Hello, I have a new game design, Solar Emipre, a living card game, which will release with two starter decks and expansions and promo cards available on a semi annual basis. I'm trying to stay away from the label CCG, as that seems to turn off long time players of board/card games. My question to all the designers and publishers here is, as an independent publisher and designer, how can I market my game effectively so I can keep interest high and maintain sales throughout the year? I'm sure there are many successful game publishers who have some good advice to a novice in the industry. I assume that banner ads and advertising on game websites is the main option, are there other ways? I would like to go directly to distributors but I don't know how to do that, I feel like I have a solid game but lack the promotional knowledge to keep it moving forward. Any help or words of advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Marketing the game after release date
My advice is Banner ads, attending conventions and sending copies to reviewers.
Yep, let reviewers bump it up for you. Of course this is a double edge sword since if it is a bad game... yea the reviewers should state that. And I've seen stuff like that happen.
Anyways: Tom Vassal, and the guys at Board to Death could help you out if you decide to send them a copy of your game for them to review.
Just out of curiosity, how are you printing your cards? Are you going to send actual decks to the reviewers?
With this thread title, you hit the nail on the head. It is the main question im dealing with since i started designing games.
Its lot of work to develop, playtest and prototype a game. and its even more work to go into full production - take all efforts together and invest the same amount of time and money AGAIN, then you know how much force you have to put into marketing your product.
why? because the world is full of good games and there are even more bad games around. also, the CCG (or LCG in your case) market changed A LOT over the course of the past few years.
Ads of any type (banner, text) depend on your budget. do you have any? in real life im working for a resonable sized company, and even we decided to stop using ads on the internet a while ago. because click-prices went through the roof in the last years AND conversions are really, really, really bad.
i would strongly recommend to try a different approach: try building a player base through a community. you have to establish a "hub" like a website with a blog, a forum, a image gallery - and update it all frequently. also you can do forum and blog advertising by contacting reviewers to write about your game. all in all - this "word of mouth marketing" is cheaper and more effective than just dumping money into google (or whatever) automated Ads Systems.
To make a long story short: you have to work - hard. and do most of the work by yourself.
and one more thing: you should really think about switching your game to a "virtual product" - because markets changed SO drastically.
