Indie games have become a race to the bottom, and devs are content on watching them slide. If I had a nickel every time I saw a downward sloping sales graph, with a single spike for that one Front Page day, I would have enough for the latest bundle.
I am always shocked at how marketing-adverse indie game devs are. Developers invest a ton of their base commodity (time) into a game, but refuse to advertise it or fail to save cash to do so. Instead they rely on front pages, bundles, and sales. Then 9 months latter they do post mortems, where they correlated sales graphs to events. I want to see a sale graph for conversions based on Facebook ads. Mobile/FB Game companies pump out mediocre games, but maintain huge user bases just because people find their games.
Everything thinks that they are going to be Notch and their game will spread by word-of-mouth, because they have a unicorn. Turns out your time-bending, retro, 2D, pixel-art shooter/platformer doesnt have the genius of Virtual Legos, and no one cares about it.
As soon as you make a game that's able to compete for conversions on ads, your game probably won't be considered indie anymore. Ads are extremely competitive and the only way to compete and not get priced out is to "sellout" and make games with mass market appeal, AAA price tags, high monetization funnels to increase LTV, etc. Without that, it's unlikely you'll be able to profitably spend on ads through any of the major channels. You're competing against the Game of Wars and Clash of Clans out there on Mobile and the AAA and IP titles on traditional platforms. So your metrics will need to be on par with the likes of those (it at least needs to be on par in a niche target demographic) in order to have any measure of success.
So the typical indie marketing strategy of using social media, press, and word of mouth, is actually very rational and probably the best way to go about it.
In my opinion, if you do CPM/CPC/Facebook marketing for your indie game, you are wasting your money. You are competing with the marketing budgets of industry giants, which are ten to 100 times larger. Your ads won't be seen.
Your effort should be spent convincing influencers to play your game, so that they will convince others. These are not people best reached by advertising.
Have you ever seen anyone try it and report numbers? Ads for Facebook are fairly specific. Its creepy how finely you can segment your audience. Industry giants may have larger budgets, which just means that they can cast a wider net. Well targeted ads may have better returns.
Facebook is not the only platform. Reddit, Polygon, and Twitch all have users that would fit your demographic more. Social media personalities (Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, etc), all will mention your game for the right price. If you have ever seen 'Featured', 'Promoted', or 'Partner' content, then it was paid for. Communities and forums are overvalued for the time investment, especially because they rely on other people to spread your game.
We live in a consumerist society driven by ads. Refusal to use them is silly.
It isn't a one-size-fits-all market, and lumping together "marketing" with the industrial sales funnel does a disservice to the numerous games that used other marketing techniques, on their own or accompanied by a traditional push.
That doesn't mean that marketing isn't important - if your goal is commercial then it really should be up in that 60% of developer time range - but the way in which you do it requires at least as much design thinking as making the game. The whole premise of the game needs built in sales value or else you're part of the crowd, fighting to break out.
Most of the tricks you can do with advertising and production values only reduce reasons for people to say "no" to a game. They don't make people say "yes", and if nobody says "yes" then all you can do is churn people through the sales funnel, because your game doesn't and never will solve anyone's hair-on-fire problem.
I am always shocked at how marketing-adverse indie game devs are.
Ambient level of marketing competence for indie developers is even below that for e.g. "indie" SaaS companies, which is unfortunate. A lot of them could benefit from simple things like aggressively getting email signups and using them to promote game N+1 to their existing fanbase, as opposed to having to buy their customers back from Valve every single time.
This analogy falls flat when you compare the levels of Unix 'bullshittery' to a shop. In a shop you have a limited number of already working machines that are readily visible. In Unix, you not only have to know how to use the machines, but how to install them, how to repair them, how to select similar, yet slightly different ones, how to copy your machines and make them run the same way in a different location. And on top of that to a novice all of the machines are hidden, and you have to read manuals/tutorials/forums to even know that they exist.
Unix tools can sometimes be horribly obtuse to use when first starting out. As you get use to them, you may discover the elegance of simple programs with pipable output, but their beauty is not readily obvious. Going from Windows installers to apt-get to git clone/make/setup, is a long process. Expecting students to already know this eats up time.
Of course, the analogy falls down–like all analogies–at some point. However, there is a whole realm of industrial fabrication beyond what is available at a simple/hobby shop.
To put it a different way: there are tools that I want to use when I am making one of something. Then there are different tools when I am making 10 of something. Again at 100, 1,000, and 1,000,000.
I've been a teacher, and I think there is a inherent conflict: As a teacher, I want my students to learn _how_ to do something, but I also want them to do things "right". Those two goals are often at odds. Sometimes the best way to learn is to do it "wrong"; preferably in a safe environment where doing it wrong won't kill/maim you. I think the injustice is trying to teach students how to use the "for a million" tools (which they will _need_ later), when they really struggling with the idea of making one.
You're talking about a mythical shop which already has all the tools - very few shops have them all. Similarly, there are plenty of physical tools which are not obvious to use; my housemate tinkers in the shed with wood and he's got a variety of tools, some of which I'm nonplussed in how to use. Plenty of the tools are hidden, whether 'hidden' is defined as 'not present' or 'unclear usage'.
Likewise methodology. As a carpenter you might wonder how to curve wood. You might even hear about steam being involved. But unless you're finding out from someone who's already done it, it's not that simple to just steam a bit of wood and usefully bend it from first principles.
Hell, even just using a chisel for a novice is easier if you talk to someone first - especially a metalworking chisel.
The 'bullshit' he is referring to is not the software itself, but its arcane interface. Think about the first time you tried to install a new version of python, only to have both version end up in your PATH somehow. Or run into permission issues and someone told you to run 'chmod 777.' As a novice, hours are easily lost trying to find the perfect commands to do something, and it often ends up being only one or two lines, something an expert would know immediately.
His job as a mentor is to empower his students to do research, not be sysadmins. Selecting a student based on a pre existing ability to use a tool drastically limits the pool.
If you want to do research into something interesting and worthwhile, you can't expect to just have a fully fleshed out programming environment with no rough edges to deal with. To use an analogy, you're walking behind the guys who cut the trail for you with machetes. You don't get a blacktop highway to where you're going.
Turns out a machete is much easier to use than the machine that is Unix. A machine that will mow down the entire forest in 30 seconds, or blow itself up, depending on what you tell it. Oh, and that machine has 1014 levers, knobs, dials, most of which are only labeled with single letters, or vague snippets.
This is a cop-out article that MailChimp can direct its customers to when they ask "how to disable spam filters." I worked in support for another ESP, and customers would often have unreasonable expectations about email delivery rates. Enough industries are corrupted, that customers thought that with enough money, we could bypass spam filters, or ensure 100% deliverability (never mind that half their email addresses didn't exist). I even had someone ask how they could make sure that everyone would open and read their emails. Like we sold some sort of Orwellian device that would hold people's eyes open and indoctrinate them to buy a specific Insurance.
The best answer, in my humble opinion, is "Don't send SPAM".
If you only send mail to people who have willingly opted in, not through trickery, pressure, inducement or some BS promotion, they'll actually want to read your mail and won't tolerate it being binned with the SPAM.
Unfortunately, a lot of business people don't get that.
Except this isn't nearly enough. Email is quickly becoming like the SEO industry. It's not just enough to "have great content" to ensure you're ranked highly.
You have to manipulate it at the whims of the search engine / email provider.
A couple years ago, I looked at switching from an in-house email server to an ESP -- MailChimp being one. Right as I was performing the cost-benefit, two things happened:
1. Gmail started re-hosting email images, nullifying passive email-open
detection features even if the user ALLOWED images.[1]
2. MailChimps added language around distribution caps.
As a minor dealbreaker, ESP's force mandatory unsubscribe links for CAN-SPAM compliance, no matter how small/private your list becomes.
Not all ESPs force unsubscribe links. We ultimately put liability on our customers for CAN-SPAM compliance. We had CAN-SPAM compliance checks on by default, but they could be disabled. As to your original question, no, ESPs have not gained much in the way of power. I might be in the minority in my industry, but I think this is good. All of the arguments against page-based ads can be used against email-based ads. But in this case, the users have won, and have full power over their inbox.
Unfortunately I can't find a source at the moment, but I do remember reading that in Facebook's early days they discovered their spammy "Invite Everyone In Your Contact List to Join" emails were getting withheld from the inbox by Hotmail. Facebook made a payment(s) to Hotmail in order to get themselves whitelisted, and this was attributed as a key to their continued growth.
