Essay: Widening Your Audience

It doesn't matter if you're noncommercial or commercial, we're all striving for people to play the games we create. Unless the motivation to create your game was out of personal reasons, most of us would like others to play our works. Everyone can be a potential consumer for your game but they can't play it unless they know about it in the first place. This article contains a variety of suggestions and tips (from personal experience) to help broaden your audience beyond the LemmaSoft Forums.

First, you need to have an official website. It can be a simple blog, but eventually you'll want to move onto something more substantial especially if your work becomes popular and you plan to remain in the indie game scene for a while. See this page for a list of suggested services you can use to host your website or this page to set up your own domain name.

After you have a corner of the internet to call your own, start establishing yourself on other Social Media Websites (latter part of the page). It doesn't matter where you start, as long as you get your name somewhere. You'll want to link back to your website and appear professional, or else people won't have much faith in you or your games. Post updates regularly or whenever possible and act friendly. People like to know there's a person behind the name! Chances are at this level you're close to your fans and other developers, so don't delay on replying to them. Don't be afraid to reach out and say you want to affiliate with them either; the more connections you make, the more people there are to spread the word about your game(s).

Each Social Media site is slightly different, and a few have certain rules.

Twitter
A fast-paced microblogging website where posts are constricted to 140. Users follow each other and view the tweets of all the profiles they track.

Tumblr
A fast-paced, sometimes whimsical microblogging website where a post can easily go viral, given that the right people see the post.

Even people who aren't users on tumblr will see the blog theme, so that is important in and of itself. When selecting a blog theme/appearance, go minimal and make sure your post information is easy to read. You do not want a distracting theme that takes away from the content of your posts. Themes that also allow connections to other social media sites are even more favorable.

On the back end of tumblr, the trick to getting the people most interested in your game is to tag it accordingly. When making a post, there is a section on the right sidebar for adding tags. The first five tags are especially important because only those will appear in a named tag. If your game is a Visual Novel, suggested tags would be "visual novel," "visual novels," "vn," etc. If your game is an otome, your tags would be "otome," "otome game," "otoge," etc. As stated before, the first five tags are the only ones that people will see when they browse a tag. Any other tags will not appear in that specified tag, though they may be used for organizational purposes on your blog. It's highly advised that you do not spam a tag with several updates at a single time or else you may disrupt the flow of that tag. Many people use tags to communicate with each other, so you don't want to appear annoying.

Users may decide to follow your blog when they see it, and every time they reblog a post from you that's spreading the word. Users can also ask the blog questions, even people who are not members, if anonymous questions are turned on. Users like to interact and they're more inclined to support you if you show a personality.

(WIP essay by CheeryMoya)