Since the launch of the mobile app stores, the number of released apps per year has skyrocketed, games not being an exception. The same goes for game releases on steam. This trend is very clear from the graph below, showing game released per month on steam up until 2015.

Graph by @TonyPlaysGuitar.

The graph looks terrifying, and this tendency has given birth to the term indiepocalypse, meaning the inflation caused by the extreme flood of released games makes it harder for indie developers to make it.

Indiepocalypse aside, what does this mean? We can no longer rely on the appstores providing visibility and downloads as was the case before. It is no longer sufficient to make a great game, it sure helps, but without an effort to get noticed it will (with high probability) drown in the masses. We have to stand out. How do we do this with a small marketing budget or, like us at Gribb Games, no marketing budget at all?

Distribute on the web as a marketing strategy

In addition to distribute apps of our games, we also make them available on the web. By having our games on the web, we can publish them on online web game portals, where the competition of getting noticed still is high, but way smaller than on the app stores. One online game portal will perhaps not result in a lot of players, but publishing on tens and maybe hundreds of portals might do.

However, there is a drawback here. Focusing on maximizing their revenue, online game portals often have strict rules regarding monetization strategy on the games being published. Most of them does not allow the developers to include their own ads in the games, the reason being they incorporate their own ads on their sites. Some have revenue sharing programs, giving the developers a cut from their ad income, others don’t. The inconsistency in terms and conditions and the fact that a great number of portals is included in this strategy has resulted in us deciding not to monetize the web versions.

Extracting value from the web versions

Without being able to make money directly on the games published on the web, we extract value in other ways:

• Place appstore icons in the game, linking directly to the app download pages.
• Place social media like buttons in the game.

Doing this will hopefully encourage players who like the game to download the app version (which DO monetize). And if not, they might still help the visibility of the game by liking it on Facebook. This means that the main purpose of the web versions is to convert players to the apps where we do monetize.

Time will tell if the added effort on distributing on the web as well is worth it. Hopefully it will result in more visibility.

In a future post I will give some numbers and try to analyze the effectiveness of this strategy. Stay tuned!