Indie games have a discoverability problem.
This is an issue that’s been cyclically tossed around game journalism circles for years. There are “too many good indie games” and no way to find them. Excellent projects are going unnoticed. Quality isn’t a guarantee of success anymore, if it ever was. It’s all quite dire, and I think pretty much everyone’s played an indie game recently that they feel deserved more recognition than it got. Just off the top of my head, Cats & Dice is mechanically that “next Balatro” everyone’s been talking about, with the exception that no one’s talking about it. There’s also Pan’orama, which I’ve described as “Dorfromantik for sickos,” which itself is going to make sense to tragically few people.
So the question becomes, what’s to be done about this? And in most places where this issue is being discussed, we reach the eternal answer “I don’t know.” Quite literally most podcasts and articles I’ve found on the subject conclude with some variation on “I don’t know what to do about it.” Just a straight-up white flag. No ideas. Head fully empty. And it’s quite an alarming sentiment to hear from…y’know…the people whose job it is to think about this stuff. Surely if the brilliant minds of video gaming’s fourth estate can’t even begin to conceive of a solution to this problem, it must be a puzzle of unfathomable intractability!
Well, that’s not entirely true. A video from Second Wind has been making the rounds recently, attempting to spell out some possible fixes to the discoverability crisis. However, the only truly actionable solution they come up with is “People need to tweet more about indie games they like,” which is…a cute sentiment, I suppose. It feels a bit like suggesting that “promoting kindness” is the best way to lower the national homicide rate, but at least it’s something people can actually put into practice.
But here’s the thing. There’s no mystery behind why this is happening. As someone who just recently put out an indie game of my own, and is struggling with discoverability myself, I can tell you that the problem is a lot more concrete and a lot less existential than it appears. To put it simply, what’s happening to indie games isn’t a crisis of discoverability, but a crisis of advertising.
I’ll say it straight up. I don’t know how to market an indie game in 2025. I don’t think anyone truly does.
A common sentiment that makes the rounds in indie dev spaces is “Market your game.” Don’t forget the marketing! Don’t forget to advertise and promote what you’ve made! And very pointedly, the phrase “Market your game” is where the statement ends, because the moment you start questioning actual specifics, the real problem comes into view. It’s not that people aren’t trying to market their indie game, it’s that they have no idea how, and there just aren’t the resources to help them.
The internet is rife with “advice” articles for how to market an indie game. Top of every list is to “Have a presence on social media.” Of course, this is only useful if you already have a following to which to promote yourself, and even then it’s less reliable than it sounds. The social media landscape is becoming more and more fragmented by the day. People are shifting platforms, people are splitting their time differently, and many people are choosing to simply log off entirely. There’s never been a silver bullet for building a following on social media and that’s even more true now than it’s ever been. The only advice people can ever offer is “Just grind at it! Post a bunch!” but…that isn’t really how it works, is it? And if you already have the loyal following to get your game viral just through your followers, do you really need marketing advice at all?
The next piece of advice is usually something along the lines of “Try to get featured at E3” so we’ll skip that.
After that we get “Reach out to influencers” which is…perhaps the best advice, but still really difficult to put into practice. For a smaller title with an unknown solo developer, you can’t just blast your game to absolutely anyone. You need to get your game in front of people who cover the kinds of game you made. In my case, that would be “roguelite streamers” and “rpg maker fans” I suppose. But riddle me this, how am I meant to find these people? With the YouTube search bar? Have you tried that thing lately? It gives me like five half-useful results and then immediately switches back to Inugami Korone singing about breakfast foods because that’s what I was watching earlier. And Twitch? The Twitch landscape for gaming content is arguably even more massive than YouTube’s and I have…what to serve as my guide? Tags? I don’t know these freaking people! And some of these people want to be paid to showcase a game, while others would be insulted by the mere offer of money, so what’s the etiquette? What am I doing? Who am I?
I would happily pay a person or service to help me with this, but even that’s a dead-end. There exist services designed to help you find and contact influencers, but all they do is scrape Twitch for their email addresses and spam their inboxes on your behalf, in ways that actual streamers reportedly hate being targeted by. Look into any of these other “We Guarantee A Billion Hits” companies that swarm after small devs, and it always takes only one google search to find a thread enumerating every way they’re a scam. Every direction you turn, there just aren’t any good options.
Now, before we continue, I feel like I should stop and address the elephant in the room.
“Hey Alex, have you considered the possibility that your game fucking sucks and that’s the reason it’s not going viral?”
Yes I have, reader, yes I have. In fact, it was my go-to excuse for over a decade. You Will Be Remembered, Welcome to Asset Club, Project WHRLD, the first launch of New Meat…whenever they fell through, I just shrugged and concluded the game wasn’t good enough. My games were ugly, or boring, or too abstract or too in-jokey. But with New Meat now…I just don’t think that’s true anymore. People like the game. It’s received nothing but positive reviews. I’ve seen people enjoy it on streams. As easy as it would be to blame the game’s quality and start from scratch again, in this instance, I’m forced to admit I’m dealing with a larger problem than myself, here. And if you’re in the same place, you should consider doing the same.
So let’s get back on track. How do we solve the discoverability crisis? The way I see it, small indie devs need three things.
Trailers and other advertising materials
Channels to mutually connect with like-minded influencers
Platforms for showcasing their work
The trailer thing I didn’t really talk about, but it’s another piece of “solo devs shouldn’t be forced to do all the parts they aren’t good at.” I had to make the trailer for New Meat myself in DaVinci Resolve, and I made that trailer literally the week I downloaded that program for the first time. I hadn’t had any editing training before that because I was busy making a video game. Obviously there are people who will make trailers for money. (I was ready to commission one, but it fell through, hence the crash course in DaVinci Resolve.) But I think we can do better for small devs than just telling them to “Find a guy” and it ties into my next point.
Connecting with influencers is a solvable problem. Indie devs need their games streamed to an audience, and streamers need lots and lots of content…as long as it’s the right content for them. But asking the twain to meet through cold-calls alone is setting everyone up for irritation. What I need is a guide. Someone who knows the landscape and, for a commission, knows who to get me in touch with. And streamers, too, would probably prefer having places they can go to find new games looking for a little paid-or-unpaid promotion. God knows cruising the New Releases tab on Steam isn’t a great stream to pan for gold.
Put these last two things together, and you effectively get my wish of “I want a company that helps with indie marketing and isn’t a scam.” One that actually courts streamers to have a relationship with them and come to them for games, rather than just spamming them in an innocent indie developer’s name. One that helps setting up marketing materials in a professional way without the absurd claims of “500,000,000 impressions on launch day.” One that takes the time to build a reputation within the community so that the first thing you see when googling them is “Oh yeah, these are the people you should talk to” and not “This showed up in my inbox. Is this a scam?” followed by a full thread of “Yeah, seems like it.”
Whether these companies ask for a one-time commission, a cut of the profits, or a choice of either based on the needs of the dev, it doesn’t feel impossible that such a thing could exist and even be quite lucrative for anyone wanting to take this idea on. If we can shift the conversation from “market your game” to “have a marketing budget,” suddenly the whole thing feels a lot more manageable.
Oh right, and that third thing. More events for showing off self-published games. I um…that doesn’t really fit with the last two points but…it’s another thing that would be helpful.
Speaking of self-publishing, eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I effectively want a company that does the things a publisher WOULD do but for self-published titles, and that’s basically true. I think for a lot of devs in my position, the thing I’m missing out on by being self-published isn’t the money, but rather the channels for promotion, and the prestige of a recognized name backing my stupid roguelike about hamburgers. If there was something in the indie game space with that level of trust, that could bring creators and promoters together, it wouldn’t completely solve the discoverability problem but it would at least give people direction. It would be a beacon for devs finding no luck promoting themselves any other way. And maybe even then it would’t work, but at least then you could walk away with reasonable confidence that no, it’s not a failure of the system, your game just actually sucks.
So there it is. There’s my answer.
This isn’t an answer that you, the person reading this article, can necessarily put into practice. You, statistically, will not be the one to open the indie game promotional agency I’m talking about. But hopefully this article can shift the conversation in a direction where actual good can be done. Because if we, as indie devs, can’t move past the part where we’re just begging on our hands and knees for retweets every day, nothing is going to get better.
This is a solvable problem. It’s a solution that will likely be…a bit more complex than I’ve laid it out here, and it’s not a solution that will turn indie games into a true meritocracy, but it’s a solvable problem.
Now who’s gonna solve it?