Today's game market is, by all accounts, saturated. There's simply not enough time for people to play everything that's on offer out there, even if everybody dedicated their lives to hunting out – and playing through – as many titles as humanly possible.

Because today's gamers are so spoilt for choice, it's easy for new limelight seekers to be intimidated by the teeming throng of "play me!" titles and quick fixes that constitute the marketing rat-race. In the worst case, a particularly shy indie dev may just upload a small demo, paste the link in a small corner of his/her personal blog, tentatively approach one or two friends and basically just stay put and hope that somebody with media clout walks by, shouts, "oh my word!" and wakes up the digital neighbourhood for you.

That's not to say that such windfalls don't occur. They are, however, incredibly unlikely. A lot of people regard these success stories on the Internet as the norm, unaware of the fact that for every runaway success they hear about, there are at least a thousand other less exposed games still hiding in the shadows.

Trino

This guide is for anybody who has a nice game under their belt and wants to give it some more exposure. It doesn't matter if you're just a two-bit dev submitting simple concepts to some backwater forum. In fact, it's probably better if you are: this article is geared towards you, and can help you make the most of something that would otherwise disappear into the murky undercity of the Internet.

A few notes before we get started

Firstly, and most importantly, this is not an article about spending money. Marketing is done on the cheap here, so things like literature, middle-men, PR agencies and paid-for advertising are way out. If you have a marketing budget, that's fantastic. But the focus here is on free services first and foremost to ensure maximum accessibility.

Secondly, this is not an article about making money. There're countless bits and pieces of writing out there that can help you draw up a viable business scheme, hunt down the best royalty prices from software portals and secure yourself a distribution platform that can earn you the buckazoids. Regardless of whether your game is freeware, shareware, charityware or vapourware, this article is concerned with only one question: how do you get people to know about it?

And with that, we begin to take a look at how the experts answer that question.

The media aren't that scary

In an article covering this year's Indie Games Summit, Offworld points out Fez creator Phil Fish making one thing clear: journalists are human beings too. His advice? "Be friends with them."

It seems so laughably simple, but he raises an excellent point: when advertising a game, too many people are afraid to approach journalists, or have absolutely no idea of how to do it properly. This leads to many "cookie cutter" approaches, where people suit up their language, bring their best promo efforts to the table and start treating the media like faceless consumers or – worse still – job interviewers.

In a blog post entitled "How To Use And Abuse The Gaming Press And How The Gaming Press Wants To Use And Abuse You", game journalism veteran Kieron Gillen (better known by some as one of the guys behind Rock, Paper, Shotgun) explains the mental state of a typical journalist: "We're not perfect, because we haven't time to be perfect. Just like developers. The secret is that we actually want to write about you. When someone has a phenomenal amount of work to do before the nineteen day clock ticks down to deadline, anyone able to present them something interesting to fill their pages saves them an amount of work."

He goes on to explain how indie developers need to be more aggressive in their promotion. Typically, professional journalists spend a lot of time trawling their news sources looking for things to report on. This is a fairly difficult job: what distinguishes one game marketing blurb from another? Which blogs need to be followed? Which screenshots look the prettiest? Where are the points of interest amongst thousands of RSS feed entries?

Kieron Gillen

Make some lucky journalist's life a little easier and follow Gillen's advice: take the initiative to send over copies of your game. That's what Introversion did with Uplink, after all. Fish took similar measures when promoting Fez, even going as far as offering exclusive footage of Fez to particular sources.

Journalists are there to be wooed. That's not to say that one should ever be rude or disrespectful: it's just important to remember that your game is news potential, and that more often than not, the big bad media will be more than happy to help you out. Even if they're forced to be terse when under deadline strain!