Getting out there

I love computer games. I love being thrust into a new environment and experimenting with the options available to me. I love how so many games these days are really pushing limits of storytelling and interfacing. And as I work on generating my own idea for a game, the difficulty of knowing how to get it "out there", into the public eye, weighs heavily on me.

Through the aid of the internet, writers can selfpublish. They can use blogs to publish chapters and try and generate interest, and with the rise of Amazon's Kindle, they can selfpublish whole books without having to go through the process of a picky editor.

Musicians can use websites like MySpace Music, or TripleJ Unearthed to get their tunes heard.

Aspiring filmmakers can release shorts or trailers on YouTube to try and generate interest.

But what can game makers do? Obviously if you've got a huge financial backing then you can just throw money at advertising, the way that EA or Lionsgate or Blizzard do. But these companies also already have a following - gamers are waiting for the next release even before it is announced in the expectation that it will be good.

But what about independent game makers? They can provide free trials of their games on personal websites, but that doesn't really raise exposure. If you're game follows the PopCap trend, you can try to release it as a Facebook app. But what about more complicated games? What then?

I think that this is where the video game development company Valve plays a very special role. In 2003 Valve released a digital distribution platform called "Steam". It's sort of like a free portable library - you buy a Valve game, install the Steam client, register your ownership of the game .. and in future, anywhere that you have internet you can download and reinstall the game. The client does away with the necessity of holding onto a hard copy of the game so that you can reinstall it.

There are of course many criticisms about this DRM method - for one thing, an internet connection is required in order to register your purchased game. There is no number that you can call or fax through information to. Still, I think that the work that Steam does in exposing indie games is more than worth the hassle of dealing with a DRM (of which, let's face it, there hasn't been a good one yet).

Games are purchasable through Steam. As of October 25, 2009 there were 928 games available through Steam - and these games aren't all produced by Valve. In fact, many of these games are independently produced games that Valve has seen and wants to promote.

This is a screenshot of the Steam store window, focused on indie games. Currently featured is the puzzle game machinarium, which is an old-fashioned point-and-click flash based adventure. Players play a robot that must return to the city to save its robot girlfriend. This game is developed by the same company that developed the immensely point-and-click Samorost games.

Once a game is on Steam, it can become popular very quickly. Easily distributed and easy to pay for, without being too expensive to make interested buyers think twice, along with a nice demo that entices players, games released on Steam have an obvious advantage. But how do games get to this point?

Well, to be honest, I'm not really sure. This article, written in July of 2007, shows that getting a game onto Steam is actually quite a difficult process. And while I would like to believe that this has become easier, which would be evidenced by the sheer amount of indie games available, the lack of information that I'm finding online seems to say that this is still, unfortunately, the case.

An alternative that I have seen mentioned is StarDock, which I do not personally have any experience with. But some research shows that it has a similar purpose to Steam in that games can be bought and downloaded digitally.

The conclusion that I'm coming to is that the way to market a video game online is the same way one has to market a blog or anything else - lots of exposure and getting links to your site, in order to slowly work your way up the Google search list. It's a shame that there isn't something a bit more direct or a bit more accessible for indie games freshly starting out, but at least there is the possibility of getting picked up by Steam or StarDock if the game begins to grow in popularity.