How to Start an Indie Game Studio the Right Way:

Figuring out how to start an indie game studio is one thing. Doing it without repeating the mistakes that sink most first attempts is something else entirely. Rob Carroll, CEO of Rollcraft, came to game development through construction project management and an environmental sciences degree, which is not the typical origin story. What he carried from that background, a producer’s instinct for logistics, timelines, and people management, turned out to be exactly what the games industry rewards.

Rob joined Dan Long on the IndieGameBusiness podcast to walk through the decisions that shaped Rollcraft, the mistakes that cost him real time and money, and what he wishes someone had told him before he started. What came out of the conversation was a grounded, specific set of lessons for anyone who is thinking seriously about building a studio from scratch.

How Rob Got Into the Games Industry:

Rob’s entry into games was not planned. He was working as a construction project manager in San Diego when friends who had started a video game company invited him to join their community. He started writing for their game, got to know the team, and when they needed a producer to manage growth, he made the switch. The studio was called Sojourn Development. The game was called Glimpse. Like many indie projects, it built something genuinely interesting and then ran out of money before it reached players.

That experience gave Rob something most first-time founders do not have: a firsthand understanding of exactly how a studio can fail even when the people building it are capable and motivated. He was not starting Rollcraft from theory. He was starting it from a specific set of hard lessons.

What Actually Prompted the Launch of Rollcraft:

Rollcraft did not start with a clean decision to found a company. Rob was working at a transmedia development company, one with an ambitious vision of integrating games, television, film, and books into a unified experience. He had built and was running the video game group there. Then the CEO decided that transmedia no longer included games. The video game group was cut. Rob and his co-founder found themselves out of a job on the same day.

The response was immediate. They had enough experience to back their own judgment, and the frustration of having something they built taken away from them was fuel. They decided to do it themselves. That kind of origin, forced rather than chosen, is more common in the games industry than the clean founding narrative most people present publicly. It is also, in many cases, the better foundation. There is less romanticism and more clarity about what actually needs to get done.

The First Real Decision – Choosing the Right Platform:

When developers ask how to start an indie game studio, the conversation usually jumps quickly to funding, team structure, or tools. Rob’s first real decision was about platform, specifically where to distribute the game, and it shaped everything that followed.

Steam and mobile were both options. Both were rejected, not because they are bad platforms, but because the current conditions on both make it genuinely difficult for a new studio to get traction without existing visibility or a significant marketing budget. The discoverability problem on Steam is well documented. Mobile requires either a substantial user acquisition spend or luck that most studios cannot plan around.

Rollcraft chose the web. HTML5 gaming, built for browser play and distributed through web portals, offered a different set of conditions. The portals Rob’s team had relationships with included:

• Armor Games, which Rob’s team has worked with directly and describes as a strong partner
• Crazy Games, which has approximately fifty million monthly active users and is actively growing
• Poki, which has stated it has over one hundred million users, runs exclusively on advertising rather than in-app purchases, and has a specific demographic skew toward younger players
• Congregate, which is rebuilding its platform and represents an opportunity to get in early on a relaunching portal with an existing audience

Each portal operates differently. Most require developers to run payment processing through the portal’s own system, with the portal cutting a check on collected revenue. Poki has no in-app purchasing at all, which means any game published there needs a separate branch without purchase mechanics. Each portal also has its own SDK, its own testing requirements, and its own approval process.

Crazy Games runs a two-week testing and approval process. Poki allows iterative playtesting with groups of ten, then requires a five-hundred-person playtest before wider release. Critically, Poki records gameplay during those sessions, which gives developers footage showing exactly where players got confused, missed a mechanic, or stopped engaging. That kind of direct behavioral feedback is something most developers pay significant sums to gather through third-party playtesting services.

The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When Starting a Studio:

Rob was asked directly about the mistakes he sees most often in founders setting up studios for the first time. His answer covered both the obvious and the overlooked.

On co-founders:

• Do not pick co-founders based on availability or convenience
• You are going to be working with this person every day, relying on their judgment, and trusting them with decisions that affect the company’s survival
• The relationship needs to exist before the company does, not get built alongside it
• Too many decision-makers at the founding stage creates paralysis, not better outcomes

On infrastructure:

• Choose your technology stack as if you are going to be scaling it, not just shipping a demo
• Do not build on a platform or tool that has a realistic chance of being deprecated or discontinued
• Switching infrastructure mid-development does not just cost money, it burns the development time you already spent and forces you to rebuild what you thought was done
• Rob’s team learned this directly from the Flash deprecation. Everything built in Flash had to be rebuilt from scratch when Adobe shut it down

On contracts and legal structure:

• Get legal agreements in place with co-founders before you need them
• Intellectual property ownership, equity splits, and decision-making authority all need to be documented
• A handshake agreement between people who trust each other feels fine until the company is worth something or a disagreement arises
• An entertainment or games-specific attorney is worth the cost. General practice lawyers frequently miss the specifics that matter in this industry

Why Infrastructure Decisions Made Early Have Long Consequences:

One of the more practically valuable parts of the conversation was Rob’s breakdown of technology choices and why getting them right early matters so much. His current studio uses Heroic Labs for backend infrastructure. Getting there was not straightforward. The first backend provider they used did not work out, and migrating everything from one provider to another meant essentially throwing away a significant portion of the development work they had already completed.

The principle he drew from that experience:

• Work with third-party tools and providers that are built to scale with a growing company, not just to get the first build out the door
• Evaluate whether a tool or platform has a realistic long-term future before committing your architecture to it
• Build systems that will be supplemental to future development, not obstacles that have to be torn out and replaced
• Avoid building anything you already know you will have to throw away later. Those are burned cycles that produce nothing durable

The engine choice follows the same logic. Whether a studio builds in Unity, Unreal, Godot, or HTML5 is a decision that shapes every technical choice made afterward. Changing engines mid-development is rarely a clean process. Rob’s team made their engine decision with the long-term in mind and has not had to revisit it.

Scaling the Team and What Changes When You Do:

When a studio is small, culture is not a policy. It is a product of the specific people in the room and how they interact with each other every day. Rob’s observation is that this works well at small scale precisely because everyone knows what everyone else is doing and the team’s shared values do not need to be written down to be real.

Scaling changes that. When new people join, they are not inheriting culture through proximity. They are learning it through what they observe, what gets rewarded, and what leadership models. Rob’s recommendation is to be deliberate about culture before it needs to be formalized, not after.

Beyond culture, there are legal and HR thresholds that vary by location. In many jurisdictions, crossing certain headcount thresholds triggers requirements around HR policies, health insurance, and other corporate compliance obligations. Rob’s practical advice:

• Know what the thresholds are in your company’s jurisdiction before you hire near them
• Consider bringing on independent contractors to handle capacity needs rather than expanding the full-time headcount beyond a threshold that creates compliance overhead you are not ready to manage
• This is not about avoiding responsibility to workers. It is about understanding what each stage of growth actually costs and planning accordingly

How Rollcraft Raised Its First Round:

Rollcraft raised its first round of funding through WeFunder, a crowdfunding platform that allows community members and independent investors to take equity stakes in early-stage companies. For a studio that had spent time building a community around its game, this approach had a specific appeal: the people most invested in seeing the game succeed could become actual stakeholders in the company.

Rob described the WeFunder experience positively and noted that Rollcraft was actively raising its next round through the same platform at the time of the podcast. For developers who are researching how to start an indie game studio without institutional venture backing, community-based equity raises represent a viable path, particularly for studios that have already built some audience or community presence to draw from.

The campaign is live at wefunder.com/rollcraft for developers or investors who want to follow or participate.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Rob and other industry pros.

The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now

Indie Game Creator Marketing: How Indies Win With Creators Without Big Budgets:

There is a persistent belief in indie game development that working with content creators requires either a large budget or the luck of going viral. Mercedes Boberg has spent years proving that neither of those things is true.

Mercedes is a Indie Game Creator Marketing specialist at First Look Pragma, a Sweden-based platform built to connect game developers with content creators and playtesters. She joined the IndieGameBusiness podcast with host Dan Long to break down how indie studios can build effective creator relationships without spending money most of them do not have. What she laid out was a practical, nuanced framework that challenges several assumptions developers commonly carry into creator outreach.

Why Passion Beats Reach Every Time:

The central argument Mercedes made is one that sounds obvious until you examine how most studios actually run creator campaigns. Developers frequently chase large follower counts and established names, spending significant portions of their marketing budgets to get a well-known creator to play their game once. The result is often a single video with decent view numbers and little else.

What actually moves the needle, according to Mercedes, is finding creators who genuinely want to play the game. A creator who is personally drawn to a game’s genre, aesthetic, or mechanics will play it more than once, talk about it between sessions, and respond authentically to their audience’s questions about it. That authenticity is something viewers feel. It is not something a paid placement can fully replicate.

The question developers should be asking is not who has the most subscribers but who would actually enjoy this game. Those are very different searches, and the second one is where the real value lives.

How Early Is Early Enough to Start doing Indie Game Creator Marketing:

Mercedes was asked directly: when should a studio start involving content creators? Her answer was as soon as there is anything for them to play.

Some studios she works with bring creators in during early development, before the build is polished, before all the systems are in place, sometimes under NDA. The reasoning is straightforward: getting content out early starts building a community around the game before launch. It generates feedback. It creates early advocates who feel invested in the game’s development because they were there from the beginning.

The instinct to wait until the game is ready, until there is ten or twenty hours of content, until the bugs are fixed, costs developers the one thing they cannot manufacture later: early momentum. A creator who plays a rough build and says it is rough but interesting carries more credibility than a creator who plays a polished launch build. The roughness signals authenticity.

For studios that find this approach uncomfortable, Mercedes suggested the next natural trigger point: demo release or early access. These are structured moments that give creators something concrete to work with and give the studio a clear context for outreach. But her preference, where possible, was earlier.

Thinking About Your Game as Content Before You Launch:

One of the most practically useful ideas in the conversation was the question of whether a game is designed with content creation in mind. Not in a cynical, optimize-everything-for-virality way, but in a genuine awareness of how creators will interact with and present the game to their audiences.

Mercedes gave two examples from the conversation that illustrated this well. The first was a developer who designed his game to be playable both horizontally and vertically. Turning the monitor ninety degrees still produced a functional, visually coherent game. That deliberate choice meant creators could record vertical short-form content for platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts without the game looking broken or awkward on a phone screen.

The second example was a developer who built a keyboard shortcut that stripped out all the UI, leaving only raw gameplay on screen. For a game heavy on interface elements, this small feature made a significant difference for creators trying to produce clean footage. The developer told creators about it directly, which meant the content coming out of those partnerships looked better than it otherwise would have.

The broader point is that small, intentional choices during development can meaningfully affect the quality and volume of content creators produce. Things worth considering include:

• Whether the game produces natural, shareable moments that do not require explanation
• Whether the game can be recorded vertically without losing visual coherence
• Whether there are UI-free or clean-screen options for footage capture
• Whether player interactions produce unexpected or funny moments that spread independently of the game’s core loop
• Whether the game has a central character or visual element that translates well to short-form thumbnails and clips

Short Form vs Long Form – Choosing the Right Indie Game Creator Marketing Type:

Mercedes was careful not to give a single prescriptive answer about which platform or content format works best, because the honest answer is that it depends on the game. But she laid out the logic clearly enough that developers can apply it to their own situation.

Short-form content on TikTok and YouTube Shorts works well for fast virality and broad discovery. A clip that catches attention in the first two seconds can reach an enormous number of people quickly. The limitation is format: viewers hold their phones vertically, and games designed for horizontal play can look small or awkward in that orientation. If the game has a strong central character, a visually striking moment, or a mechanic that reads clearly in fifteen seconds, short form can be very effective.

Long-form content on Twitch and YouTube is better suited to games that need context to be appreciated, games with depth, progression, or player interaction that unfolds over time. A Twitch stream lets viewers see the full arc of a session, which builds investment in a way a clip cannot. For games where the interesting stuff happens twenty minutes in, long form is the vehicle that actually showcases it.

Many studios benefit from both. A short clip drives discovery. A longer video or stream gives the viewers that clip sent their way something to watch and decide whether to buy. The funnel works better when both are present.

What to Do When You Only Have a Few Hours a Week:

Dan asked a question that reflects the reality most indie developers are working within: if a studio only has a few hours per week to dedicate to creator outreach, where should that time go?

Mercedes’s answer was to use platforms that automate the sourcing process. Rather than spending those hours every week identifying, researching, and emailing individual creators, a developer can list their game on a platform designed to match it with interested creators. The developers’ active time then shifts from outreach to review: confirming or declining the creators who express interest. That is a significantly more efficient use of limited time.

For studios that prefer direct outreach over platform listings, she recommended narrowing the focus to a small, carefully chosen group. Not one hundred creators, but five. Interact with them on their social channels before reaching out formally. Watch what they play. Comment genuinely on their content. By the time you send an email or DM, you are not a cold contact. The relationship already exists in a small way, and that matters.

First Look Pragma and What It Actually Offers Indie Studios:

First Look Pragma is the platform Mercedes works for, and it was built specifically to address the sourcing and management problems that make creator outreach hard for small teams. The platform covers three distinct functions:

• Social listening and player CRM. Developers can track how their game is being talked about and manage their player relationships in one place.
• Playtesting. Developers can run playtesting campaigns through the platform, with a free tier available for up to five hundred players. Players.gg, a companion marketplace, lets playtesters browse and apply to available game campaigns directly.
• Creator campaigns. Creators.gg, launching shortly after the podcast was recorded, connects developers with a waitlisted pool of content creators for both paid and organic campaigns. Full access to the creator pool is available for studios at one hundred ninety-nine dollars per month.

Free trials of thirty to sixty days are available depending on what a studio wants to test. The pricing is publicly listed on firstlook.gg without any gatekeeping, which Mercedes pointed out directly as a deliberate choice.

For a solo developer or a small team trying to figure out how to run creator outreach without hiring someone to manage it full time, this kind of tooling represents a meaningful change in what is actually achievable. The manual work of sourcing, vetting, and tracking creators gets reduced to a review and confirmation process.

The Advice Every Indie Developer Needs to Hear About Indie Game Creator Marketing:

Mercedes closed with a single piece of advice that she would give to every indie developer working with creators, and it is worth taking seriously.

Stop chasing the biggest creators. The developers who get the best results from creator marketing are the ones who invest in the creators who genuinely want to play their game. Find those people, stay in contact with them, bring them along as the game develops, and treat the relationship as ongoing rather than transactional. Those creators become real advocates, not hired promoters.

That shift in how you think about creator relationships, from a transaction to a partnership built on shared interest, is what separates campaigns that produce sustained attention from campaigns that produce a single video and then go quiet.

Getting Started With Indie Game Creator Marketing as an Indie Developer:

If you are an indie developer who wants to start working with creators but does not know where to begin, the practical starting points from this conversation are:

• Start as early as you have a build, even a rough one
• Think about how your game will look and feel as recorded content before you reach out to anyone
• Identify five creators who play games in your genre and interact with them genuinely before pitching
• Consider listing your game on a platform like First Look Pragma to automate sourcing and reduce the weekly time commitment
• Prioritize passion over follower count when evaluating which creators to work with
• Keep the relationship going after the first piece of content, not just before it

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Mercedes and other industry pros.

The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now

Make-A-Wish gaming – Ways Indies Can Get Involved With Make-A-Wish in 2026:

Most indie developers think about Make-A-Wish the way everyone thinks about it: a large charity that grants wishes for critically ill children, mostly connected to Disney, sports, or celebrity encounters. What fewer people know is that gaming has become one of the most active and growing areas of Make-A-Wish‘s work, and that indie studios of any size have real, concrete ways to be part of it.

Ian Wright, lead manager for gaming fundraising at Make-A-Wish America, and April Stallings, who runs gaming fundraising for Make-A-Wish International, joined Ash Cason on the IndieGameBusiness® podcast to talk through exactly how that works. What came out of the conversation was a surprisingly practical and personal picture of what involvement looks like, why gaming has become central to the mission, and why small studios are not just welcome but genuinely needed.

Who Ian and April Are and What They Actually Do:

Ian describes his role simply: he is the gaming guy for Make-A-Wish America. If it involves Make-A-Wish and video games in the United States, he is involved. His work covers content creators, game companies, brands, community fundraising campaigns, and occasionally the part of the job he loves most, actually granting gaming-related wishes.

April came to Make-A-Wish through a similar path. A lifelong gamer whose father owned a coin arcade, she spent over two decades in the nonprofit sector before landing the opportunity to build a content creator-led fundraising program for Make-A-Wish Canada at the start of the pandemic. She has since moved to Make-A-Wish International, covering everything outside the United States, which means nearly fifty countries.

The two organizations operate independently for practical reasons: different time zones, languages, currencies, legal structures, and cultures. But Ian and April work closely together, particularly on gaming, because they both understand that gaming is a global audience and treating it as a regional one misses the point.

The Wish That Started Everything:

Ian closed the conversation with the origin story of Make-A-Wish, and it is worth knowing. On April 29, 1980, a young boy named Chris Gricus in Phoenix, Arizona was diagnosed with leukemia. Chris had always wanted to be a police officer. His parents connected with the local police department, who gave him a uniform, a badge, and made him a Phoenix police officer for the day. He rode in a patrol car, wore his uniform, and when someone mentioned he loved helicopters, the officers did not just let him look at one. They flew him over the city of Phoenix.

A few days later, Chris told his mother he did not feel well. The next day, he was gone. His mother Linda looked at what had happened for her son and decided it could not just be for Chris. That conviction became the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Linda is still involved with the organization today.

Ian had the chance to sit with Linda one-on-one during his first year at Make-A-Wish. When he explained his work in gaming and how he raises money through content creators and industry partnerships, Linda reached across the table and said: thank you for telling Chris’s story to a new audience. That is the framing Ian carries into every conversation about gaming and Make-A-Wish.

What Make-A-Wish gaming wishes Actually Look Like:

The range of gaming wishes is wider than most people expect. Ian and April described requests that covered practically every genre and platform, including:

• Fortnite and Minecraft wishes, which remain consistently popular
• Roblox experiences and custom in-game moments
• Attending major esports events and gaming conventions like TwitchCon and VidCon
• Meeting favorite content creators and getting to play games with them
• Creating their own video game, which Make-A-Wish has facilitated with indie studios
• Visiting specific game studios, sometimes for games that came out years ago

That last point stood out in the conversation. April described a recent wish request from a child who wanted to visit a major Nordic studio. She assumed the wish was about the studio’s current high-profile title. It was not. The child wanted to talk about a game the studio made seven years ago. The studio was as surprised as April was, and equally moved.

The wishes are only limited by what a child can imagine. That unpredictability is exactly why Make-A-Wish wants to build a deeper network of contacts across the games industry, so that when an unusual wish comes in, they have someone to call.

How Make-A-Wish and Gaming Work Together:

Make-A-Wish runs gaming-related activity across several formats, and the entry points for indie studios vary depending on what a studio can offer. The main ways gaming companies and individuals currently get involved include:

• Fundraising campaigns. Developers can run time-limited fundraising events, charity streams, or in-game activations where proceeds benefit Make-A-Wish. These can be scaled to the size of the studio and the audience it has.
• Wish granting. Studios can participate directly in granting a gaming-related wish. This might mean hosting a child at the studio, creating a custom in-game item or experience, or helping a child design their own game. Ian and April have worked with indie developers to make this happen.
• Creator partnerships. Make-A-Wish works with content creators at every level to fundraise and spread awareness. Indie studios that have relationships with creators can help facilitate those connections.
• World Wish Month activations. April is World Wish Month, with April 29 designated as World Wish Day in honor of Chris’s wish in 1980. This is one of the highest-activity fundraising periods of the year and an obvious moment for studios to participate.
• Summer of Wishes. Make-A-Wish America runs a summer campaign covering June, July, and August. This is another structured period where studios can plug into existing campaigns rather than building something from scratch.

Why Indie Developers Are a Particularly Good Fit:

Ian and April were direct about this: indie studios are not a lower-priority partner because they are smaller. In some respects they are more valuable, because indie developers can move quickly, take creative risks, and have direct relationships with their communities in ways that large publishers do not.

April described the wish-granting network they are trying to build as a database of people and studios who have told Make-A-Wish what they can offer. When a wish comes in that requires something specific, they can go directly to the right person. An indie developer who makes a niche genre might be exactly the right fit for a child whose wish centers on that genre. Without that developer in the network, the wish either does not happen or takes significantly longer to arrange.

Ian added that he actively enjoys hearing unusual ideas and pitching them internally. If an indie developer comes to him with a creative proposal for a fundraising event or wish experience that he has not seen before, his instinct is to find a way to make it work, not to filter it out for being unconventional.

The Scale of What Make-A-Wish Does and Why It Needs Support:

Since 1980, Make-A-Wish has granted more than 650,000 wishes. The organization currently grants a wish approximately every thirty minutes somewhere in the world. At the same time, a child is diagnosed with a wish-eligible illness roughly every twenty minutes.

That gap, between the rate of wishes being granted and the rate of new children becoming eligible, is why fundraising and community involvement matter so much. Make-A-Wish reports that around sixty percent of wish children go on to live long lives. The wish itself is not a final gesture. It is something that carries forward. Ian and April both use the same phrase: not a last wish, but a lasting wish.

Make-A-Wish gaming | How to Get Involved as an Indie Developer:

Make-A-Wish has created a form specifically for indie developers and small publishers to tell the organization what they can offer. This is the most direct first step for any studio that wants to be part of wish granting or fundraising. The information goes into a working database that Ian and April can pull from when wishes come in.

Beyond the form, there are several practical ways to get involved:

• Fill out the Make-A-Wish developer interest form to get into their network
• Reach out directly to Ian Wright for Make-A-Wish America partnerships
• Reach out directly to April Stallings for Make-A-Wish International partnerships
• Connect through the IndieGameBusiness®  Discord, where both Ian and April are active members
• Contact Ash Cason [Discord: Pebbster] through IndieGameBusiness®  if you cannot reach Ian or April directly
• Plan around World Wish Month in April or the Summer of Wishes campaign for structured activation opportunities

Ian’s message to developers considering it was clear: reach out regardless of studio size. There is no minimum threshold for involvement. If you have an idea, even an unusual one, bring it. The worst outcome is a conversation. The best outcome is a child getting a wish that would not have been possible without your specific expertise or community.

A Community Built Around Something That Matters:

What came through clearly in the conversation was that this partnership between gaming and Make-A-Wish is not a corporate sponsorship arrangement or a checkbox exercise. Ian spent years in military nonprofits before Make-A-Wish. April spent over two decades in fundraising before finding a way to bring gaming into the work she cared about. Both of them got into this because they are gamers who believe the games community is capable of doing something genuinely meaningful with its size and creativity.

The games industry tends to be good at building community around shared passion. Make-A-Wish is asking that same instinct to show up for children who are navigating something no child should have to navigate. For indie developers who want their work to mean something beyond the screen, this is a direct and practical way to make that happen.

To get involved, fill out the Make-A-Wish developer interest form, connect with Ian and April in the Indie Game Business Discord, or reach out to Ash Cason at IndieGameBusiness®.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on May 27th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Ian, April, and other industry pros.

The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now

Indie Game Marketing Strategy – What Actually Drives Game Sales:

Viral moments feel like the goal. A clip blows up on TikTok, a streamer picks up your game, and suddenly everyone knows it exists. But awareness alone does not pay for the next project. Sales do, and sales require more than hype.

Eleni Sagredos, a growth marketer who has worked with indie studios, publishers, and large-scale creator campaigns, joined Dan Long on the IndieGameBusiness® podcast to break down what actually moves players from discovery to purchase. What she described is a structured, measurable system that most indie developers either do not know about or are only partially using.

What Growth Marketing Actually Means:

The term growth marketing gets used loosely, so Eleni started with a clear definition. Growth marketing is not just paid advertising or social media management. It is an understanding of the full customer journey, specifically where a player is in that journey at any given moment and which actions will move them to the next stage.

The practical implication is that marketing channels are not interchangeable. TikTok, email, press, paid ads, and influencer partnerships all serve different functions depending on where a player is in the buying process. When developers say a particular channel does not work, Eleni’s first question is always: does not work for what goal? The channel may be perfectly functional, just applied at the wrong stage of the funnel.

The Marketing Funnel and How It Applies to Games:

Eleni walked through the three stages of the marketing funnel and how each one maps to the game buying journey:

• Top of funnel: Awareness. This is where players first discover that your game exists. Content that stops the scroll, a viral clip, a striking visual, a gameplay moment that spreads organically. The goal is reach and discovery, not conversion. Channels that work here include TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and organic social posts.

• Middle of funnel: Consideration. The player has seen the game but has not committed. Now the goal is to build trust. When someone sees a viral clip and gets curious, they typically Google the game next. What they find at that moment determines whether they move forward. Reviews, press coverage, social proof, and consistent community presence all contribute here.

• Bottom of funnel: Conversion. This is where awareness turns into a wishlist add or a purchase. The Steam page is the primary conversion point for most indie games. A strong capsule image and a gameplay-first video carry enormous weight at this stage. Eleni stressed the distinction between a trailer and a gameplay video. She skips through trailers looking for actual gameplay, and so do most players.

Understanding which stage you are trying to influence at any given moment changes how you evaluate whether your marketing is working. A TikTok that gets a million views is not a failure if it does not immediately convert to sales. It is doing top-of-funnel work. The question is whether your mid and bottom-funnel systems are in place to catch the people it sends your way.

Why Indie Game Marketing Strategy Hype Alone Does Not Drive Sales:

A lot of developers look at a game that went viral and attribute its success entirely to the viral moment. Eleni’s point is that this misreads the situation. The viral moment is visible. What is not visible is everything else that happened simultaneously or shortly after: the press coverage, the review scores, the gameplay footage, the community response on social media. All of those elements work together to convert awareness into purchases.

Focusing only on creating a viral moment while neglecting the rest of the funnel means that when attention does arrive, there is nothing in place to convert it. Players who discover your game and then find no reviews, no active social presence, no gameplay footage, and a weak Steam page will move on. The hype dissipates and the sales never materialize.

The Steam Page as Your Most Important Conversion Tool:

Eleni emphasized the Steam page as the place where purchasing decisions actually get made. Everything above it in the funnel is driving traffic to that page. What players find when they arrive determines what happens next.

The two elements that carry the most weight on a Steam page:

• The capsule image. This is the first impression. It needs to communicate genre, tone, and visual identity instantly. A weak capsule image costs you players before they ever read a single word about the game.

• The video. Eleni was direct: put gameplay at the start. Not a cinematic. Not a tone piece. Actual gameplay. Players are evaluating whether this is something they want to spend time with, and the fastest way to show them that is to show them playing it. Trailers that bury gameplay or avoid showing it altogether create doubt rather than excitement.

The rest of the Steam page, the description, the tags, the screenshots, all matter. But the capsule and the video are the gatekeepers. If those do not land, most players will not read far enough to be influenced by anything else.

Social Proof and Why It Has to Come Before Launch:

One of Eleni’s strongest recommendations was to start building social proof at least six months before launch. The reasoning is straightforward: when a player hears about your game at launch and gets curious, they investigate. What they find during that investigation either builds confidence or raises doubts.

Social proof in this context means more than social media follower counts. It includes:

• Press coverage and articles about the game
• Review scores and written reviews from any source
• Community discussion on Reddit, Discord, and social platforms
• Creator content showing real gameplay
• Wishlists as a signal that other people have already decided this looks worth trying

If none of that exists when a player goes looking, the game feels like a risk. Players who are on the fence will not take that risk. They will move on to something with more visible validation.

Starting early is not about spending money on paid promotion six months out. It is about building the foundation of trust that launch-day marketing will rely on. Press outreach, community building, creator relationships, and organic content all take time to develop. Starting at launch is too late.

Email and Social as the Foundation of a Marketing System:

When asked where to invest limited marketing resources, Eleni did not point to paid ads or a single platform. She pointed to email and social, specifically because they are channels the developer controls.

Her reasoning on email:

• Email consistently delivers one of the highest ROI of any marketing channel
• A newsletter audience is a warm audience that has already opted in
• Unlike social algorithms, email reaches the people who signed up directly
• Email covers more than newsletters. Creator outreach and press outreach both run through email, making it a multi-purpose channel

Her guidance on when to send emails was practical: only reach out when you have something specific to say. A message that opens with a clear call to action, a playtest invitation, a launch announcement, an exclusive key offer for creators, will perform. A message that opens with a general check-in will get ignored and eventually filtered out.

On social, she recommended posting with intention rather than volume. Each post should have a clear sense of where in the funnel it belongs and what it is trying to accomplish. Posting regularly without that clarity produces content that exists but does not move anyone closer to a purchase.

Working With Creators and Influencers:

Creators are part of the picture, but not a substitute for the full system. Eleni has worked with major creators including Markiplier, and she confirmed that large creators do move the needle when the fit is right. She has also run press outreach campaigns to more than a hundred smaller creators simultaneously, which takes more time to manage but produces a different kind of result.

The distinction she drew between large and small creators is worth understanding:

• Large creators often have parasocial audiences who will act on recommendations with genuine conviction. A well-placed video from the right large creator can produce a significant and fast sales spike. The risk is cost and fit. A poorly matched large creator campaign can produce almost nothing despite significant spend.
• Small creators tend to have more engaged, interactive communities. A creator with a hundred viewers who genuinely talks with their audience can produce higher conversion rates per viewer than a creator with a thousand viewers who broadcasts rather than interacts. The tradeoff is scale and management time.

Her overall recommendation was to work with a mix, calibrated to the size and capacity of your team. If you are a solo developer managing marketing alongside production, working with a handful of creators across different size tiers is more sustainable than coordinating a hundred-person outreach campaign.

What to Do on LinkedIn as a Game Developer:

Eleni mentioned LinkedIn as an underused channel for game developers, particularly for building industry credibility and reaching press and creator contacts directly. Her observation on what performs there:

• Posts that establish authority by connecting with other industry professionals and documenting real events and relationships
• Free, practical marketing information shared openly without a sales pitch
• Content framed around informing rather than entertaining, which fits how LinkedIn audiences use the platform

LinkedIn is not where you will find players, but it is where you will find press contacts, potential collaborators, publisher representatives, and the kind of industry relationships that support the rest of your marketing work.

Final Advice for Indie Developers on Indie Game Marketing Strategy:

Eleni’s single most important piece of advice for indie developers marketing their games:

Start early. Build social proof before launch. When players hear about your game for the first time, they will look for evidence that other people have already decided it is worth their attention. Your job in the months before launch is to make sure that evidence exists.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on May 27th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Eleni and other industry pros.

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