How to Gain Thousands of Community Members Before Launching Your Indie Game
This guide will provide actionable strategies to help you market your game to thousands of players while creating a thriving online community and player base before launch.
Marketing your game is hard because, quite frankly, it’s just not as fun as making it.
Today, I’ll show you how nine pioneering indie game developers have used simple marketing strategies to gain thousands of community members before launching their games—and how they’ve done it through fun and exciting social gamification where everybody wins.
As a game developer, I imagine that you do what you do because you want to create memorable experiences, give people something to hold dear, and have some fun while you’re at it.
But the only way you can deliver that kind of experience is through your game… right?
Actually, there is a powerful new way to make marketing your game fun while delivering value above and beyond your game’s ecosystem—and you can deliver it before your game even exists.
By creating a real-life economy that operates independently of your game, you allow it to take on a life of its own.
A life that’s far more valuable to everyone involved.
Escaping Walled Gardens
Are walled gardens better at locking users in or keeping them out?
It’s time to remove the walls that separate you from the world of players yet to discover your game.
By allowing your in-game assets to extend past your walled garden and organically reach new players, you will meet them where they are and invite them into your realm.
These indie game developers have used this approach with great success, organically building their communities into the thousands — prior to launching their games.
- War of Crypta: 3,000+ members
- AlterVerse: 2,100+ members
- Bitcoin Hodler: 2,000+ members
- Cats in Mechs: 2,000+ members
- 9Lives Arena: 1,900+ members
- Age of Rust: 1,900+ members
- Forest Knight: 1,400+ members
- Titan Flight Studios: 1,300+ members
- CryptoFights: 1,300+ members
By delivering assets that transcend their own gaming worlds, these developers have built thriving communities and earned over half a million dollars in crowdfunding and revenue—providing them with the funding needed to build the games of their dreams.
Decentralized Assets
What if you could deliver in-game assets before even releasing your game?
By decoupling assets from your game’s server, you gain the ability to:
- Reward community engagement and player-generated referrals through fun giveaways and competitions—helping you to build communities filled with thousands of dedicated supporters.
- Sell rare and powerful assets that will gain value as your game gains popularity — enabling you to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in crowdfunding as players invest in your asset economy.
- Monetize the transaction fees generated from peer-to-peer trading of assets — allowing you to earn thousands of dollars per month in transaction fees.
All before launching your game!
None of this is hypothetical— it’s happening right now.
The Truth About Value
The reason decentralized assets are so effective in community building is because of the tangible value they allow you to offer.
Not only can you distribute assets independent of your game’s ecosystem but those assets are also more valuable because they are automatically integrated into the real-world economy.
As a standard, players can inherently own these assets forever, trade them freely, give them away, or sell them for profit.
Ownership over one’s belongings is what gives them tangible value.
Think of it this way: in society, if no one owned anything, everything would be worth nothing.
The concept of ownership is fundamental to society. It developed from our base-level human instincts and persists to this day as the foundational metric that defines an asset’s value.
That means I judge how much something is worth based on how much I want to own it — and so do you.
At Enjin, we provide tools that certify the ownership of gaming assets by using the same technology that certifies the ownership of Bitcoin: blockchain.
Is it any surprise that the technology that makes Bitcoin valuable can do the same for your gaming assets?
Unfortunately, Bitcoin has yet to become a practical solution for financial institutions to integrate into their business models, which is why we’ve specifically designed our tools to offer you clear, actionable advantages.
Community Building: Founder’s Tokens
The Founder’s Token is a membership token that certifies that the token’s holder is a pillar of your community — and a founder of your movement.
It’s a way for players to say “I was one of the first to discover this game and I helped build its community.”
As an added bonus, developers can send perpetual rewards to their “founders” by sending assets to their publicly visible blockchain addresses.
Dozens of game developers have utilized Founder’s Token giveaways to attract thousands of players within days of announcing their adoption of the Enjin Platform.
“As a game developer, the hardest challenge has always been reaching people in an effective manner. The Kingdom Karnage Founder’s Token had unequivocal results. Our goal was to amass 1,000 members, which we estimated to take a week or more. We were dumbfounded when we reached this goal in under 3 hours.
Enjin is shaping the future of gaming, and we’re glad our founding members will enjoy a limited edition character to celebrate this.”
— Nick Franklin, Developer of Kingdom Karnage
How to Create, Distribute & Manage Founder’s Tokens
Community Building: Competitions & Giveaways
Sharing Competitions
The best way to create viral loops that exponentially boost your community is to create sharing competitions
It’s simple.
You share a competition that motivates participants to join your community.
Then share the competition with those participants who join your community… who then share your competition with other participants who will also join.
The cycle continues.
Creative Competitions
Your community is the most creative, experienced, and dedicated group of minds freely available to help you expand the horizons of creativity.
Creative competitions are the perfect way to reward innovative thinking within your community while galvanizing the spirit of imagination and possibility.
“We’ve found sharing competitions as a great way to attract loyal and engaged players while still in development. The beauty of the blockchain is that we can provide them real value before our game is live, which means we can offer our community tangible rewards for their community-building efforts.”
— Ralph Laemmche, Producer of 9Lives Arena
How to Create & Manage Competitions
If you’re interested in gaining early access to the blockchain game development platform that can help you achieve the things discussed in this article, we encourage you to apply for the Enjin Spark featured adopter program today.
Thank you for reading. With utmost sincerity, I believe that together, we can change the world as we know it.
Please share this article with a game developer you know and respect.
