly amplify your marketing efforts. These events often provide rare opportunities to showcase your game directly to your target audience audience, leading to significant increases in visibility and wishlists.
Actionable Takeaway:
Research and participate in game festivals that align with your target audience. Plan significant announcements around these events to take advantage of the increased visibility they offer. These announcements include things like a demo release, demo update, new trailer, announcement date, etc. Consider offering exclusive content or demos during these times to further incentivize engagement.
Most OP Strategies
A large motivation behind creating this blog was to discover clever marketing strategies that other game studios are using and steal share them. I’ve only done 3 case studies so far and have already found some OP strategies worth highlighting:
Exclusively delivering beta keys through newsletter signups.
This one tops the list due to its effectiveness in increasing newsletter signups, which are super valuable!
Locking final part of a beta/demo/playtest behind a feedback form.
If you’ve every conducted a playtest of any sort than you know that even when people enjoy your game it is incredibly hard to get people to care enough to leave meaningful feedback.
This is a really clever way to simultaneously incentivize feedback and make sure that those giving feedback have played a significant portion of your game.
Use social media as a testing ground for positioning and messaging.
An underutilized usage of social media that I wish every game dev did!
Giving unique gifts for finishing the demo or buying during release week.
While offer users an in game reward for doing something is not a revolutionary strategy, using that to motivating finishing your demo or buying during release week is a fantastic idea! This might be just enough to push you from “maybe ill wait to buy it on sale later” to “oh man I was already gonna buy it later but if I buy it now I get a unique weapon, say less here’s my money”.
Combining important updates with game festivals
Important updates area always nice marketing beats but if you don’t already have a significant following you may make your important announcement only for no one to care. By combining it with a game related festival such as Steam events, gamescom, wholesome snack, next fest, etc you amplify your reach while also talking to your target audience in most cases.
Final Thoughts
From understanding your audience and starting your marketing early, to leveraging email newsletters and engaging with your community, these strategies are designed to help you build anticipation and drive interest in your game. Remember, successful marketing is about persistence, creativity, and a deep understanding of your audience.
Your game deserves to be seen, and with the right strategy, it will be. See you next week ✌️
Damn, I will probably forgotten I read this great piece of work!
If only there was a way on @Substack to save specific posts, like lists or something...