I have been using Steve Pavlina’s advice on business plans for indie game developers. I have found it to be a good guide, even though I think it is geared towards existing developers. There isn’t much talk about what to do if you’re just starting and you don’t have a product yet.
Luckily, Juuso Hietalahti recently wrote The Basic Marketing Plan for Indie Games. Even though it isn’t as detailed, it is a good supplement to Pavlina’s document.
4 replies on “Basic Marketing Plan for Indies”
[…] In this blog entry I found a pair of nice links about marketing, aimed at independent developers. Excellent advice, but I can’t help but feeling sceptical about it all. I have no head for marketing, so it seems too much like a gamble – especially in a fluid environment like independent software development. Trends change at the blink of an eye. I still remember when Quake 2 was big news, and it doesn’t seem like all that many years have passed since those days; but they have, and the software business has changed along with them. On a smaller scale: look at the casual game market before Zuma was released. That wasn’t all that long ago. […]
Hmm… I just have to ask: that quote above, did you place it there, or did it magically become added since I linked to this blog entry? I’m totally lost when it comes to how these feeds and backlinks and permalinks and whatever-links interact. I guess it could be good to know if something happens when I go around linking to people’s posts. 🙂
Hey, Karja!
When you posted “Flight Plan for Indies”, you had a link to my article. WordPress, your blog software, sends a pingback/trackback automatically to my blog software, which happens to be WordPress as well. I believe WordPress uses the actual link to the article, but other software, like TypePad I believe, uses separate trackback links to do the same thing. Check out this tutorial for more info on trackbacks in WordPress.
Ach, I see! That explains it. I’ve used most of WordPress’ default settings, and I didn’t expect this to be one of them; so I didn’t bother reading up on trackbacks. Thanks for the tutorial!