How to Promote Your Indie Game On Reddit Without Losing Your Sanity

Alongside more traditional social media, Reddit has become a favorite of indie developers and marketers alike in recent years. The platform lets you get in contact with potential players and other game enthusiasts, often without having to wade through an ocean of unrelated posts, accounts, and discussions.

The /r/indiegames subreddit is full of developers showcasing their latest creations, while titles such as Palworld – whose subreddit now counts over 500,000 members – have greatly benefited from the attention they got on the platform. At the same time, just a couple of months ago, the developers of Cleared Hot got a massive spike in interest when the trailer for their upcoming indie game reached the top of the front page of r/gaming.

But Reddit can also be a confusing website to tame, especially for first-time users. For that reason, we decided to dedicate today’s blog to guiding you through the basics - looking at how you can successfully promote your game on Reddit while also preserving your sanity!

 

How Does Marketing Indie Games on Reddit Work Anyway?

Before diving into anything else, it’s important we look at how Reddit’s structure makes it unique among social media platforms.

Unlike TikTok, X, Instagram or Facebook, Reddit doesn’t work as a united, monolithic system. Instead, you can imagine it as a loose agglomerate of communities, known as subreddits, each dedicated to a specific topic. And while Reddit has a set of basic content rules in place and your karma (an account-wide score based on your activities) will carry across, each community is more or less free to act independently.

With that in mind, your first step should always be identifying the communities that your indie game best fits into. While more generic gaming and development hubs like /r/gamedev, /r/gaming or /r/indiegaming might be a good place to start from, leveraging your game’s subgenre or trying to tap into specific niches is a great way to get more attention. If, for example, your indie game features a unique artstyle — such as pixel art, voxel art, or low-poly 3D — consider visiting /r/PixelArt, /r/VoxelGameDev and /r/low_poly respectively. In most cases, genre, engine, and platform-specific communities also exist for you to use.

Once you’ve found your Subreddits, it’s also fundamental that you get familiar with their rules. While most communities will have some minimum requirements for posting (usually at least 20 Karma points and an account that is at least a week old), a majority of them also enforce specific content and behavior guidelines to ensure everything goes smoothly. Depending on the subreddit you’re visiting, these could define what kind of media you will be able to share, regulate interactions with other members, or straight up forbid specific activities. While the actual punishment also varies and is ultimately in the hands of each community’s moderators, breaking these rules usually results in either a warning, your content being removed or a full-on ban from that specific community… so always check the rules!

Finally, as an alternative to existing communities, you can also choose to create your own subreddit. By doing so, you’ll have a dedicated messaging hub where your fans and development team can interact, exchange ideas, and discuss the game you’re working on.

Reddit itself only gives very little visibility to new communities, however, and you should only consider a dedicated space on the platform once you already have a thriving community somewhere else.

 

What Should You Post on Reddit?

With a general idea of how Reddit works, you can now start planning content for promoting your indie game.

Speaking of which: among the various rules that regulate the platform, however, the 10% or 10:1 rule is perhaps the most common. The communities that enforce it will ask that only roughly 10% (or 1 in 10) of the content you post is aimed at promoting your game directly. In other words, you’ll be expected to contribute valuable insight, interact with other posts, and help the community grow before they’ll let you shamelessly self-promote what you’re working on.

In practice, that means that you’ll need to aid and uplift others first. Depending on which community you’re visiting, this could be anything from posting another developer’s work, to linking to a cool tutorial you found, to sharing an article or writing a short comment about your experience. Participating in discussions, offering advice, providing constructive criticism and sharing feedback are all great ways to contribute to a community. As an interesting side effect, stepping away from your game and supporting others will also quickly help you make a name for yourself in the various subreddits.

When the time to promote your game finally comes, the kind of content that you’ll be able to share isn’t all that dissimilar from what you already created for other platforms. GIFs, short videos, links to your Steam page, fragments of your trailer and post-mortem all work wonders.

Because the value of a post often overshadows its contents, however, always try to present your game development journey in an engaging and authentic way.

Each subreddit will also have specific post types that the community is more reactive to, so consider looking at the top submissions and getting familiar with what people like before you start posting.

If you really don’t know where to start, you can tell the community a story, celebrate a milestone, let them in on a secret or ask for feedback to ensure solid results. At the same time, you should always be kind and humble when responding to comments and criticism.

As a further option alongside more traditional types of posts, subreddits also host Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions. These Q&A sessions, which you’ll usually need to agree to with the community’s moderation team, will give you the chance to directly answer questions and get feedback from the community - as well as a huge amount of visibility for your game! AMAs are usually reserved for more experienced, popular studios though, and might be hard to organize in the first part of your game’s lifecycle.

 

What Does Success Look Like on Reddit?

Because of how the platform works, success on Reddit doesn’t always look the same.

Looking back at the examples above, titles like Palworld and Fall Guys didn’t really have to do much to colonize the platform. As with most high-profile games, their communities are entirely fan-made and essentially run themselves - with little intervention from the respective development teams. Mediatonic officially supports the community-driven subreddit, for example, but its staff rarely interact with it. At the same time, the games’ popularity itself was enough to spam a number of sister communities dedicated to memes, tricks, and player-generated content. Other high profile indie games, such as Hades, Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley and Balatro just to mention a few, managed to amass a huge community on the site - with people still sharing content and chatting about them.

For your average indie developer, on the other hand, success might be a more modest achievement. In most cases, a popular post in a specific subreddit, or perhaps a post so well crafted that it shows up on Reddit’s front page, will be enough to propel your game forward. The developer of Cleared Hot, for example, earned over 1,000 comments to his original post on /r/gaming, with many within the community praising the game and expressing their excitement about it.

A Desert Strike-like!

 

Similarly, in February 2024 Dark Lessons solo developer Robert Seidel published a post-mortem on his initial wishlist acquisition efforts. He mentioned that his posts had gone somewhat decently, but that he ran into a lot of challenges when promoting his project on some subreddits.

In the short term, upvotes and comments can be a good indicator of how well a post is performing. The more people interact with it, the more visibility the post will get - potentially reaching an even wider crowd. If you’re using your post as part of a wider promotional campaign, attaching a UTM link can also help you measure the campaign’s clickthrough rate and lead generation abilities.

At the same time, tracking your popularity across Reddit can be a challenge - especially since the platform won’t automatically notify you of mentions unless people tag your account.

If what you’re after is a more complete picture of how your game is doing on Reddit, take a look at our very own Coverage Bot! Integrating with Discord, the tool scours YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Reddit for mentions of your game, compiling thorough reports for you to review!

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In today's blog, we looked at how Reddit works, explored some of the most popular post types on the site, and gave you the basics you'll need to start promoting your indie game on the platform. As with anything marketing, you'll now need to adapt this approach to your own game. Visit different subreddits, interact with communities, and try unique combinations of content. Then, don't forget to visit our Discord and let us know what worked for you!

See you on the next one!

- Ashley