Rechosted from Reddit's r/gamedev forum, which like many other subreddits has gone dark to protest the shutdown of third-party apps by the end of June
I write a newsletter about adult games every week, and I love putting a spotlight on the work of my LGTBQIA+ friends, so I devoted my latest issue to 23 queer games about sex, love, and romance. But to do so, I had to review all 466 items (games, comics, books, and other media) to find out if they would interest my audience. And I only had a week to do so between my regular full-time job as a AAA game programmer.
Here's how I pulled it off and what I learned in the process.
First, I made a simple board in Notion with a few properties. Name of the game, link to the page, tags, and a screenshot that I could potentially use in my newsletter. I also added a Status field, with the default "To-do," "In progress," and "Done" states suiting my needs just fine. Now the real work could begin.
I opened up the page for the Queer Games Bundle 2023 and opened every item that looked vaguely interesting in a new tab. At this stage, I'm merely looking at the title and the small preview screenshot and asking: Is this a game? If yes, is it about sex, love, and romance? Both of these can be surprisingly fuzzy to answer at a glance. As an example, look at the fantastic Understuffed. The ambiguous title and cuddly graphics make it hard to notice that this game is about hardcore BDSM! To be clear, that is an artistic choice that I fully support, but it makes it difficult for the game to find its way to the right audience.
Once my browser was filled with tabs, I took a better look at them and put them as tickets in the "To-do" column in my Notion board. Was my initial impression correct? I estimate I got it right about 80% of the time, which isn't a great score. That meant the game was not about sex, love, or romance, for example. And sometimes what I thought was a video game was actually a board game in printable PDF form. Those tickets were eliminated from the board.
Next, I tried to learn a bit more about the games I selected, which is where the tags came in. I moved the ticket to the "In progress" column and started filling in details. For example, I tagged Night Cascades as "Detective," "Supernatural," and "Lesbian" and copied the second screenshot on the page to my Notion board. I didn't know in advance how I would categorize the selected games in my newsletter, and I felt it was better to be safe than sorry when it came to tagging.
Finally, once I was satisfied with my selection, I wrote a one-line description for each game. I would then move the ticket into the "Done" column to figure out how many I had left to do for the newsletter. I had set a goal to do this for at least 23 games and ended up doing 24 anyway because I miscounted.
What I learned
Unfortunately, finding out more about a game is exactly where many pages struggled. Many of the pages I had on my board did not explain the premise of their game, lacked a short plot summary, and ultimately made it very difficult to discern why people should be interested. I'm under significant (self-imposed) time pressure to review these games, and I simply do not have the time to play them all. But that's how most people review game pages. If you make it easier for me to write about your game, you also make it easier for the casual player to learn more about it.
And while most game pages had screenshots, which is great, many failed to realize that screenshots have to show something interesting happening. If you're making a visual novel, more power to you, but please don't have a screenshot of a single character in an empty room saying something mundane like, "I put the banana in the freezer." Big emotions work well here: Shock, Horror, Fear, Anger, and yes, Horny, are great ways to grab your audience's attention instantly. A game that does this really well on a tight budget is the erotic visual novel Knife Sisters. The second screenshot shows one character in the background, tied to a chair with tape, and another in the foreground, holding a small knife aloft. The caption is, "She started cutting through the plastic, really slowly." I guarantee that this screenshot alone is enough to get this game's target audience (trans lesbians) hot under the collar.
And finally, this is just a pet peeve, but be explicit. Don't say your game has "LGTBQIA+ themes" because that doesn't mean anything. Do you have a non-binary or gay protagonist? Put it on the page! Are you kissing boys and girls in this game? Put it on the page! You get the idea.
Most game developers are not marketers, and I don't think many have the budget to hire someone to write good marketing copy for them. But you can always bother your friends for feedback. Does this make sense to you? Can you summarize the plot back to me? What screenshots look appealing to you? Asking a few questions like these is often enough to save a lot of heartbreak when your sales fail to materialize.
Conclusion
I write my newsletter every week, and I've done so for almost two years. I've gotten pretty good at turning almost inscrutable game summaries into a short and snappy one-line description, but this is a muscle I had to train. Many of the games I found in this bundle clearly struggled to find an audience not because they were bad games, but because they had bad marketing.
If there's one thing I want you to take away from this post, besides that you should check out the Queer Games Bundle 2023, is that a bit of marketing can go a long way.
