Dave Gilbert’s gamedev blog

So, I’ve been working a lot lately. I’ve been at my computer for 7-8 hours at a time, for about one week straight. As a result, you’d think that I would have made significant progress on my next game, right? Alas, no.

I’ve been coming to terms with the business end of things, and it’s been quite interesting. Most of my success, if you can call it that, had been through word of mouth. I never did any serious marketing or advertising, aside from giving free copies of my games to review sites. Somehow or another, word got out and I’ve been riding that wave ever since.

But, there’s only so far word-of-mouth can get you. When that wave recedes, it’s time to rely on the tried-and-true: marketing!

Marketing.

Something about that word always carried iffy connotations with me. The image of a bright-eyed, sleek sales-rep with a plastic smile spouting PR buzzwords comes to mind. Personally, I have always been very wary of being thrown a sales pitch, and I am always suspicious around marketing types. But, alas, I had no choice. Customers weren’t just going to find their way to me anymore. I had to find my way to them.

First tactic: game portals. Not many game portals were interested in carrying an old-school adventure game like Legacy or Shivah. And very few were interested in carrying a religious-type game like Shivah. However, my efforts have finally paid off. You’ll be seeing The Blackwell Legacy appearing on Big Fish Games in a few weeks, and both games will be making their debut on Garage Games. In addition, I just signed a deal with an Italian company called Adventures Planet, who will be distributing the game in Italy (and translating it, to boot).

Second tactic: Advertising. The time had come to spend some money on advertising. The two obvious places were Adventuregamers and Gameboomers, since most of my traffic came from there. But, I also wanted to try and find new customers. I decided to go the webcomic route, and signed up with Project Wonderful to get my ad up on various web comics that center around “geek culture.” Two days after getting all these ads up and running, I nearly doubled my traffic.

Things are picking up once again, and I have to make a heartfelt apology to Marketing. Marketing, I’m sorry. You do good things, after all. I take back all the bad things I ever said about you. Well, most of them.

Of course, due to all this extra work, I have much less time to work on the actual game. Does anybody out there know anything about marketing and want an internship? I’m serious. If you can make coffee and walk the dog, even better.