On Marketing a Free Game

I am catching a little heat from the people on RPGnet for my little trick last night, so I figured I should kinda put a bigger picture frame around this whole endeavor.

I have a kind of rare position in the RPG community's mix of game designers. I am pitching something for free, absolutely no cost, with no strings. No affiliate marketing, no ads to take advantage of traffic, no sideways way to get money. There are only a few people like me out there. This is my entertainment. I have actually made money on this whole thing, you just have to consider all the money I didn't spend on video games in the past year as revenue. I am so glad I kicked that habit. Wow, what a difference in my life.

Anyway.. I had entertained thoughts about getting money early in my adventures, but I realized pretty early on with Synapse that it wouldn't work. 1st off, I can't pay for marketing. And in order to get your message onto a lot of plates at once, you almost always have to pay. Sure, you can make a single announcement on a site or get a review, then it fades away in only a few days. You can make a post in the developers forums on popular RPG forums, it will be moved to the 2nd page within a week, if even that long. The only way to do free marketing involves lots and lots of work. You need to be pounding pavement. And quite frankly, I have better things to do. Like write more stuff.

So for the past year I have been making a lot of stuff and getting some great feedback, but the pool of interest has been low. Not because of the quality of my product, I have gotten a ton of really positive feedback on the quality, but because there are so few people aware of what I am doing.

A big conclusion that I have reached is that I don't think you can say "hey, I made a free game" and use that as a marketing pitch. It just doesn't work. It doesn't. People tune that out. "Meh, free game, probably sucks". There was a really great discussion a while back on someone's blog that I read about how people value free things in a totally different way from things that cost money. It is just a psychological thing.

I think the only way to be successful at what I am doing and get my books in front of a larger audience is to come up with other ways of getting people to check them out that just a direct pitch. I think the best way to do so is to drive traffic to the blog, then let them see those free links on their own.

So my goal in the next year is to raise awareness of me, Greg, without directly pitching my games. And the people that I see who have big traffic are typically quite controversial. Whether it is justice or not, the fact is that the internet rewards peacock feathers and not camouflage. So I need to add some peacock feathers. It won't all be covert controversy posts, there will be a lot of regular commentary all over the place. But before I went on a posting spree on forums, I wanted to make sure my time would be worth spending there.

The test I ran last night may have been cynical, but I was at least honest about it and posted the results. And if anyone with a blog is reading this and can honestly say they don't care at all about the reality of what draws people to blogs and what doesn't, I would like to meet you. Because my experience is that every blogger wants people to read their blog, so they want to know the truth of what makes people click on a link (or not) so that they can maybe adjust course to benefit from that. I wanted to know if it would really matter, because if it didn't then I didn't want to go down that road at all.

The fact appears to be that edgy works. Edgy is a crowd-pleaser. Edgy is an ear-turner. Edgy is spectacle.

If a few people followed the links here and saw my posts about what I was doing and they never come back, then that is the price I pay for the knowledge of how the internet actually works. At least our little RPG corner of it. Those people need to grow up anyway.

At least I was honest about it on the backside of the equation. I can easily find a hundred posts WAY WAY more controversial than my little test here. Why do you think those people wrote those posts? Do you remember Malcolm's post about how RPGs suck? Or Skarka's about Tabletopocalypse? What do you think they were doing?

Traffic. This is the web folks. It is the universal currency. I just wanted to know how it works.

Anyway, this is the last I will ever say about this. Cheers!