This is an updated for 2026 version of a blog post I wrote way back in 2017 over on Medium
Having previously launched two VR games some time ago, “Loco Dojo”and “Radial-G : Racing Revolved”, it took me a while to remember all the important profiles and sites to create associated accounts with to help promote, market and connect to the growing community for your game.
So with this in mind, I thought I would share the sites that I think are essential to any indie game developer to help spread awareness and grow your playerbase. Be prepared to set aside a couple of days to set all these up and it helps if you have all the image and video assets ready beforehand.
How you go about it and how effective you can be with PR, marketing and community management is somewhat related to how clever (or lucky) you are with the name of your game. Naming a game is one of the hardest parts of development because even when you think you have the best name ever, it’s highly likely that someone else already has had the same idea and registered all the web addresses and social media profiles already that have the best SEO (bleurgh) results.
So try to a) think of a name that no-one else has registered or used already, b) is easy to say when you’re up on stage talking about your game and c) makes you proud to say it aloud! Or at the very least, decide upon a naming convention for your online presence that allows you to be consistent i.e. we refer to everything online for profiles and addresses for Loco Dojo as locodojogame.
I covered “what’s in a name” in a recent blog post, to help you get to the point you are ready to register it officially online. Whether or not it will be plagiarised and released as AI-slop before you have finished developing it is another discussion topic. The simple fact is if your game is based around a fairly simple, easy to copy mechanic, then it will likely be copied anyway if successful, or gains traction. AI just makes that happen sooner*.
tl;dr there’s advice at the end.
Official Website
It goes without saying that you should have an official website for your game but you don’t need to spend thousands on getting an agency to create one for you. There’s a number of websites that allow you to create and host your own websites quickly, cheaply and without any real web development skills. We used a site called Squarespace to make the Loco Dojo website.
From the official website you can bring in social media feeds, allowing sharing of articles and pages out to players own social media channels and host your own screenshots, trailer videos, blog posts, presskits and more…
Of course having your own web domain for your game enables you to have a number of email addresses on that domain, so you can create ones for info@… contact@… bugs@ etc. Unfortunately having a web domain and a series of online presences means you’ll soon be inundated with tonnes of spam emails selling you bullshit SEO improvement services and ways to increase your Google ranking too.
Use a suitable email alias or address through your domain to setup all your social media accounts rather than a personal one, which might be verified already for your own purposes.
Official Trailer
You need a compelling trailer for launch and the best way is to pay someone with video editing and creative skills to make one for you. Of course this costs money so you might have to make do with the limits of your own abilities but bare in mind length (keep it short, ideally no more than a minute long) and focus on actual gameplay footage that makes the game look fun, attractive to potential consumers and keep the studio logos and boring bits to a minimum and stick ’em at the end of the video.
If you have a bit more budget available, there are a number of trailer creation agencies who offer reasonable rates for indie game developers, such as The Trailer Farm.
Either way, I would certainly go and look at what Derek Lieu has to say and offer in regards to guidelines to making catchy, effective trailers!
Social Media
For all the faults and issues with social media today, it’s a necessary evil that a game developer needs to embrace on their path to building a community for their studio or game title. Which channels you focus on depends upon your intended audience for your game (which of course you have thought about right?)
YouTube
Of course once you have an official trailer for your game, the best place to host it is on your official game YouTube channel. And if you haven’t got to that point yet, then YouTube is a great place for dev logs too.
Setting up a YouTube channel is straightforward and easiest with an all-encompassing Google account that you’ll use (with two form-factor login) across all the Google sites (YouTube, Google+ and Gmail).
A key part of YouTube is to take the unique code provided to verify the associated brand/product and embed this into your official website header code. Once Google/YouTube checks for the code, it will verify your account and enable more options to make your account more powerful.
You can use YouTube to build up a playlist of all the other YouTubers posting their own Let’s Play videos of your game, to make it easy for people to find all of them in one simple list linked to your game account.
YouTube is also a great place for your long-form dev blog videos, assuming this is something you want to do. Shorts can create compelling content for viewers to follow to the full length version. These can then also be shared on other video platforms to form the wider net.
Bluesky
Now that X (Twitter) is basically dead to anyone without an ulterior motive or who isn’t a bot, platforms like Bluesky have become the place for short-form posts, with some new features to take advantage of. Lists, feeds and starter packs are great ways to spread the word about your game within the relevant topics. This could be around game dev, screenshots, region-based studio feeds or game genres.
Take a look at the awesome BlueSky Guide to the Video Game Industry by ICO Partners.
Facebook is typically harder to grow a fanbase of users willing to actually [LIKE] your official game page but it’s still necessary to have a page to help share longer-form news posts and game updates.
Be sure to set an action button too, either to the game store page or official website calling users to action to do more with your profile page.
You could do a paid targeted ad campaign from Facebook narrowing down age, region, likes and interests to help build that audience but again it depends who you are targeting and why.
TikTok
If your game is aimed at the age of users who are more likely to be on TikTok than other older social media platforms, then it’s another way to share short-form gameplay videos, bits of a trailer, even bugs during development. Many gaming influencers are now on TikTok too, doing let’s play videos and reviews.
No doubt you will be doing events to help promote your indie game at some point and Instagram is a valid place to share photos from the events and have cropped screenshots and videos on your profile too. Now with Reels and video it’s another place to share the short-form content you have available.
Discord
Millions of gamers are on Discord to connect with each other and specifically, game devs of the titles they care about. Even if your game isn’t multiplayer or social, it’s a place where players can share strategies, ideas, feedback and connect to you, the developer.
Game Profiles
IndieDb
It’s worthwhile setting up your game and developer profile on IndieDb in order to join one of the largest online games databases.
Another benefit of IndieDb is that they’ve added support for presskit(), designed and created by Rami Ismail (with assistance from many others), which is an easy page to provide to press and websites looking to cover your game with all the necessary assets in once place, such as high-res screenshots, logos, trailers and short/long descriptions to make their lives easier.
NB. If you mark your game as a VR game, it will be mirrored across to VRDb as well to increase your reach and linkbacks. All game entries will also be mirrored to ModDb, in case you have a game that supports user modding.
madewith.unity
If you have made your game with Unity, then it makes sense to setup and create profiles for your development studio and game on the official madewith.unity website as well.
Whilst it seems like a duplication of other sites that require more time to be kept up to date, it’s worthwhile to get your game in front of the madewith.unity community and moderators eyes, who knows they might decide to include in the next #madewithunity Friday or the next Unite event showcase video!
GiantBomb
You should create a GiantBomb profile for your game in the game wiki hosted there so that Twitch streamers can select your game name when they stream a Let’s Play session of your game, which makes it clear to viewers the game being shown.
Press Releases
Once you have created a press release, send it to Games Press website so again the press and journalists have a centralised online location to get the latest news on games releases and updates from.
Press releases uploaded to Games Press are aggregated out to large games development-centric websites such as Gamasutra and Develop.
Forums
Forums are a great place to engage with the community around the hardware and platform your game is going to be available on but each one has it’s own rules and regulations around what can and can’t be posted. Long time forum users will be wary or even potentially hostile to new users just appearing to promote a new game without offering or interacting with the community beforehand, so it’s worth the effort to spend time well before launch building up a forum user profile history for yourself as someone useful, helpful, good to engage with before launching an all out promo assault!
Forums— Reddit
It’s worthwhile finding the appropriate Reddit channel that your game would fall under, whether it’s PCGaming or one of the many game dev related ones like r/indiedev or r/gamedev. These are also great places to get advice from fellow devs about specific issues you have come up against.
Be wary that most reddit moderators won’t tolerate blatant marketing threads and will delete those that appear to be just selling a product / brand without any attempt to engage with the community. Many Reddit channels require flair to be added to posts as well once submitted to don’t forget to go back and do this, otherwise it will be deleted.
Forums — Unity
Whilst mostly aimed at developers and users of Unity itself rather than end-users of games made with Unity, it’s still worthwhile engaging with the community on the Unity Forum as they have a Community category where you are able to promote your in-progress or released game. Also this is a place to start raising awareness of your game within the Unity organisation which could lead to a Unity Awards submission or nomination at the very least.
If your game is made with Unity, there is a high chance you would have interacted with other Unity users on the forum anyway.
NB. I assume a similar forum exists for Unreal developers.
Forums — Steam
If you’re publishing your game on Steam, you’ll get a game forum created as part of the Steam game profile be default. Here you can manage your own Steam userbase to post updates, announcements, guides, pinned topics, bugs etc as well as engage with consumers and players who have or are interested in buying your game.
Linking Everything Together
Once you’ve set all those up, you should at least have them listed on your official website. The social media channels have the ability to add other links to show on each profile so link between them all to widen the net further. The more links between all your relevant sites and profiles, the higher up and greater your Google search results ranking will be. You could collate them all into something like linktree too.
Use a service like bit.ly to create an account to shorten as many of the URLs as possible and include these on the press release and inter-site links as these will give you click-through rates and stats to compare.
This is a quick summary of the main sites you should create profiles on. Of course each social media channel has their own nuances, strengths and weaknesses. There are plenty of other websites and articles that cover these that can be found easily…
General Advice
Set aside time during development to do PR/marketing and community building! DO NOT leave it to just before or after launch. It only has to be 30 mins or an hour a week initially but ramp it up as you have more to share or the release date is approaching.
The important thing is that if you have spent the time setting them up, then you have to spend the time nurturing and updating them, otherwise the community you start to build will wither away and die.
(If releasing on Steam) Everything you do can help build wishlists for your game title but untargetted wishlist boosting can give false hope. This might get you a higher number but this doesn’t necessarily result in conversions to sales if they are based upon users with no real interest in your game. (Some publishers are interested in high wishlist numbers so balance your efforts accordingly).
Look for help if you need it; as already mentioned people like Derek Lieu are great for trailers but other indie PR/Marketing folk like Ashley Gwinnel and impress.games make things simple.
There are lots of folk out there who yes, run businesses around this stuff but also provide a lot of great, free resources to get you going too.
Think about what makes good content and make it! Whether it’s awesome game dev vlogs like Anton Hand for H3, screenshots, gameplay clips or a full trailer, think about what is going to capture attention and bring gamers to your game and keep them interested.
Similarly tailor your content for each specific platform. Although it is tempting to copy/paste the same post text, take advantage and learn to be clever (i.e. knowledgable through research) about what works best on each platform.
Don’t give up! When you first start out, yes you will likely have very low numbers but everyone has to start somewhere right? As momentum builds, the net will spread wider and the numbers will go up. Similarly, don’t think you have to target the influencers with the biggest numbers to get the biggest return, and certainly don’t feel pressured into thinking you’re going to have to pay them to cover your game.
Speaking of influencers, research and find the ones who cover games like yours or adjacent genres - reach out to them; if they are already passionate about these types of games, if they do cover yours, it’s going to be far more genuine and have greater impact with their audiences.
Just do it! I know you want to focus on making the game but what’s the point if no-one knows about it when you finish and launch? 25,000+ games launched on Steam in 2025, over 700 a week now in 2026, so it is in your best interest to make sure you spend a bit of time helping your game rise towards the top!
