Earlier than feels comfortable — months before launch, not weeks. Audiences accumulate slowly, and every marketing system rewards accounts and pages with history over ones that appeared yesterday.

Where does bug reporting fit into this?

Quietly underneath all of it. Whatever you ship — store page, jam build, full release — players will hit problems you can't reproduce, and most won't tell you. A lightweight reporting tool like Bugnet captures those crashes and reports with the context to fix them, which protects the reviews and momentum everything above depends on.

Planning Marketing Beats Across a Year

Quick answer: Indie marketing works as beats — discrete moments that earn attention (announcement, trailer, demo, festival, date reveal, launch) — connected by a steady low-effort content cadence. Plan a year backward from launch: place the big beats at festivals and milestones, keep one meaningful beat every 4-8 weeks, and let the connective tissue (clips, devlogs, posts) run on a sustainable weekly rhythm.

Indie marketing works as beats — discrete moments that earn attention (announcement, trailer, demo, festival, date reveal, launch) — connected by a steady low-effort content cadence. Plan a year backward from launch: place the big beats at festivals and milestones, keep one meaningful beat every 4-8 weeks, and let the connective tissue (clips, devlogs, posts) run on a sustainable weekly rhythm. That's the short version — the sections below get into the how, the why, and the mistakes worth dodging.

Beats are what algorithms and humans both remember

Attention responds to events, not presence: 'the demo is out' moves wishlists in ways three months of pleasant screenshots don't. The planning unit is therefore the beat — something with news value: announcement, first trailer, demo release, festival appearance, date announcement, preview/press wave, launch, then post-launch updates. Each beat is a spike; the campaign is the spike sequence.

Audit your pipeline for beat material: features worth revealing, milestones worth celebrating, partnerships worth announcing. Then ration them — two reveals in one week is one wasted reveal; the same pair spaced six weeks apart is two spikes.

Build the calendar backward and around fixed points

Start from launch (or target window) and walk back: press keys 2-3 weeks out, date announcement 2-3 months out, demo + biggest festival 3-6 months out, first trailer and page 6-18 months out. Then overlay the fixed external calendar — Next Fest cycles, your genre's showcase events, seasonal sales — and snap beats to them, because every festival is a beat with built-in distribution.

Leave deliberate gaps as slack: dev reality will move things, and a calendar with no give converts every delay into a public broken promise. The calendar serves the game; renegotiate it monthly.

The connective tissue, and the feedback loop

Between beats, run the sustainable cadence: a weekly clip or screenshot, devlog on a monthly-ish rhythm, community presence daily-ish — sized to your worst week, not your best. Its job is keeping channels warm so each beat lands on an audience that remembers you; channels resurrected only for beats convert like cold lists.

Close the loop quarterly: which beats moved wishlists (Steam's data tells you), which channels carried them, what the velocity between beats says about fatigue. The year-two calendar should be the year-one calendar corrected by evidence — most indies discover their audience lives in two channels and gleefully drop the other five.

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.