What strategies have you taken to build an audience for your game(s)?
Would love to hear what everyone has tried (successful or not!) towards building an audience for their games.
A lot of the guidance on IH is for B2B SaaS, which I've felt doesn't always coincide as well with marketing/launching a game.
Games are usually more-like consumer apps, but even then I feel like they are almost in a league of their own.
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I'm going to assume you don't have a marketing budget in the 10s of 1000s of dollars. In which case your best weapons are going to be regular updates via Email and Discord.
Email gives people flags that there are new and exciting things happening with your game's development and is obscenely good at doing what you need it to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ5H6DeaKKs
Discord gives them a place to consistently stay and stay plugged into the project and can slowly evangelize players.
Talk about your game early and often. Build wishlists on Steam. Find events and awards that can get other people to talk about your game.
If this doesn't sound like something you're interested in or good at- find someone who is. This can be a publisher, a PR partner, a social media manager. You can make the greatest game in the world, but if no one knows about it you're still going to flounder.
Twitter is still a very good place to get free eyes to funnel them into email and discord. Check out the #indiedevhour #PitchYaGame and #indiegames hashtags. Just remember it doesn't end there. You've got to take users and draw them further and further down your sales funnel until on launch day they're ready to whip out their wallets.
Over at infinitelives.github.io we are doing games in our spare time and we managed to grow our twitter followers slowly and get some mailing list signups, simply by tweeting screenshots and emailing our subscribers whenever we are actually working on a game or gamejam. It's a slow tactic but some audience is better than no audience I guess!
I'm very interested in this company sokpop who do a game every two weeks.