Sell the Sizzle, not the Sausage: How to Release your Game

Anyone can make a video game. A good one, fit to prosper and win awards and hearts! I wrote a piece about exactly that last month, but making it is only half the battle. You need to ready it for release, get it out there, and have the fruit of your labours reach an audience.

We're going to look at four main sections:

• Pre-publicity, including trailers and social media.
• Finishing touches to the game before it reaches the public, including the need for good playtesting
• Sites you can release games through.
• Festivals, conventions, events and awards.

Pre-publicity

You should start publicity earlier than you think. If you have a solid title and concept – and you ought to have both of those long before release – you can show the world your game.

This is a case where showing is a lot more important than telling. A description of your game is not alluring. Pictures and animations are what you want. You need your audience to see the gameplay and imagine the experience of playing the game. As Lord Sugar puts it, “sell the sizzle, not the sausage”. As a child I would gaze at the images on the back of game boxes like Civilization II or Fury of the Furries and imagine the gameplay long before I got to try it for myself. We play it in our hearts and minds before we get our hands on it.

Images, short clips or animations are some of the best options. This is really Instagram's time to shine. TikTok too. I even recoursed to Tumblr with a raft of animated gifs. It's unlikely that your teasers and posts will go viral, but a lively assortment, a consistent release and a range of platforms increase the chance of your promos reaching some of the right people.

Some developers keep posting excerpts and promotions for over a year before finally releasing. In November I met the makers of Contact Protocol. The game isn't out yet, but I really like their consistent, effective use of social media to show snippets of the game, and do so in an engaging way. I wish I'd followed that sort of pattern before releasing my own games.

It's tricky to work on all the elements of your game at once and work on pre-publicity, but it's a necessity if you want to stack up interest and get on people's wishlists.

Wishlists

Whichever site you're selling through, there'll be a wishlist feature. People wishlist a lot more games than they buy, so you want to get on as many people's wishlists as possible. Some say you shouldn't even think of releasing your game until you're on 7,000 Steam wishlists. I didn't, to my regret: my game Trans Theft Horso was only on a thousand wishlists when it released last July, and this led to the game releasing to fairly muted response.

When your game releases, and again whenever you put it on a discount, emails will go out those who wishlisted it, and you have a chance to make a sale or two, or (if you're lucky) hundreds. Don't expect all your wishlists to convert into sales. It's likely to be around 10-20%. This can be disappointing if you're not prepared for it. Many things can! Still, any purchase is better than a poke in the eye.

Make a Trailer

Video game trailers are like movie trailers: wonderful, exciting, and sometimes more entertaining than the thing they represent.

Make a good trailer, one which seizes the audience's attention in the first three seconds and keeps it for the duration. My method was with a song, but your trailer needs to be something which suits, and sells, the vibe of your game.

I made my trailer about half-way through the process of making my game. The song gave me a duration to aim for, and I pulled together clips of some of the most striking and visual moments in the game. Then I realised I didn't have enough clips to fill the time, which also made me realise my game didn't include all that many stunning set-pieces. As a result, I bodged together a couple of exciting scenes purely for the trailer – wow, a cow is struck by a traction engine, spins through the air and explodes! – and then worked them into the story of the game later.

Is it bogus to add things to your game purely to make the trailer exciting? Not at all! That's how they make Hollywood movies, and that's how you punch up the excitement of your game.

Incidentally, making trailers is an art in itself, and a lot of people outsource it to trailer-makers found online. If you're not a confident video editor, it might be a wise choice. Making and releasing a game requires a ridiculous number of skillsets.