Categories
Marketing/Business

How to Compete with Playfish and Zynga on Facebook

If you read the previous post about Zynga’s “ghetto testing” market research and listened to the podcast in which the CEO talked about how every aspect of the game is thoroughly tested, allowing Zynga to identify what customers want and what changes will bring in more revenue and fans, you might have had a scary thought: how the heck can you compete with a company that has such an infrastructure?

You may be only one person, a lone wolf indie. You don’t want to hire full-time staff, let alone hundreds of employees. If you make a game, what stops Zynga, Playfish/EA, or any other game developers from essentially stealing your ideas and applying their vast resources towards making something similar, or worse, better? Are you doomed to always lose out to the bigger, better financed game companies?

Also, in the time it takes for you to create ONE game, there are hundreds of others being made. Is it realistic to think that your game has a chance to stand out?

The idea that someone will rip off your game and quickly release their own, possibly improved, version is a common one. Look at the casual game space, and you’ll see hundreds of Tetris, Zuma, and Bejeweled clones. There have been stories of developers iteratively working for months to put together a great game, only to see perfect clones with different graphics getting sold by other developers. It can be demotivating, demoralizing, and downright frustrating, especially when it feels like your livelihood can be threatened by someone with a few hours and a will to reproduce your work.

Which is why it was a pleasure to read an article at GeekStack called Why Zynga Is Unstoppable, and Why It Doesn’t Matter. The article addresses three concerns/complaints about the success of Zynga. One is that Zynga simply copies games, another is that Zynga’s games are simplistic and appeal to the lowest-common-denominator, and the last is that Zynga dominates the social gaming landscape and so you’re doomed as an indie developer.

Bottom line: Yes, Zynga is huge, good at what they do, and makes games that appeal to a large number of players, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t opportunities for an indie to fulfill neglected market desires.

Being an indie, your ability to focus on a niche and satisfy it thoroughly is a strength. Very large companies such as Zynga can’t afford to go after every opportunity, even if it were profitable. It wouldn’t be an efficient use of their resources. Microsoft, for example, spends millions of dollars on research and development, but very rarely will they produce full products out of it because the return on investment is too low to justify it. Earning $100,000 in revenue for otherwise useful and popular software just isn’t going to be enough for them, even though that money for the same product made by a small, one-person start-up might be a fantastic ROI.

Similarly, Zynga needs to appeal to a broad, general market of players to ensure that they maximize the revenue they can get.

But that doesn’t mean you need to appeal to the same players, nor do you need to appeal to the same number of players to run a profitable MMO. It’s possible that Farmville has left some people wishing they could play a heavier, more serious farm simulation. Since most people aren’t interested, Zynga is not going to satisfy these players, but maybe you can. In the end, it goes back to identifying a niche and being the best at it.

What concerns do you have about your ability to compete as an indie game developer? Are you worried about larger companies taking away potential business, or do you see their interest in the market as a good thing?

(Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pierrelaphoto/ | CC BY-SA 2.0)

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Quick and Dirty Market Research: A Better Way Than Build & Pray

If you want to create a failing indie game development business, you need to create a product or service that no one will care about, and it’s easy to do so. Just follow these steps:

  1. Get inspired to create a game.
  2. Create the game.
  3. Release the game.
  4. Start figuring out how to market the game.
  5. Start again from step 1.

If you follow the above steps, you’ll spend time creating and releasing games that you may or may not find enjoyable with features that you love. By the time these games hit the market, they will probably sell badly. Note that the marketing step doesn’t happen until after you’ve released the game.

Anyone who knows anything about business will tell you that those steps are backwards. If you want to be successful at business, the marketing comes first. Maybe you’ve heard this advice before, but it’s easy to dismiss or misunderstand. How do you market something that doesn’t exist yet?

That first step above says you get inspired to create a game. The problem is that most amateur game developers will do so in a vacuum. They’ll come up with ideas that appeal to their own desires, ignoring what anyone else, specifically customers, might want.

For example, if you love playing games such as Bejeweled, you might want to create your own match-3 game. Naturally, if you love playing a certain type of game, you will probably enjoy making one, so this new project feels like a good fit. Bejeweled is simple, fun, and popular. You could probably make a better game, right?

What you shouldn’t do is start building a game immediately. You may be able to crank out something “just like Bejeweled but with better [insert feature here]”. Maybe your version of the game uses high quality 3D graphics. Or maybe you provided joystick input with force feedback support. Or maybe you simply made the playing field bigger. In any case, you have this feature that makes your game unique. You liked it and wanted it enough to put it in the game.

So here’s a question: when you finally ask someone to part with his/her money in exchange for the game, do you know if that customer even cares about what you are going to offer?

Amateur game developers will work for possibly months to years on a game before releasing it, and then they hope that customers like it enough to pay for it. That’s the Build and Pray model. And while it might provide some success, there’s a better way.

Market Research

Market research should be the first step in your product development plan. It is another term that can be misunderstood and dismissed too easily. A lot of indie game developers might like the idea of market research (or at least the idea of the benefits of market research!), but they have no idea how to do it. What is actually involved?

If you want to see a great example of a company successfully leverages market research to create popular products that customers love, look at Zynga, one of the largest Facebook game developers. While some of their monetization practices have been controversial, there is no getting around how large of an audience their games are receiving. It’s no accident, of course. Zynga doesn’t just put out games and get surprised by success.

See the article How Zynga Uses Minimum Viable Products at Grattisfaction.com for some insight into their quick and dirty market research, or what Zynga CEO Mark Pincus calls “ghetto testing”.

The basics:

  1. Find out if there is interest in the market for what you want to create. You can do so using low-cost ads on high traffic sites. Tim Ferriss did something similar to come up with the title for his book, “The 4 Hour Work Week”.
  2. If you have a decent interest level in your idea, build a simple version of it.
  3. Test and measure to see if what you built is doing what you want. Are people responding favorably? What metrics will tell you the answer?
  4. Iterate. Do more tests. Repeat.

With the amateur Build and Pray approach, you are taking on a lot of risk. You get no feedback from customers until after you’ve expended a lot of energy and spent a lot of money. Once the game is released, you’re scrambling to let people know it even exists, and then hoping they like it enough to make it all worth the effort.

With market research, whether you do “ghetto testing” or something else, you’re minimizing your risks. Throughout development, you feel fairly confident that you’re building something that someone will actually want. You don’t haphazardly work on random features you think of because you’re focused on only those features you need to satisfy your customers. Market research helps you identify what you need to focus on and what you can ignore safely.

There is a lot more to marketing and product development outside the scope of this article, but if you do decide to create a new game, hopefully you can see that there are many benefits to putting your marketing efforts up front instead of waiting until after a game is finished.

Besides the “ghetto testing” method, what market research do you prefer to use to learn what your target market wants to play? Have you found it fairly easy or difficult to identify potential customers before your game has been created?

(Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/3935419035/ | CC BY-SA 2.0)

Categories
Marketing/Business

Who Is the Audience for a Social Game?

Survey

Raph Koster posted What social gamers look like, which reports on a study that PopCap sponsored to identify the profile of the typical player of social games.

So who is playing these games on Facebook and in other social networking portals? Apparently she’s 43 years old, may or may not be married with children in the home, works full-time, is college-educated, and plays other kinds of games, whether casual or hardcore.

You can dig into the 79-page PDF from PopCap to see the details yourself. Koster summarized a few key points in his post, too.

The study covers not only the profile of the players but also game play behavior, which sites and games were most popular (Facebook by a long shot, Bejeweled Blitz is possibly not accurate due to potentially bad data), social gaming relationships, and how often players spent actual money on these games.

That last bit is important for people who wish to make money creating Facebook MMOs. Less than a third of players have purchased virtual gifts for others. About 72% said they have never paid for virtual currency. While these might sound like poor figures, if you think about it, over 20% of the players are paying real money for otherwise free games. Are your shareware games converting at 20%? That may not be a fair comparison, especially since each player might only spend a few bucks, but there are various metrics available such as Average Revenue Per Player thanks to companies like Three Rings, famous for Puzzle Pirates.

What is also important is recognizing that Facebook is the primary social networking game portal. Over 80% of players reported going there. #2 is MySpace at 24%. Bebo has 7%. I find this reminiscent of Windows vs Mac vs GNU/Linux, although the percentages mentioned have some overlap. While most people are on Facebook, is it possible that targeting MySpace and other social networking sites with your games will mean that you will have a larger piece of a smaller pie? I’m only speculating, of course, but it’s easy to forget that Facebook isn’t the only game in town. Sometimes going in a different direction than everyone else is lucrative. Still, a smaller piece of the much larger pie of Facebook might be worth the competition.

While it’s no surprise that the typical player of social games isn’t a teenaged boy, does any of this data surprise you? Are any of the findings hard to believe?

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

Happy Valentine’s Day!

In the world of romance, video games tend to get a bad rap. Gamers are sometimes viewed as childish, and being called immature by your impatient significant other is a quick way to feel guilt, anger, and resentment.

On the other hand, there are couples who stay together by playing together. Whether it’s a date playing Wii Bowling, surviving in Left 4 Dead, building up a farm in Harvest Moon, or creating a testament to their love in SimCity, playing games together can be just as enjoyable and romantic as dinner and a movie. I’d suggest wine and spaghetti with your gaming.

So what do you play with your significant other? Do you rekindle your romance with the classics, or are modern games what brought you together? Or are you one of those indies who made a game for your sweet?

(Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tangledcontrolpads/” | CC BY-NC 2.0)

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Read Up on the Video Game Industry’s Indies

Entrepreneurs, business owners, and other indies have given me a good piece of advice that applies no matter what is going on in the economy: keep on top of the industry. Subscribe to magazines. Go to conferences. Read relevant blogs and books. Be familiar with what your industry is doing.

Why does it matter?

There are a few reasons. First, when you’re in business, you need to stand out and provide unique value. If you don’t know what everyone else is doing, how will you know where to direct your efforts without finding yourself accidentally duplicating someone else’s efforts? Worse, what if you think you’ve created an incredible game only to find that it pales in comparison to an existing game on the market? Being aware of the competition is not only good for helping you avoid problems, it’s also good marketing. What is everyone making, what do the customers demand, and what can you do about either?

It also helps to be aware of trends. You can ignore these trends or go with them, but knowing about them allows you to make an intelligent decision about it. For example, these days a lot of people are throwing their hat into social networking. With millions of people in a highly specific demographic using Facebook all looking for a fun, socially-engaging game, they are an audience with a need that indies and major companies are hoping to fulfill. Some indies are creating games to take advantage of this trend, while other indies are focusing on what they’ve been doing. Both paths are valid and profitable, but imagine if you didn’t know about the social media trend and you could have made a great MMO to take advantage of it. You miss out on opportunities you didn’t even know existed!

There are other benefits, but the point is that being informed, even if only to be aware of things on a superficial level, is way better for your business than being clueless. That isn’t to say that you need to spend more time reading about the industry than making a contribution to it, but knowing something gives you an advantage over someone who knows nothing, all things being equal.

One way to learn about who is in the industry and what they’re doing is to go to conferences. While conferences abound, they’re focused, usually annual events that happen a few days out of the year. So what do you do between conferences? Read up!

What should you read?

I subscribe to PC Gamer magazine, but aside from a few pages dedicated to indie games, the lion’s share of the coverage is for games with multi-million dollar budgets as well as the marketing budgets to buy ad space. Some people swear by Edge Magazine, Game Informer, and other popular game enthusiast magazines.

That’s great for learning about whatever major retail games are being released, but what about games being made by indies? You have a few options. Some are free, and some cost you money. Now, don’t let a subscription fee stop you from getting access to good information! If you’re running a business, sometimes you need to invest in your education, and it should be tax-deductible, too.

First up, the indie game review site Game Tunnel is a popular and free one. Full disclosure: I used to be a staff reviewer for Game Tunnel. This site has developer news, reviews, editorials, forums, and interviews. Add the news feed to your RSS reader, and you should be good to go.

Next, The Indie Game Mag focuses exclusively on indie games and their developers. While it has some free content, there is also a set of paid subscription options. I took advantage of their Pay-What-You-Want Valentines Day Special (which expires on February 14th) to get a subscription after I was given a free copy of Issue 8 to read. I was impressed with the developer-focused articles, such as the 6 part series called Beginner’s Guide to Indie Game Development by Mike Gnade, and the in-depth review of Gratuitous Space Battles by Positech Games. I printed out my copy, and the images and layout were still well put together in dead tree form. Becoming a subscriber gives you access to back issues and resources that are especially useful for indie game developers and marketers (that means you if you’re running the show!). You can also get access to the magazine anywhere you use a computer.

IndieGames.com is brought to you by the same people behind Gamasutra.com (another good resource, by the way). It focuses on finding the best indie games anywhere they can be found. It isn’t unheard of for 48-hour game dev competition entries to be featured alongside of artistic and commercially-available games.

And of course, The Independent Games Festival is held every year at the Game Developers Conference. If you want to see what indie game developers are making a creative impact in the industry, checking out the entries for the IGF is one way to do so.

What do you read?

So I’ve cited a few big resources that I read to keep up on the industry. What do you read? Do you have any must-haves in your RSS feed that I’m missing? Any books or blogs?

Categories
Marketing/Business Personal Development

Happy New Year!

I know. I’m very late, but I didn’t mean for the new year to start without me! What can I say about 2009? What does 2010 have in store?

Let’s look back on 2009 first. I created an index card and kept it with me throughout the year to remind me what I wanted to focus on:

This year\'s focus!

My four main focii: being more decisive, creating more value, delivering more value, and being healthier.

Being more decisive was meant to remind me that I need to be more active in my pursuits if I expect to make a difference. I may want to run my own business and create games, but unless I make bigger and better decisions, I’ll continue to get mediocre results.

Creating and delivering more value? Those two were inspired by Steve Pavlina’s article How to Make Lots of Money During a Recession. Creating and delivering real value to customers is the best, most sustainable way to earn a living. You can probably trick people into parting with their money, but if you can deliver your creations to people who are willing to pay for it, you’ll be well ahead.

And finally, being healthier. I wanted to lose weight and feel as fit as I did when I was in high school.

So how did I do in each focus last year? Miserably.

At the beginning of the year, I was able to leverage the work of outsourced contractors to create a Facebook game, Sea Friends. You can read the post-mortem, but here are the key highlights:

  • It was the most aggressive schedule I have worked on outside of 48-hour game development competitions.
  • I learned a lot about what I can accomplish by leveraging other people’s time.
  • I got a taste of what life is like when you put everything else on hold and dedicate your time and resources to a single pursuit.

That last bit, however, got me in the end. I spent way longer recovering from this project than I would have liked. Between a day job and working on this project, I had no time for relaxing. I couldn’t afford idle time or time spent on anything that wasn’t getting that game finished. I paid someone else to shovel my car out of the snow during this time because I couldn’t afford the time to do it myself! So I needed to take time off, and unfortunately that downtime lasted much longer than anticipated.

And as for Sea Friends, it’s not a very good game, but it still had a few hundred daily active users as recently as a few weeks ago. I could have spent time improving it, but between feeling burnt out and the proprietary nature of the Flash file, I couldn’t motivate myself to do so. I’m not proud of it, allowing those two things to stop me, but it’s what happened.

After Sea Friends, I had a whole year to release a new game, but outside of Ludum Dare competition entries, I didn’t finish anything. So much for creating and delivering value.

I suppose I’m being overly negative. Late last year, I also invested in an online educational course on Internet business development, and since my focus has been there for the past few months, that’s why there has been a drop in the Thousander Club entries (and blog entries in general!). What I’ve been learning there should help me not only with GBGames but also a different website I started.

The focus that resulted in definite improvement was the focus on being healthier. I went from 188 lbs in February to a peak of 192 lbs in May down to 180 lbs in December. That’s a net loss of 8 lbs, and 12 lbs were lost between May and the end of the year! I’ve also been playing soccer, so I’m feeling more fit in general, too. Aside from a pulled hamstring in October, I’ve been improving my health slowly but surely.

So if 2009 was a mediocre year for me, what makes me think that 2010 will be any different?

Because I’ll be leveraging Purpose, Discipline, and Habits this time around.

Last year, each focus was practically the equivalent of a bad New Year’s Resolution. They were vague, and I didn’t do anything to change my life so that each focus played a big role. Yeah, I had a reminder in the form of that index card, but what was it reminding me to do or be?

I realized I didn’t want a repeat of a mediocre year, and so I decided I was going to make changes to my life to ensure it.

First, I didn’t want to feel aimless, drifting from one interesting project to the next without accomplishing anything. I needed to figure out what I really wanted out of my life. I needed to figure out my purpose.

Using the exercises in the book Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life, I was able to get a good start with this statement:

A Life on Purpose is a joyful life of freedom, continuous learning, encouraged and supported creativity, insatiable curiosity, and prolific creation, all driven by passion and a desire for excellence, powered by a healthy body and soul.

Bam. It’s great to have something to help me make decisions. If it doesn’t lead to more freedom and fun, I’m not interested. If being that person’s friend is discouraging and stifles my creativity and curiosity, I don’t want that friendship. If my heart isn’t in it and I can’t improve, why should I bother doing the same old same old? And if my health deteriorates because of it, why should I accept it as a fact of life?

Ok, so what do I want? Generally, I want to be a prolific creator. I want to be a lifelong learner. I want to be fit and healthy. I want to be a leader and role-model. I want to live a life of passion.

I’ve identified four major goals that I want to accomplish this coming year, and while I won’t be able to list all of them here, they all pass my “Is it a match for my purpose?” test.

One goal is to earn regular revenue from GBGames. So far, the only revenue I’ve ever earned is from ads, and it was never significant in the first place. I could basically pay for web hosting. With the recession, my revenues have dropped.

So how do I plan on changing things this year? Hasn’t my goal always been to earn revenue from GBGames? Yes, but I never gave my business the attention it needed. This year, I’m taking steps to change my life so that I can give it that attention.

There is a quote I like about discipline: “Discipline is remembering what you want.” A lot of people fail at keeping New Year’s resolutions because they think they need to dedicate all of their will power to accomplish it and they burn out. Will power is great for short bursts of focus, but it’s the wrong tool to use for the long haul. Discipline is the right tool. Will power will let you do things to change your environment so that discipline is easier to maintain. For instance, if you want to lose weight, using will power to avoid eating all of the junk food you keep in your home every day is a poor use of the will. A better use? Dedicating an afternoon of throwing away your junk food, shopping for healthier food, and planning healthy meals. Now you have healthy meals and snacks because you used your will power to change your environment to match your goals. Set your life up in a way that makes it easy to remember what you want out of it.

How do you do so? You install some good habits. If you can get yourself to go for a walk every single day after dinner without fail, you’re a long way along your goal of becoming more fit, and each day it becomes harder to fail.

So how do I leverage my purpose, discipline, and habits to help me accomplish my goal of earning revenue for GBGames this year? Frankly, my business plan is still being formed, and it’s the subject of another blog post. That said, in previous years, my business has suffered because it was always an afterthought. Development hours were squeezed into weeks full of non-development. 2010 will be the year that I gear my daily actions and habits toward improving my business. I’ve already taken stock of my current situation, and I’ve identified what needs to change. While I feel behind already, this work was important and needed to be done to pave the way for the rest of the year.

In previous years, I believe I have written inspirational posts about how things were going to change, but I never stuck by those convictions. This year feels different. It is different. I’ve hit a point where what I knew intellectually about the connection between action and results is now intuitively known as well.

While I intend to write more about my plans, for now, days after Groundhog’s Day, here’s to 2010!

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Merry Christmas, Blog Readers!

I hope that everyone is having a relaxing and enjoyable time during the holidays. Last minute shopping, gift wrapping, and driving through horrible weather should all give way to the fact that you’re spending time with loved ones.

Two years ago I took a picture of me with my cats for a Christmas card. It came out funny, partly because it was obvious that the cats wanted nothing to do with the camera.

Recently I tried again, and this time I put some more effort into it. The end picture came out great, but I had to go through over 170 pictures, my ineptitude with a camera, and two cats who wouldn’t sit still no matter what treats or toys I presented.

I hope you enjoy this video I made of the process!

Merry Christmas from me, Diego, and Gizmo!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Marketing/Business

Is Single-Player Gaming Dead?

Sharing the experience

Back in October, Raph Koster wrote about a PC World interview with the lead designer of Dragon Age, a major single-player game from Bioware. Mike Laidlaw on single-player games talks about the idea of creating such games today, when games such as World of Warcraft and even Facebook games such as FarmVille dominate by leveraging their social components.

Social networking games are the current big thing. For indies who would prefer to keep making shareware, the idea that someone could make a ton of money through a relatively simple MMO is as frustrating to hear about as major game developers who learned that Tetris, as simple as it was, sold much better than anything they were working on. I know more than a few indies have grumbled that while selling virtual items and subscriptions to an MMO is piracy-proof, they don’t want to make those kinds of games. With major indies reporting piracy rates of for-sale games in the 90+% range, sticking with single-player games sounds like a tough bet.

So what do you do if you want to make single-player games? Give your player a way to share his/her story.

Instead of a game that tells the player the same story that every other player will hear, give the player the means to create his/her own story. Make the experience of playing the game personal. And make sure the player has a way of sharing that experience.

NetHack is a perfect example of a single-player game that lets you experience a story to share with others. The in-game story is minimal, the NPCs aren’t very complex, and there’s not a lot of dialogue. What the game does do is provide plenty of fuel for stories that players love to share with one another. Yet Another Stupid Death, or YASD, is a common phrase for NetHack fans. I’ve even posted my own stories of these deaths. See Engraved Note to Self and YASD, the First for 2008 for short stories about my own travels in the Mazes of Menace.

Of course, those stories aren’t shared inside of NetHack. While you can watch others play online, most people talk to each other or write about what happened. The game doesn’t easily facilitate communication between friends.

But your game can. Dragon Age apparently has a Social Engine, but as Koster points out, most successful Facebook games are successful because of the player’s ability to interact with others. Even if your game is meant for one person to play, it doesn’t have to be a solitary experience.

Dragon Age has its Social Engine.

There are iPhone games that allow players to send progress updates to Twitter.

Facebook notifications let you know if someone has challenged you in Sea Friends.

Can a friend go to YouTube to view a replay of the way I handled a tricky boss? Can I show off an achievement? Could my friends send me time trial challenges?

What does your game do for allowing shared experiences?

(Photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/wanderingone/ / CC BY 2.0)

Categories
General

Being Thankful as an Indie

It’s that time of year again! Thanksgiving, that American holiday, is today. It’s a fantastic opportunity to take stock and recognize those things that we can be thankful for.

I’m thankful for free and inexpensive information about game development, marketing, business, sales, and personal development, all available through the World Wide Web.

I’m thankful for free and inexpensive high-quality development resources, including source code, compilers, engines, operating systems, art, and sound.

I’m thankful for opportunities granted by the multiple large platforms, including Facebook, cell phones, and the Web.

I’m thankful for the knowledge that I’m much more than I have been demonstrating.

I’m thankful for you, the readers of my blog.

So what are you thankful for as an indie game developer?

(Photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/guest_family/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Marketing/Business

Marketing Is More Important Than Product Quality

GamesIndustry.biz recently published a post called Marketing influences game revenue three times more than high scores. Research has shown that the belief that game reviews have an impact on the sales of a game is a false one.

Or at least a poor quality game with big marketing dollars behind it will sell much more than a good quality game with poor marketing.

On the one hand, it’s discouraging. Gamers already complain about bug-ridden games, the need for patches, and subpar playing experiences. I was shocked to find that FIFA ’09 for the Nintendo DS had crash bugs in it, and according to at least one comment in a game review out there, it seems that FIFA ’10 has its own share of show-stopping bugs. That the FIFA games are at the top of the charts in terms of sales has to make game players feel disheartened. And when game companies start shoveling anything they can out the door, customers will feel the need to be more discerning about their purchases. The video game industry already had a crash when anyone could and did make an Atari game. People stopped trying to find fun in video games when most of the products were horrible. And, of course, marketing dollars become even more important, which means the larger companies with the greater capabilities win.

On the other hand, none of this is really news, is it? Ask anyone who knows anything about marketing, and they’ll tell you that marketing is way more important than most people think it is. If you create a fantastic game that no one wants, of course it won’t sell. If you create a game that a lot of people want, even if the attempt isn’t the best, it will sell. Part of product development should be market research: finding out if anyone cares about what you’re creating.

It’s true across all industries, and it’s true for the video game industry. That said, what can an indie game developer do?

Generating Buzz for Indie Games and Advice for Aspiring Indies have some marketing tips which should fit your budget. It also helps to remember that major publishers such as EA and Nintendo need to make a lot more money than you do, and so your marketing budget doesn’t need to match theirs in dollars. You can spend much less and still make enough money for your business. Also remember that your time is a resource, and there are plenty of ways to improve your marketing that just happen to take more effort than money to pull off.

Marketing will have a huge impact on your sales potential. Don’t ignore it.