Hey guys. For the last year or two I’ve been considering paying for advertising, which is something I’ve never done before, but it seems like a way to keep sales up in the years that I’m not publishing anything new. (And it also helps with accounting shenanigans, as I could reduce my tax bill by investing in future sales, blah blah)

But the more I think about it the more challenging it seems.

First of all, for it to pay off, you’d need to have a fairly high revenue per user, which is why I guess you see it the most with micro-transaction-plagued mobile games, and big AAA games. But I’ve also seen it with some medium-sized indie games, who presumably have publishers who know what they’re doing – and I don’t. I’d have to learn quite a bit to figure out how to measure if the advertising was worthwhile or not.

Secondly, I haven’t really felt the need for it other than curiosity. The store algorithms on Steam and Google Play do most of the user acquisition work for me, and I’m paying them a share of the profits regardless of whether they find the new users or if I do. So it seems like a poor deal to pay to send users to one of these platforms. On Google Play for example, I reckon less than 10% of the 500k EBF5 downloads are from my social media efforts, and the rest are from Google Play randomly showing the game to people. (my characters being recognisable definitely helps a lot, but that’s really hard to measure)

Thirdly, I just really hate the idea of giving more money to awful, monopolising companies like Google and Facebook.

I guess a lot of those problems also apply to paying “influencers” like gaming livestreamers. I don’t regularly watch any and my games don’t seem like the flashiest to show off in that form, so I don’t know if it’s a good fit. Plus it’s always a joy to see people streaming my games just because they want to, and it would feel weird to pay others to do it.

So now I’m thinking, what if I commission really popular artists to do art of my characters, and give my games a little shout-out on social media? It seems less dirty than more direct marketing – I support a micro business and get some cool art out of it. I don’t see a lot of examples of this sort of thing though, so I guess I’d have to try it to see if it works. It also feels weird to pay someone for art when my games already get tons of fanart organically.

I guess the most elegant solution would be for me to be the influencer, but I’m just not cool enough. All of my clout has always just come from my games doing well on gaming platforms, due to good reviews and recognizable characters. And I guess that’s fine too.

So the conclusion is that I may just end up doing nothing with any of this. But maybe I’ll commission a few art pieces to see if any traffic comes from that. Thoughts?