Selling Your Soul

Hello.
My name is Bob, age 25.

This is my game for Nintendo DS, a 20-hour-long retail-size,
retail-quality adventure title by a single human being-
the largest game ever made by one person.

"bob's game" is a simple 2D adventure game, with focus on
story, puzzles, item collection, and communication instead
of repetitive battles with palette-swapped enemies.

Many characters (over 200 completely unique characters!)
have deep personalities that evolve, and many things
depend on the in-game time, day and weather.

It's the game I wanted to play when I was younger,
a vision I've been following since then.

http://www.bobsgame.com/

So, you made yourself a game. Good.
Now, how are you gonna pitch it?
It depends on your market audience. A casual game, or a game with general all-ages appeal might sit well in a TV spot. However, something for the more hardcore gamers out there might best be sold online -- the proving grounds of the gamer elite.
You can set up your own website and pitch it that way, if you'd like (like Bob did). Advertising might consist of buying up web banners or Google advertisement space that point to your web site.
For Bob, it's really worked out:


2008-10-03:

The WiiDS Podcast is up!
I've done another short QA with gaming blog E2EntertainmentExplosion.
Talks are progressing rapidly- there's something big in the works. ;)
Along with normal carts, I might be one of the first downloadable titles on the DSi!

A bigger company needs only to send one of their PR guys to a gaming entertainment expo to espouse their new title. Or they might simply choose to fly a few gaming reporters in to their labs, and show them their newest product close-up.

I think my product would benefit from the "Bob" approach -- make something fantastic (a "tech demo" or proof of concept), whip up a series of short (>1 minute) flick that shows all the fantastic features and revolutionary ideas being poured into my game, upload to YouTube, and enjoy success! A lot of small "indie" developers are finding success with this method, and with my game concept being marketed to indie development studios, I think this is the logical conclusion for marketing our concept to either the public or game distributors and producers.

This sort of "underground" YouTube-based approach is often helped when grouped with other word-of-mouth processes -- talking it up in your favourite forums, buying online advertisment space, offering a shareware demo to rally interest (even when you've barely begun development of the full game!). In the book Masters of Doom, John Romero and John Carmack, the god-like heads of iD software and developers of Doom and Quake, are described subverted the early-nineties culture of submitting your assets and rights to a publishing house. They did this by releasing the shareware demo to Doom online through univeristy internet servers.

So the online approach is three-pronged: advertising, both through word-of-mouth and official services such as Google's AdWords, having a central website that houses development discussion and resources, and releasing free stuff to the public (everything from proof-of-concept tech demos, all the way up to full-blown playable shareware demos).