Which marketing channel provides the best return on investment for small publishers?

Faced with tight marketing budgets, small game publishers must maximise their return on advertising investment (ROIA) – and that’s doubly true for indie developers, who might not have a marketing budget at all.

As ever, the release window of a game remains the most crucial time for getting the message out there, especially for games released on Steam. As Future Friends Games founder Thomas Reisenegger said earlier this year in a feature on game pricing: “If it’s not a safe bet that people will like your game right away, the Steam algorithm will quickly bury you under a mountain of other content.”

The importance of this was made clear recently with the news that a Steam bug prevented people who had wishlisted Planet Centauri from learning of its 1.0 release via email. Steam later confirmed to the developer Permadeath that it was one of fewer than 100 games to have been impacted by the bug since 2015.

As a result of the bug, only 581 players purchased Planet Centauri in the first five days it was on sale, even though it had been wishlisted by more than 130,000 people. For an indie title, that lack of attention at launch is devastating.

So, which marketing channels – from paid-for social ads to sponsored streams – can small publishers use to get eyes on their games in those all-important first few days?

Paid social

Marla FitzSimmons is head of marketing for Fellow Traveller, publisher of the newly released Wander Stars in addition to indie classics like Paradise Killer and Citizen Sleeper.

She believes that fostering a community around games is vital for maximising ROIA – which is why the team concentrates on community-focused social platforms when committing paid ad spend. She explains: “Platform wise, we’ve focused mainly on TikTok and Reddit. Both give us the opportunity to connect directly with players, and spark conversations around the game – in different ways, of course.

“They’re spaces where players are already talking about the games they really like, so we’ve found it’s easy to target the right players and a good way to put a new title on their radar.”

However, paid spend is no guarantee of success. In a lengthy post on reddit the developer of indie title Flocking Hell broke down how everything from historically low conversion rates to the cut taken by platforms can eat into ROIA, effectively making paid spend look like a bad bet for small publishers.

To ameliorate that issue, FitzSimmons advocates that the marketing budget should be split between “awareness channels” – to create knowledge of a game’s existence – and more authoritative and trusted sources to improve conversion.

“We’ve found that creating a multi-channel approach works best,” she says. “Players might first see the game on awareness channels like TikTok, then see a game mentioned by a journalist or creator they follow, and that’s far more likely to see them seek out our community and hear from other players.”

Hunter Bond, the director of horror games publisher DreadXP, agrees. But he additionally points out that social platforms are constantly changing algorithms (and owners), which can stymie paid advertising strategies. “I think these days we’re in a rough spot as indie publishers, because there isn’t a single good answer to where you’ll see the best ROI on time spent.”

Mike Rose, the founder of No More Robots, says that the release of Little Rocket Lab on October 7 marked the first time the publisher had put a significant amount of paid spend behind a launch – in part to ensure it received attention during that all-important launch window. “We spent roughly $50k total, with a burst around Next Fest, and then a bigger burst in the weeks leading up to the launch. On launch day, we used ads to make sure everyone saw the game.”

He did so not in the expectation this would directly drive sales, but awareness. “I don’t think people are seeing our ads and are immediately clicking the buy button. However, there’s that old golden rule about someone seeing a thing over three times, and becoming more and more likely to interact with it each time. My feelings are that we made Little Rocket Lab be in enough places using ads, in the weeks leading up to the launch, that by the time people saw the game on Steam, they were like “oh, it’s that game I’ve seen a bunch, and it’s 25% off, and it’s highly rated”. Little Rocket Lab’s launch was a success, he says.

Live events and community

Bond says that DreadXP, which has published titles like Heartworm and The Mortuary Assistant, has committed to paid ad spend in the past in cases where it feels like it will be complementary to an organic marketing campaign, rather than a replacement for one.

He explains that DreadXP spends a proportion of its marketing budget on meeting gamers and press face-to-face at events like PAX, believing that word of mouth “has always been, and still is, the most effective way to market. That’s the one form of advertising where not only can you not buy it, you have to deliver on what you’re promising to have a hope of someone making a personal recommendation to others to give your games a try. Focusing only on marketing via paid channels or the press leaves something lacking, which to me is an effort to reach directly to the people who buy your games.”

By contrast, Rose believes that live events often lack the necessary infrastructure to effectively market a game. Instead, in the wake of the successful launch of Little Rocket Lab, he advocates for participation in community-organised digital events.

“We first showed the game at the end of 2024 as part of Wholesome Snack,” he says. “That ended up bagging us around 8,000 wishlists, which was an amazing start. In general, if you can get into a showcase, it’s always a good idea – the Wholesome showcase was perfect for us.”

Success in streaming

Video content creators have steadily supplanted other forms of media over the last decade, and there is an appetite among publishers to associate themselves with trusted creators or streamers.

This has the dual benefits of allowing them to connect with streamers whose audience size and therefore cost is commensurate with their limited budget, while also hitting that sweet spot between awareness- and community-focused marketing mentioned by FitzSimmons.

According to the gaming specialist agency Yrs Truly’s recent Gaming Content Creator report, 65.9% of creators have different rates for indie projects, particularly when there’s a strong audience alignment. That provides an opportunity for those smaller publishers to maximise ROIA for sponsored streams and creative. More importantly, it also provides publishers with an opportunity to appear on those awareness-focused platforms.

“The best results come when a streamer genuinely enjoys the game and their community is a natural fit,” says Fitzsimmons. “We don’t look at sponsorships as a way to secure ‘positive’ coverage, but as a way to help new players discover the game through voices they already trust. When it’s the right streamer, with the right audience, it can be a very effective tool in the mix.”

Such coverage is unlikely to come for free. Rose, who’s previously argued against the transactional nature of paying creators to feature games, has reluctantly accepted it as an inevitability that “all YouTubers want paying,” he says. “So we’ve had to play ball, because otherwise, you’d never see any of our games on YouTube ever again.” He now includes influencer costs into the budget of every game he signs.

Like display advertising, it’s a cost that cannot be precisely justified. Bond notes that: “Influencers and sponsored streams are always a difficult one because it’s definitely one of the most nebulous ways to spend money on marketing from a data-driven perspective. Because of the impossibility of predicting outcomes and the difficulty of directly attributing results to it, it’s hard to know ahead of time if a given amount of money invested will have been worth it beforehand.”

So while paid ad spend across a variety of platforms is possible, even for smaller publishers, it is no guarantee of success. It is no silver bullet – paid spend is best used in concert with an organic focus upon community, creating and leveraging interest in the game through more personal approaches. Paid advertising then serves to elevate that as the release date approaches. “In general, my feelings are that ads are good for putting your game in the back of a bunch of brains,” says Rose. “Aand then come launch, if you’ve also got all the other ducks in a row, they can pay off.”