Comparing Indie Dev Marketing

Near the end of August 2014 I decided to compare several popular Indie Developers and AAA Developers.

As an aspiring Indie, I look up to these companies for guidance and inspiration, and rather than trying to figure everything out on my own, I decided to research what others did and developed a spreadsheet to display my findings.

More than the Game

I think the quality of their games is most important, but in the world of gaming, if their game is king, then marketing is queen.

Truthfully, we know there are really good games out there, but waiting to be discovered is too passive for me and learning how to make my game noticed in a noisy marketplace is what I've sought to learn.

So I took a day's work, and set to research all the popular Indie Devs (sorry if you're not on here), the most popular indie games, AAA studios, and AAA games.

Tools

These are the tools that I used to get the data shown above:

Facebook Graph Search – This is super powerful. Type in, “Interests of people who like Vlambeer” into Facebook search. Do it for your own Facebook page and see how it goes. It's cra cra what you can research. Teh Internetz – Since reading Gary Vaynerhuk's Jab, Jab Jab, Right Hook, I started learning other social media outlets, and therefore decided to research other developers' social media uses to find trends. Open Site Explorer – This gave me information for who's linking to the sites of interest, and from where.

Thoughts

Of everything, I must say the most impressive marketing came from The Behemoth. They've got it all, and they've got it all branded.

Behold!

Caveat – this took a day's worth of work to gather. I know us Devs don't have a lot of money, so instead of paying for this data, would you kindly like my Facebook page in the sidebar to the right?

Here's the excel file. There's a spot next to Lion Root on the spreadsheet to fill in your information and see how you compare.

What insights did you find from the spreadsheet?

Like this: Like Loading...