George Clingerman:The more I read this thread, the more I realize that marketing is a VERY hard thing to get right. The only time I ever hear about your game Matthew is when you post in here and when you guys twitter about it. I buy a lot of XBox Live Arcade games and I'm really active in this community but I'm not stumbling across any ads for any of our XBox LIVE Indie Games out there (and I have google search feeds setup for most XNA related keywords). So I can't even imagine how hard it is to reach gamers who are even less involved in our world than I am (and I always thought I was VERY involved! Lol, I guess not because I still haven't listened to a single episode of XNA Roundup).
I stumble across new XBLA games by word of mouth and the occasional post or ad on Kotaku (or some similar game sight I might be casually browsing). XLIGs I typically find by word of mouth (friend recommends it, I know the developer or I'm seeing it talked about by people I follow on twitter). I do use the top 10 lists a lot for browsing, but I just as often randomly browse through games in both XBLA and XBLIG.
I'm not sure how to reach me better and I'm really not sure how to reach someone who doesn't even know what XBLIG's are but plays a lot of XBLA games.
Couldn't have said it better myself. And you should see some of the responses we get "on the outside"... the accusations cover spamming, overkill, should only market the game once it is available, etc. They have no idea how hard it is to get the word out. They know about our game and have no clue as to the scores of people that do not and may never not.
