How to promote an indie game

Promotion is the half of shipping that most first games underestimate, and the half that decides how the other half goes. The good news is that almost none of what works costs money. The bad news is that all of it costs time, and most of it has to start long before launch.

The uncomfortable premise

Nobody is waiting for your game. Not one person. Every player you get, you will have found, convinced, or earned through somebody else who did.

That sounds bleak and is actually freeing, because it means the job is concrete: find the places your specific players already are, and show up there as a person rather than a billboard.

Start before you think you should

The single most common mistake is starting at launch. By then the decisions are made.

Steam wishlists are the clearest example. They are the main signal Steam uses to decide whether to show your game to anyone, and they accumulate over months. A store page up early with a modest trailer beats a perfect page up on launch day, every time. If you do nothing else from this page, put the page up.

The same logic applies everywhere: an audience of two hundred people who have watched the game take shape is worth more than two thousand strangers who see a launch post.

What works, roughly in order

Show the game, constantly

Short clips of the game being played. Not concept art, not a roadmap, not a logo reveal. The thing moving. Post them where your players are — the genre subreddit, the relevant Discord servers, wherever your sort of game gets discussed.

Clips do the work because they answer the only question anybody has: what is it like to play this. Five seconds of real gameplay says more than a page of description.

Creators, chosen narrowly

A hundred small creators who cover your exact genre will do more than one large one who does not. Find people who have covered three games like yours, watch what they actually enjoy, and write to them individually saying why you thought of them specifically.

Send a key, a short pitch and a clip. Never send a press release. Never send the same message to two people.

A demo, treated as the main event

For a lot of players the demo is the store page. It is also the thing creators will stream and festivals will take. Make it short, make it end at a moment that makes somebody want more, and ship it earlier than feels comfortable.

Festivals and events

Steam Next Fest and the various online showcases are free, and they put a demo in front of people actively hunting for new games. They are one of the very few genuinely free distribution channels left. Diary the deadlines a year out; they come round faster than you expect.

Somewhere you own

A Discord, a mailing list, anything you control. Social platforms change their reach overnight and owe you nothing. The people who liked your first game are how your second one starts above zero, and you can only reach them if you kept a way to.

Press, last and least

Coverage is lovely and mostly does not move the needle for small games. Pitch it, briefly, to writers who cover your genre. Do not build the plan around it.

What does not work

• Posting the same launch announcement everywhere on one day. It reads as spam because it is.
• Buying followers, reviews or wishlists. Visible, worthless, and on some platforms it ends you.
• Waiting for the game to be finished. By then you have no time left to build an audience and no way to use what you learn.
• Talking about the engine, the tech stack or the tooling. Other developers find it interesting. Players do not.
• “Going viral” as a plan. It is an outcome, occasionally, and never a strategy.

The storefront is marketing

People forget that the page itself is doing most of the selling.

• Capsule art that is legible as a thumbnail the size of a stamp. Most are not.
• A trailer that opens on gameplay. No logos for the first five seconds. You have about that long.
• A first sentence that says what the game is, not what it is about. “A turn-based artillery game with bulls for soldiers” beats a paragraph of fiction.
• Screenshots from the actual game, including its interface. Players are trying to work out what playing it looks like.

The browser advantage, if your game can take it

Every route above has the same friction in the middle: somebody has to decide to install. A browser game does not have that step. The gap between “saw a clip” and “is playing” is one click, and that changes what a shared link is worth.

It is not right for every game — charging is harder and the build has constraints — but for a demo, a jam game or anything multiplayer, removing the install is the single largest reduction in friction available.

Where Arcade Union fits

Honestly: we cannot hand you an audience, and our launchpad page says so in those words. Anybody promising you one is selling something.

What we can do is remove some of the work around the game. On our indie game launchpad we carry the delivery and bandwidth, so a clip going well does not arrive as a hosting bill. Leaderboards and player accounts come built, which gives you something to post about after launch rather than only before it. And players arrive with a history from our other games, so a launch starts somewhere above zero.

If you are weighing up where to put the game in the first place, that is a different question: how to publish an indie game covers Steam, itch.io, consoles and the browser on their merits.

And if blockchain keeps coming up in pitches to you and you want a straight answer about whether it would help your game: what is Web3 gaming includes the cases where it makes things worse.

Published 12 October 2026. Platform rules and festival dates change — check before relying on any of this. Think something here is wrong? Tell us.