Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

> I’m kinda floundering right now and not really sure what to do

    release it
    focus on marketing for a while
    Treat it as a purely hobby project
    Make it into an ethical game experiment
    pour a lot more time in, improve graphics and music, add more levels and variety

As someone who's gone through this, put years into a software startup, nearly had it fail completely after spending a lot of my own money to keep the family afloat while I goofed around thinking I was building something great...

I feel like there is only one right answer here, and it's just glaringly obvious. Marketing is the thing that needed doing before starting, during the project, and after it's done. Regardless of the trends on Steam, in fact even more so because of the trends on Steam. None of the other options will solve the problem. Releasing it won't help, and making an ethical experiment won't get anywhere without an audience. Pouring more time into graphics will result in greater loss without first gaining an audience.

Find someone who is good at marketing and believes in your game enough to get 30% of all revenue in exchange for marketing it. In other words, find a business partner with a clue.

I initially dismissed this advice. However, when i thought a bit deeper, it makes a lot of sense to do this.

If you can't convince somebody to market your game, how can you convince somebody to buy it from you directly?

Where can I find someone like this? I need this help.

these projects evolve during their production.

it's difficult to market what you haven't finished imagining.

Indeed, that's very true. I've experienced first hand trying to market something that I haven't finished imagining. But that's the whole point, you have to start before you've finished, even though it is hard.

It's difficult to market in general, at any stage of doneness. Marketing can be hard, boring, frustrating, and not fun. It's especially tempting as a dev to think that if you just make the product better, people will see it, and recognize its amazingness, and it'll go viral and market itself. It's tempting to keep adding features and making the product better. But that strategy doesn't work, it's important to buckle down and do the marketing, otherwise nobody will ever know about your game or product, no matter how good, and no matter how done it is.

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