I am a few weeks into making my first "real" game and want to take it somewhat seriously. It'll be a single player top-down dungeon crawler RPG for PC. At what stage should I start marketing?

From observation, sales benefit from building a customer base during development, but starting too early can cause customers to lose interest and showing unfinished assets/ideas can mar reputation. I also have that irrational fear someone's going to steal my ideas if I share them, but I'll get over it. When should you start putting your concept/aesthetic, code snippets, mechanics, gameplay footage, etc out there? Do you share in relation to when your content is presentable or your release schedule?

As for where I'm at ~ I am still building the skeleton of my game, so there's lots of features but no substance or levels yet. The art is 100% placeholder. My concept is fleshed out, and I could give an elevator pitch for it. I'm beginning concept art, so I'll also have some aesthetic ready to share soon. I've been keeping a day-by-day journal of my activities and ideas, so I'll have plenty of content to rework into a developer's diary and marketing whenever it's okay to show people. It's probably early, but I want to start planning.

Any perspectives are welcome! I'm mostly looking to learn from others' experience.

Moving to Business forum.

Yes it's too early.

2 hours ago, 0r0d said:

Yes it's too early.

How do I know when it's not, though? What should be done first? Or at least when have you started and how did it go?

9 hours ago, chimchooree said:

How do I know when it's not, though? What should be done first? Or at least when have you started and how did it go?

You should start building interest and a community around the game when you're close enough that you know what the final game will be and approximately when it will be finished.  

Right now you're 4 weeks in and as far as I can tell you have no history of building and shipping a game, so for all you know you will never finish this game.   Also, regardless of what you're planning now, when you're 6 months in the game concept might have changed completely.  Lastly, since again you have little experience, you're better off using your energy to actually building the game.  Everything else is just putting the cart before the horse.

In my opinion one should start marketing his game once there is a _showable_ build and your friends said the game looks good after testing it. (Of course explain them that it's an early build).

From there you can start gathering gameplay footage, videos for trailer, put an early access alpha on, etc.

Note that it doesn't absolutely mean that you shouldn't THINK about marketing before that point: read marketing articles and study successful indie games, see how they have done and why. (There are a lot of resources around the web).

Also at one point you should probably consider hiring someone that can help you with this: they know streamers, they know youtubers and they know this world way better than you: They could offload a lot of work while you can remain focused on finalizing the build.

Leonardo

I wouldn't do any marketing until at least 60-70% completion. The reason is, the game design & look is not stable at this point. If the game shipped after that and it drastically different than what you have advertised, then your customer will get mad at you.

Even for a kickstarter project, I don't think it's worth much showing off prototypes or early design. If I recall correctly, most of the successful projects started the campaign around midway. Nowadays I don't think people would trust someone with nothing more than a design or a couple of prototype, regardless of how trustworthy they are, after a number of failed project. 

So I think starting the marketing too early might result in negative result even.

Most projects only start marketing at the end of development, but that doesn't mean that the marketing plan /execution didn't actually start long beforehand! 

If it's a serious game and you're doing "real" marketing, you should hire a firm to handle that for you. You're the expert in making the game, they're the experts in selling games. Schedule a meeting with them early, discuss the game concept, gameplay, games with similar gameplay /themes, the budget, the timeline, the development process, how much you can afford to let them spend, etc... They can then advise you whether a slow drip campaign over the full development lifetime, or a blitzkrieg upon release is better suited to you.

I actually have an idea for you, though it's been used by many (including non-games app). How about you create a website teaser containing the title and the name (project name is fine), then put a form so people can sign up for updates and see if there's interest. You're doing an RPG, so most likely there are characters and environment concept arts you can put to tease people. So at best you got to work up to your concept arts if you wanna do it this way.

At best, you create a teaser trailer. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 game teaser is released 5 years ago. After that the developer went completely dark on that game until this year they released a full trailer. I don't really recommend this one though cause it's kinda big budget only marketing game, I think, I dunno. Besides, they got other game that keeps going so their company as a brand stays afloat in the audience.