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🏆 My Favorite Game Dev, Marketing, and Steam Advice

A huge list of AMAZINGLY good game development articles, videos, and more. Make your game!
My Favorite Game Dev, Marketing, and Steam Advice

It's time for another great big list of amazingly useful game development information, resources, and educational content. This time we're focusing on my main priorities recently, including:

  • 🎮 How to Make Your Game
  • 📢 How to Market Your Game
  • 🛠️ How to Make Games For Steam

Every. Single. One of the following links, to me, is spot-on. I have linked people to them repeatedly over the years as these topics come up in conversations.

So I do not link to these lightly. They're gold I tells ya, GOLD!

🎮 How to Make Your Game

These are articles and videos about the actual making of the game. Nothing else is as important as this! (That's why I called my podcast Make the Game.)

If you only click on one of these, how about:

This Problem Changes Your Perspective On Game Dev

📢 How to Market Your Game

Games marketing is often something that new game devs don't even think about until after they've already made (most of) their game. Sometimes that's too late!

You've either already committed to a game concept that's going to be hard to market, or you haven't given your game enough runway to build up momentum before launch. This happens to a whole lotta game devs.

The good news is that it's all about your game. It is however still critical that people know about your game, so promotion also matters a great deal:

If you only click on one of these, how about:

The Diary of a Modern PR Campaign: How to Plan Your Game's Promotion

✅ Who to follow for games marketing advice

There are lots of great game marketers out there. Here are 10 that I especially recommend following:

🛠️ How to Make Games For Steam

Steam (ya know, the developers of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, and more) is the premium platform for desktop indie games. They host over a hundred million gamers ready to buy your game (if they like what they see).

Steam is finely aged at this point and has built up a gigantic feature set over the years. With multiple domains, lots of different software, and an ever-changing laundry list of best practices, it can be overwhelming.

That's why I recommend starting with 🛠️ Steam overview for game devs before proceeding deeper into its steamy depths:

If you only read/watch/do one of these links, make sure it's:

How To Make A Steam Page
Pro Game Marketing

How To Make A Steam Page

👁️ Stay Focused

I know this is a lot. I promise you, if you take the time to consume a good chunk of these links, you'll become better at making increasingly more marketable games.

If you need help getting started (or finishing) then of course I highly recommend my book How to Make a Video Game All By Yourself. I also encourage you to join the Valadria Discord where you can ask questions and share your game. If you want hands-on support, I also offer coaching and consulting.

That's it for this "best of" list ... for now. There's probably some stuff I forgot to include – and maybe you've got your own gems to suggest? Please do send them to me; I'll make another one of these in the future.

In the meantime, good luck with your game! You can do it. 💪

-Matt (bsky, LinkedIn, Mastodon)

Next up: a brand new podcast (finally) and more on games marketing.

Published by:

Matt Hackett