Okay so I am going to ask a "funny" question:
How to grow a game organically?
What do I mean by this? Well organically tends to follow a path of growth that is "it's base or following". So IF I had a Kickstarter and started with a modest amount of "backers" (let's assume 500 backers), what can be done to GROW this amount of people interested in playing your game?
Okay so the OBVIOUS answer is have a SECOND (2nd) Kickstarter. But sometimes the opposite may happen instead of the same amount or more, you get LESS than your previous amount of backers! What can you do to drive more sales to ensure that you get MORE backers during a 2nd Kickstarter?
Sell online via a website. This also sounds very reasonable. The main problem with this strategy is that it is HARD to get people who have never heard of your game to get INTERESTED in it. Granted if they were a Kickstarter backer or a friend of a backer, that could be a reasonable way to increase your pool of fans. But getting back to the website... Does this mean that the ONLY "viable" buyers of the game are "friends" of the backers??? Seems VERY LIMITING. So while a website may be good to SELL the game, attracting TRAFFIC and BUYERS is the real challenge.
To kind of encourage more sales from a website, I guess your REAL alternative (and it's probably going to be expensive) is ADVERTISING and MARKETING... Somehow you need to get the word out that your game 1> Exists and 2> Can be bought SOMEWHERE. Right now I can only think of one source and that is Board Game Geek (BGG) banners. They are very expensive but do offer a way to "advertise" to GAMERS...
The other way is through "Reviewers" which some are FREE others are PAID. The only "downside" is that a review is "subjective". You are not aware of the results of the review and it could be "unfavorable" which could in turn lower the popularity of your game and affect sales negatively. This is in all fairness a "chance" each designer takes with each reviewer. If you get a string of "HOT" reviews... Maybe this can drive some traffic to your sales website. And I say "SOME"... Not an overwhelming amount.
All of this MAKES SENSE... But in no way, shape or form does this amount to VIRAL or GREAT amounts of sales. It's sort of like a VERY SLOW way of gaining sales.
I offer this up for DEBATE... Maybe there are other options, steps to be taken, ways that I am unaware of to GROW and SELL more copies of a game.
Please feel free to share your thoughts, give feedback, ask questions and offer your comment below!
Cheers.
Hmmm... Not sure if I agree. Why? Because I have been following @Evans and it seems like he PAID a couple bloggers/influencers to mention his game to their following and ... he got 0 sales out of them.
7,000 followers on FB and 1,800 on Instagram... And not even 1 game sold.
16,000 Instagram followers... And again not even 1 game sold too!
So throwing "a bunch of $$$" to Facebook ads ... I doubt would result in any additional sales... I personally don't feel like the RISK is worth any sort of reward. To me it sounds like you might get 1 or 2 sales...