Here's a little bit of video game marketing advice for those of you who develop your own instead of just affiliate selling them. I'll probably get some flack for this because it's not always true, but if you're just selling a small title without a fanbase or underserved niche, this videogame marketing advice might as well be.
The press can be worthless for game marketing & promoting them. Unless you're willing to pay or bribe them with advertising of course.
Don't worry about the videogame journalists. Sure, you might get a boost in ego & traffic from having your game written about by them. But the truth is - many sites they write at just plain aren't read all that often. There's no reason to chase after them unless you want to be really proud of having your release mentioned on one. Don't worry if no one at Kotaku, Destructoid, GameSpot or CrispyGamer wants to put up a small blurb about your game in their news. Many people who depend on gamesites like those simply pirate everything anyways.
Why would big places like IGN want to write about your release? They don't usually. The articles they write are to either get traffic from new visitors/search engines or give people reading the site who are already interested in the games you're marketing news. People don't read them or magazines to find out about interesting new games except in the well-established franchises.
Sites like Tigsource & IndieGames get more readers (unless you're major news) than their unknown announcements and are full of people who love interesting games. They are where you should be focusing your video game marketing resources if you don't have a large budget. Go to the forums where you can post your release in an as announcement - I just gave you one.
There's plenty more out there if you do your game marketing research. Many of the same gamepress writers you'd be trying to reach normally with your PR efforts also pay attention to these.
You'll get more traffic by writing about other games yourself and using their visitors (people wanting more info about them? be creative!) to promote your own. Go to message boards about them and be subtle marketing your own. Write walkthroughs for some areas. Review another developer's product and use it as a game sales page for your own or another you're marketing. Make a list of the very best games of that type and stick your own in it. Those can get popular with a nice push if you're into Digg or other types of social marketing.
Find your fans, and have your fans pressure the press into writing about your game instead of harassing them yourself. It's much easier than trying to scale the mountain the hard way and whining about why game journalists never want to listen to your marketing materials or post your press releases. Rabid fans are one of your best targets for game marketing - especially if they help you sell more games to other players too.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Privacy Policy
The privacy of our visitors to Selling Games is important to us. At Selling Games, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we recieve and collect when you use and visit Selling Games, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties.
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We also use third party advertisements on Selling Games to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google Adsense program) information including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).
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You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.
Deleting cookies does not mean you are permanently opted out of any advertising program. Unless you have settings that disallow cookies, the next time you visit a site running the advertisements, a new cookie will be added.
Log Files
As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.
Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums.
We also use third party advertisements on Selling Games to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google Adsense program) information including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).
DoubleClick DART cookies
We also may use DART cookies for ad serving through Google’s DoubleClick, which places a cookie on your computer when you are browsing the web and visit a site using DoubleClick advertising (including some Google Adsense advertisements). This cookie is used to serve ads specific to you and your interests (”interest based targeting”). The ads served will be targeted based on your previous browsing history (For example, if you have been viewing sites about visiting Las Vegas, you may see Las Vages hotel advertisements when viewing a non-related site, such as on a site about hockey). DART uses “non personally identifiable information”. It does NOT track personal information about you, such as your name, email address, physical address, telephone number, social security numbers, bank account numbers or credit card numbers. You can opt-out of this ad serving on all sites using this advertising by visiting http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/dart_adserving.aspx
You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.
Deleting cookies does not mean you are permanently opted out of any advertising program. Unless you have settings that disallow cookies, the next time you visit a site running the advertisements, a new cookie will be added.
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