It's Hannah Flynn //  🖤

I had a question about mystery in marketing at the end of my Develop talk and I don't think I answered it very well, so here is a short thread about why you don't have the time or money to deal in mystery when promoting your indie game. #indiedev #gamedev

I'd made the point that you should show the best parts of your game to convince people it's worth buying. Short of major story spoilers, there's almost nothing that you can't show to catch people's eye.

Some developers have the opportunity to use mystery with their communities. I sometimes give ours little clues about new stories. It makes the community a fun place to be, which is valuable.

And obviously games, and our games in particular, can deal out mysterious goings-on by the truckload and it's great. That's in-game thinking.

But you can't put out ~~mysterious~~ marketing content that withholds the juice. Not without some recognition already. Not without a community who'll get excited about the hints.

You're assuming that someone will even read/see the whole message. It's hard enough to make people remember your game's name; you can't afford to conceal your hand on its best content. If all they take from the ad/tweet/trailer is OH SHIT TRAINS IN SPACE?? - great!

They could at least Google "trains in space game" later. But in this 'attention economy' you can't ask people to care about something without clearly showing them what they should care about.