The evenings are darker, the air more sinister and a low fog has descended across the fractured landscape of the indie gaming world. What better opportunity to venture into the basement, dust off the toolbox and highlight our favourite indies by means of a freaky flashlight under the chin.
This year for Halloween, we wanted to utilise the occasion to create a platform to raise the awareness of participating games, and offer something back to the community we love so much.
Indie games marketing is a delicate art. Throughout the year, our carefully considered marketing campaigns sail along the ever-flowing river of game development with tenacity, alongside the forces of nature that conspire to see us go under. This time of year is especially tricky, with giant AAAs dropping seemingly at a moment’s notice and creating huge waves that can easily swallow our delicately handcrafted indie paper ships.
Halloween is one of those points on the calendar that often sees many of us flexing our artistic muscles with some whimsical art to celebrate the season, sharing our creations across social media. It’s a chance to have a little fun within the worlds we’ve created, and showcase our characters and designs. What better chance to help amplify everyone’s voices at once!
We launched #Halloweendies, a short sweepstakes within which one participating dev team had the chance to walk away with a neat $500 USD towards their game’s development or promotion. The idea was simple - submit your art; share it online, promoting everyone’s games simultaneously; and enter the prize draw for the cash.
Acorn has hosted many competitions on behalf of our clients, over the years. One important rule we (almost) always follow is to keep the entry threshold low. We want to make competitions as easy to enter as possible in order to gain the maximum number of entrants. This one was of course different – here, we were valuing quality over quantity.
And what quality we saw! Of course indie games are the best place within the industry to discover something new, disruptive and innovative, so it made sense that our participants worked hard to play within the space and have fun with their creations. We saw crossovers, helping out multiple developers at the same time; variations on the theme, such as posters and screenshots; and of course a strong selection of unbelievable digital art from some of the most talented artists within the industry.
We decided upon the format of a sweepstakes for our prize draw. Initially, we thought that asking for community votes would help raise awareness for the campaign, but it soon became clear that this would heavily skew votes in favour of the biggest games. Drawing a winner from a hat seemed to be the fairest way to maintain a level playing field.
On Halloween, we picked our winner via video, shared on YouTube premiere and were able to congratulate the team at Insanto Studios for their wonderful submission. The #Halloweendies campaign was a success, with 76k impressions generated from our content over the period. Thanks to all who entered, and we hope to renew the idea again in 2023!
The winning artwork from Insanto Studios - A Trail of Ooze.