Thread by @tanyaxshort

I have a few mins left in my lunchbreak so I'm going to do a quick thread on:

you might be accidentally marketing your indie games to other game devs, pros and cons

so, as lead whoever of Kitfox, I've done accidentally marketed basically all of our games to other devs first. why?
- that's my network
- that's who will give me a microphone
- that's the language I speak natively (design/dev)
- I respect them & want them to like me/my work

writing a gamasutra or gamedev.biz article? only game devs read those

speaking at conferences? nobody's listening but game devs

tweeting about the details of game design or bizdev? oops most of my followers are game devs. this is meta.

editing textbooks... yep

(imo super hardcore indie enthusiasts, critics, prestige journalists, and game fanciers are developers for the purposes of this mini-rant. their population is still v small and particular)

I've never /especially/ succeeded at marketing to other devs, to be fair. No Kitfox games have been nominated for IGF awards or whatever. But I've still seen some serious repercussions for this (at first accidental) strategy.

the drawbacks of marketing your games to other devs are mostly obvious.
- there aren't THAT many devs out there
- most of them don't have time to buy or play many games
- their taste is kinda different from most "gamers"
- they're fucking picky as hell

the benefits of marketing your games to other devs are also mostly obvious.
- grows your professional network
- practices your pitch before it hits your 'real' customers
- increases visibility to business partners
- might feel a little respected by peers. aw. that's nice.

and it sounds easy to fix, right? if your game is popular among devs, move to phrase 2. why not just shift channels and target actual game players and buyers instead??? get with the program, Tanya!

but there's a bigger drawback that's harder to see: there might be little or no overlap between your dev-targeted "marketing" and your customer-targeted "marketing". they have completely different interests, tastes, and priorities..

the good news is that there are benefits that are ALSO hard to see. in the long-term, other devs are much more likely than customers to have your back emotionally. and if an admired dev ever becomes a fan of your game, that can open some SERIOUS doors for you and your studio.

there's no neat moral of the story. I don't regret writing gamedev blog articles, or editing those textbooks, or speaking at conferences. they were probably worth it.

I'm just glad that now, I can make that choice b/t dev vs customer marketing consciously. I hope you can too.