Quick answer: Other indies aren't competitors — players who buy one indie game buy dozens a year, and the dev next door has exactly the audience you want. The working formats: mutual Discord/newsletter shoutouts between adjacent games, Steam bundles, co-organized festival/showcase events, demo end-screen cross-links, and the daily-driver version: genuinely boosting each other's posts. Fit and reciprocity are the whole etiquette.
Other indies aren't competitors — players who buy one indie game buy dozens a year, and the dev next door has exactly the audience you want. The working formats: mutual Discord/newsletter shoutouts between adjacent games, Steam bundles, co-organized festival/showcase events, demo end-screen cross-links, and the daily-driver version: genuinely boosting each other's posts. Fit and reciprocity are the whole etiquette. That's the short version — the sections below get into the how, the why, and the mistakes worth dodging.
Why the math works
Indie audiences overlap heavily by taste cluster: the cozy-game buyer owns thirty cozy games; the roguelike player wishlists everything in the genre. A shoutout from an adjacent game's community is targeting no ad platform can sell you — pre-qualified, trust-carried, free. And it's symmetric: your audience is worth exactly the same to them, which makes deals easy.
Adjacency is the targeting science: close enough in taste that audiences transfer, different enough that you're not asking players to choose. 'Players who loved X also loved Y' is the relationship to engineer.
The format menu
Lightweight and immediate: trade announcement-channel shoutouts ('a game our community would love'), retweet/boost each other's launches, guest in each other's Discords for AMA-style events. Medium: Steam bundles (complete-the-set mechanics make these pure upside), demo end-screens or main menus cross-linking ('if you enjoyed this, check out...'), newsletter swaps. Heavyweight: co-organized genre showcases and themed sale events — groups of indies pooling audiences into something press covers.
Each format works best at a beat: time the shoutout to their launch week, the bundle to a seasonal sale, the showcase to a festival window. Cross-promotion multiplies existing momentum; it doesn't create motion from rest.
The relationship layer underneath
Effective cross-promo grows from genuine dev friendships — the people you trade feedback with, whose games you actually play. Start there: be useful in dev communities, playtest for others, celebrate launches you admire without an ask attached. The promotional asks then make themselves, and they come with the sincerity that audiences detect instantly.
Guard the currency: only promote games you'd recommend unpaid, keep frequency low enough that your endorsement retains meaning, and match magnitudes roughly (a 50k-member community and a 500-member one trade different things — acknowledge it openly). Your community's trust is the asset; spend it like it's yours, because it is.
Consistency compounds, virality doesn't
Every indie knows one game that blew up from a single tweet, and that story wrecks more marketing plans than it helps. Viral moments are lottery tickets. The reliable curve is slower: post regularly, get a little better each time, and let followers accumulate like interest.
Pick a cadence you can sustain on your worst week — one post, one clip, one devlog — and hold it for months. The audience you build that way actually shows up on launch day.
Talk where your players already are
The best channel isn't the biggest one; it's the one where people who like your genre already gather. A cozy-game TikTok audience, a niche subreddit, a genre Discord — a hundred genuinely interested people beat ten thousand passers-by every time.
Find three places your exact players hang out and become a regular, not a billboard. Contribute first, share your game second. Communities can smell the difference instantly.
The quiet work that protects all of this
Everything in this post gets undone by an unstable build. A great store page, a clever marketing beat, a perfect jam entry — none of it survives 'crashed twice, refunded'. Stability isn't a feature players praise, but it's the floor everything else stands on.
Give yourself visibility before you need it: crash reports with stack traces, a simple way for players to flag issues from inside the game, and a habit of fixing the top recurring error before adding anything new.
Putting it to work
Don't try to act on all of this at once. Pick the one change that costs you the least and pays the most this week, do it, and see what actually happens before reaching for the next.
Most of this rewards steadiness over intensity. A small improvement made every week, checked against how real players respond, outruns any single burst of effort — in this corner of game development and every other one.
Show up where your players already are, lead with the interesting thing, and keep the cadence.