Making games is one of the great creative jobs of our time.
You get to invent worlds. You get to write stories and then hand the player the controls so they live them. You get to design mechanics that don't exist anywhere else, polish art that nobody has ever seen, sweat over a sound effect for an hour because the impact has to land. You get to build the thing you wanted to play when you were fifteen and couldn't find.
It's genuinely magic. I don't think we say that often enough.
Then you put a price tag on it
For a lot of indies there comes a point where the game has to start paying for itself. Maybe you've burned through savings. Maybe you'd like to make the next one without taking another contract. Maybe you just want the rent covered. Whatever the reason, you add a price tag, push it onto a store, and at that exact moment something changes that most devs don't see coming.
It stops being only about you.
Up until that price tag, the game's job was to satisfy you. Your taste, your vision, your itch to make the thing. After the price tag, the game's second job is to convince a stranger to part with money for it. Both jobs still matter. The first one doesn't go away. The second one shows up uninvited and refuses to leave.
This isn't a game-dev problem. It's a product problem.
If this feels unfair, take some comfort. It isn't unique to games.
Anyone who has ever shipped a product, software, a book, a board game, a piece of hardware, a SaaS, has run into the same wall. The thing you made is one half of the work. Finding the people who want it, convincing them it's worth their money, and earning their trust enough that they actually click "buy" is the other half. Engineers building a startup hit this. Authors hit it. Musicians hit it.
Products need customers. Customers don't appear by themselves. Somebody has to go and find them, or, more honestly, give them a reason to find you. That work exists whether or not you've trained for it.
The muscle most devs haven't built
The pattern I see, over and over, looks like this. A dev spends two, three, sometimes five years building a game. The whole time, the work is craft. Code, art, sound, design, iteration. They get good at it. Genuinely, deeply good.
Then the game is "done", and they pivot. Now they're going to "do marketing". They open a Twitter account. They post a screenshot. Nothing happens. They try TikTok. Nothing happens. They email some press, get one reply out of forty. They wonder why none of this is clicking, because building the game wasn't this hard.
It isn't that they're bad at marketing. It's that they're trying to use a muscle they've never trained, in the two weeks before launch, against people who've been training it for a decade. Of course it's hard. You wouldn't expect to pick up a controller for the first time and win a tournament.
Marketing and community are features
Think about how you plan a game. You make a list of features. Mechanics, art style, sound design, shaders, levels, UI, save system, the pipeline that ties it all together. Each one gets time. Each one gets iteration. Each one gets debugged when it breaks.
Marketing and community engagement are features too. Not of the game. Of the product.
Trailer. Store page. Capsule art. Wishlist funnel. Devlog cadence. Discord. Press list. Streamer outreach. Demo. Festival submissions. Each one is a thing you build, iterate on, and ship. Each one breaks in interesting ways and has to be debugged. They don't appear in the engine, but they're as real as your save system, and the game won't sell without them.
The shift that helps is to put them in the same plan as everything else. On the same roadmap. With the same weight. Not "after the game is done." Alongside it.
The boring stuff is also your job
There's a layer underneath the marketing work that's even less fun. ABNs and LLCs. Tax registration. GST or VAT thresholds. Publisher contracts and what "exclusive" means in clause 4.3. Refund policies. Invoices to collaborators. Bookkeeping.
None of this is fun. All of it is part of the job. You can outsource a lot of it to an accountant or a lawyer, and often you should. What you can't do is pretend it isn't there. The devs who get blindsided by it are the ones who tried to sort it all out in the same fortnight they were trying to ship.
It's a small, boring layer of work that, once it's set up, ticks along quietly in the background. Do it early and you forget about it. Do it late and it eats your launch.
Your players are customers. That's a good thing.
There's a strain of indie thinking that treats "customer" as a dirty word. As if charging money for your game means you've sold out, or that worrying about reviews and retention is somehow uncreative.
It isn't. Treating the people who buy your game as customers means taking their experience seriously. It means reading the negative reviews carefully, not defensively. It means having a contact email that someone actually checks. It means patching the bug that only affects 2% of players, because to that 2%, it's 100% of their experience.
The other side of the same coin: you don't owe customers everything. You don't owe them a sequel. You don't owe them every feature being asked for in Discord. Running the product side means deciding, on purpose, what the game is and isn't, and being able to say so out loud.
What this looks like in practice
You don't need to become a marketer at the expense of being a developer. You need to spend a small, consistent fraction of your time on the product side from the start, instead of zero now and a hundred percent in the final fortnight.
A rough split that works for a lot of solo devs:
- 70% making the game
- 20% marketing and community
- 10% operations, finances, admin
The exact numbers matter less than the principle. Every week, some hours go to the parts of the job that aren't building. If you can't bring yourself to do that, your runway, your launch, or your future self will pay the difference.
The indies who ship and earn a living from it aren't necessarily better developers than the ones who don't. They're the ones who noticed they were running a product, and started treating it like one.
So how do you actually market a game?
That's the next question, and it's a big one. Wishlists, capsule art, trailers, streamers, press, festivals, communities, devlogs, demo strategy. Each of them has its own craft, and most of them are completely unlike anything you learn making the game.
I'll cover that in the next post. For now, the work is smaller: notice that you're running a product, not just building a game. Put marketing, community, and the boring stuff on the same roadmap as your features. Start the timer on building those muscles now, while you still have time to build them.
The AssetHoard Team