... insightful stuff ...

I wish this thread was not in the Lounge, so I could +1 both of those posts, couldn't agree more.

Also, I think it's easy to think "oh marketing... that means I need to buy lots of ads all over the place right?", but that is both a very expensive way, and not really doing that much.

Marketing is so much more then that. Basically it's every time you ever talk about your game to anyone else. And every time anyone else is talking about your game. (hopefully in a positive way)

For our game Touchgrind BMX, we actually won 100k euro in TV ads on a german television channel.

Didn't notice even the slightest bump in sales...

It's much more efficient to get people to talk about it, and get exited about showing it to their friends.

To help our players do that, we added the possibility to upload replays to youtube.

We had thousands of them uploaded within days of launch, and I do not doubt it significantly contributed to the success of that game.

Another way, often used by Indie devs, is to get a following on forums, and even set up your own forum just to enable your fans to talk about the game.

It both helps to market it, and provides valuable input, and a horde of unpaid testers (of course, the quality is lower then payed testers, but the numbers of them can be really helpful)

Love this comment. Thanks for sharing what you've done with your game!

So why are they so well received?

Memetics, timing, inertia. These games didn't have multi million $ advertising campaigns. They spread mostly by word of mouth which can be way more effective because of the level of trust that you assign to those that you actively choose to listen to. I remember the first time I heard about minecraft was in a totally unrelated call of duty gamplay video on youtube. It was a big channel and the video had like a million views. The guy was just commenting his game and on the side talked about how he had fun with this indie game Minecraft. So I checked it out and bought a beta key. I wonder how many more of the viewers did exactly this.

Now minecraft has developed into its own cultural meme. I believe every gamer has heard about it by now. There are minecraft jokes, image macros, ripoffs all over the internet.

Yes. That is true. I don't have a rich uncle that's about to give me millions, and oh,

he's also not going to live that long :) . It's more like starting that original movement

and have people want to be part of it.

I never played Meat Boy nor Minecraft, but I did play Braid, liked it, and beat it. I heard of Braid from a colleague of mine back then, who went to school with one of the guys who made Braid. I had low expectations of Braid. Like really low, especially looking at how it's almost another Super Mario clone with jumping things on top of monsters to kill them. First thought that came to me was some guys just been lucky making a super mario clone that's actually successful.

I bought it when it was on sale on Steam ($5? $6?), and played a couple of levels. One thing that pleased me was the art. It's not pixel art, it's not uber-hdr-pixel-pushing-graphics like any other games. It's classical paintings. The whole game is hand-drawn by the artist. They almost look like canvas paintings. Being someone who can appreciate art, I gave this game cool points for doing that.

Then came the big wow from me when it actually uses time as part of the mechanic. I'm not talking about using time in the story like in LoZ:OoT, but you actually moved backward in your game, retracing all the things you did in the game, and all the enemies you killed came back to life. I thought that whole thing was beyond cool.

So I liked Braid, and those two reasons deserve my praises. The developers had rightfully earned that success. If Braid had not been as successful as it is, I would probably be pissed at gaming community for overlooking this game.

Angry Birds, however, is beyond my grasp why that game got so many attention. Nothing is special about that game other than cutesy-looking birds. Angry Birds in Space? Angry Birds Star Wars? Really? It's an overdone franchise that needs to die, but people keep feeding it money.

I never played Meat Boy nor Minecraft, but I did play Braid, liked it, and beat it. I heard of Braid from a colleague of mine back then, who went to school with one of the guys who made Braid. I had low expectations of Braid. Like really low, especially looking at how it's almost another Super Mario clone with jumping things on top of monsters to kill them. First thought that came to me was some guys just been lucky making a super mario clone that's actually successful.

I bought it when it was on sale on Steam ($5? $6?), and played a couple of levels. One thing that pleased me was the art. It's not pixel art, it's not uber-hdr-pixel-pushing-graphics like any other games. It's classical paintings. The whole game is hand-drawn by the artist. They almost look like canvas paintings. Being someone who can appreciate art, I gave this game cool points for doing that.

Then came the big wow from me when it actually uses time as part of the mechanic. I'm not talking about using time in the story like in LoZ:OoT, but you actually moved backward in your game, retracing all the things you did in the game, and all the enemies you killed came back to life. I thought that whole thing was beyond cool.

So I liked Braid, and those two reasons deserve my praises. The developers had rightfully earned that success. If Braid had not been as successful as it is, I would probably be pissed at gaming community for overlooking this game.

Angry Birds, however, is beyond my grasp why that game got so many attention. Nothing is special about that game other than cutesy-looking birds. Angry Birds in Space? Angry Birds Star Wars? Really? It's an overdone franchise that needs to die, but people keep feeding it money.

AB is easy to play and even a 2 year old can do it. It's a good time-killer and

excels on the mobile platform.

As for the different spin-offs, well, that's not surprising, Hollywood does this to

any successful movie out there :) .

I think what made Minecraft successful is the fact that you do your own adventure : not a main quest with a lot side quests, not some random main quests selected at the beginning, but your very own adventure. And also because the style of minecraft was very iconic and special (with its cubes, monsters, items ...) and its possibilities (craft).

Before the adventure mode, Minecraft was really really bad for me. I tested it once and I was bored in less than 5 min. There was nothing to do. But the adventure mode changes everything (for my point of view at least).

Of course there is something more subtle in all this at it has been said by Daaark.