How to Cross-Promote With Other Indie Developers

Cross-promotion—indie developers with overlapping audiences helping promote each other—is a low-cost, effective marketing channel that taps the indie community's unusual willingness to support each other. Reaching the engaged audience of a developer whose players are predisposed to like your game, and vice versa, flows naturally from genuine relationships, making community connections a real marketing asset.

Overlapping audiences make cross-promotion effective

Cross-promotion works because of audience overlap: when two developers make games appealing to similar players, each one's audience is full of potential players for the other's game, so promoting each other reaches engaged, relevant, predisposed people rather than random strangers. This makes cross-promotion efficient—instead of reaching new audiences cold, you reach the engaged audience of a developer whose players already like the kind of game you make, who are therefore far more likely to be interested than an untargeted audience. Sharing each other's games, featuring each other to your respective audiences, bundling games that appeal to similar players, and other mutual promotion all tap this overlap, reaching relevant engaged players through each other's audiences at essentially no cost beyond the reciprocal effort. The relevance is the key: cross-promotion reaches players predisposed to interest because the audiences overlap, which is far more effective than broad untargeted promotion that reaches many irrelevant people, making cross-promotion a high-value channel that leverages audience overlap to reach the engaged, predisposed players each developer is trying to find.

The indie community's generosity and the genuine relationships that enable cross-promotion make it natural and sustainable. What makes cross-promotion especially accessible to indie developers is the indie community's unusual willingness to support each other, born of shared experience and the recognition that helping each other helps everyone, which means cross-promotion opportunities are abundant for developers who engage with the community. This generosity flows from and is built through genuine relationships with other developers—the connections formed by participating in the community, supporting others' work, and building real relationships rather than transactional ones. Developers who genuinely engage, support other developers' games, and build real relationships find that mutual promotion follows naturally, because the relationships create the willingness and the opportunities. This makes community relationships a marketing asset: the genuine connections you build become a network of mutual support where cross-promotion happens naturally, tapping the community's culture of helping each other. Cross-promotion is therefore most effective and sustainable when it flows from genuine relationships within the supportive indie community rather than cold transactional outreach—building real relationships with developers whose games appeal to similar players, supporting their work genuinely, and finding that mutual promotion follows from the relationships and the community's generosity. This is why engaging genuinely with the indie community is itself a marketing investment: it builds the relationships that enable the cross-promotion that reaches engaged, predisposed, relevant players at no cost, helping everyone involved find the audiences they're each trying to reach. Building genuine relationships with other indie developers and engaging with the community is not just good for its own sake but a sustainable, effective marketing channel.

Scope is a decision, not an accident

Almost every overscoped game got that way one reasonable addition at a time, with no single decision ever feeling like the mistake. The finish line recedes a little with each new feature, and because the project always feels nearly done, the developer rarely notices how far the goal has drifted until they're exhausted and the game still isn't out.

Treat scope as something you actively decide rather than something that happens to you. Write down what the finished game contains, make every addition a conscious trade against that, and keep most new ideas in a backlog where they belong — because a small game you finish beats a large one you abandon.

Measure before you optimise

Intuition about what's slow, what's confusing, or what's driving players away is usually wrong, and acting on it wastes effort on problems that don't matter while the real ones persist. The developers who improve their games efficiently are the ones who measure first — profiling performance, watching real sessions, capturing actual errors — and let the data set their priorities.

It's slower than trusting your gut, but it's the only approach that reliably improves the game instead of just changing it. Find the biggest real problem, fix that, and measure again, rather than optimising guesses.

The first impression is most of the battle

More players leave in the opening minutes than at any other point, which makes the first few minutes the highest-leverage stretch of the whole game — and also the part the developer can least see clearly, having played it a thousand times. What feels obvious to you is often confusing to someone seeing it fresh, and that gap quietly costs you players before they ever reach the good part.

Get the player into the interesting part fast, let them feel competent quickly, and watch first-time players go through the opening without helping them. Nobody quits a game they're enjoying, so making the early minutes land is most of the battle for retention.

Small and finished beats big and abandoned

A folder of impressive unfinished projects teaches far less than a single small finished one, because finishing is where the hardest and most valuable lessons live — the unglamorous final stretch of bug-fixing, polishing, and shipping that ambitious abandoned projects never reach. Each completed game, however modest, builds the finishing muscle and the confidence that make the next one achievable.

So resist the pull of the dream project until you've shipped a few small ones. Scope to what you can actually complete, finish it, and let the experience of shipping make your bigger ambitions realistic.

Trust behaviour over opinions

People are unreliable narrators of their own experience — they're polite, they rationalise, they suggest fixes that miss the real problem. What they do tells the truth that what they say obscures: where they hesitate, where they get stuck, what they ignore, where they quit. The most valuable feedback is usually the behaviour you observe, not the opinion you're offered.

This is why watching beats asking, and why real data about what players actually do beats any amount of speculation. When several people stumble at the same spot, that's a problem worth fixing, regardless of whether any of them mentioned it.

Cross-promotion with devs whose audiences overlap reaches engaged, predisposed players at no cost, enabled by the indie community's generosity. Build genuine relationships with other developers, and mutual promotion follows.