Flash Game Design Challenge

[kingyak]

Most of our advertising is word of mouth (IRL and on the web). One of our guys does a Podcast (Monkeys Took My Jetpack) where they sometimes play QAGS, and that's gotten us some awareness and a few mentions in the podcaster community. And of course we have Facebook pages and Twitter feeds and websites and all that stuff and (as you may have noticed) aren't shy about mentioning our stuff on forums and such we frequent if given the opportunity.

The only "traditional" advertising we regularly do are press releases, banners, and occasionally a featured product ad at drivethru, though we have occasionally done ads in con programs for cons that are willing to trade ads for prize support. We also send (PDF) review copies of each new product to a bunch of reviewers and podcasters, but the vast majority of those either don't get downloaded or get downloaded but never reviewed or mentioned. If we were sending physical product, I doubt the extra sales would be enough to cover the cost of the product and shipping.

When we first started out, we ran a few ads in Knights of the Dinner Table, but didn't really notice much of a sales bump. Since we no longer sell our books through the usual distribution channels (we tried it for a while and it was more trouble than it was worth), print ads would probably pay off even less for us. Since our games are pretty niche, broadcasting isn't really our best marketing strategy--most gamers will take one look at a lot of our products and write them off as either "silly" (not serious, like when you pretend you're an elven wizard) or not shiny enough. We're better off finding the other people on the fringes who like the stuff that we like and letting them know we exist rather than trying to win over your typical D&D player.

The best advice I can give you is to join the Game Publisher's Association. A full membership is, I think, $75 a year and there's a cheaper associate membership option and it's worth every penny just for their mailing list. There's not a lot of traffic on it, but it's full of people who have been doing this a long time, so you can ask just about anything about the industry and somebody will know the answer.