You have no budget. What you have instead is your own time, which feels free right up until you notice you've spent three weeks making TikToks and gained the attention of eleven people, four of whom are bots and one of whom is your mum.
That's the trap. "Free marketing" is almost never free. It's labour you're paying for in evenings, and most of the advice out there quietly ignores the hourly rate. This piece sorts the tactics by how much reach you get for the effort, and it's honest about the fact that a couple are worth it, most are not, and one thing matters more than all of them combined.
The one thing worth doing before anything else
Before you post a single thing anywhere, can you describe your game in one sentence that makes a stranger understand it and want it?
Not a tagline. Not a mood. A sentence that tells someone what they'll be doing. "A farming game where the crops fight back" does more work than any trailer, any devlog, any thread. If you can't do this, everything downstream leaks. You'll spend effort driving people to a page that doesn't land, which is like drilling a hole in the bottom of a bucket and then buying more water.
This is the highest-return activity available to you and it costs nothing but honesty. Most games that struggle to get noticed aren't badly made. They're illegible. The person scrolling past can't tell in two seconds what the game is, so they don't stop.
Get the sentence right and it feeds everything else: your store page, your screenshots, the first line of every message you send. Get it wrong and no amount of posting saves you.
So write it. Then test it on someone who doesn't love you and isn't obligated to be kind. If they say "oh, like X but Y," you've won. If they say "cool," you have not.
Sort every tactic by effort-to-reach
Here's the frame that cuts through the noise. For any marketing thing you're considering, ask two questions: how many of the right people will see it, and how many hours does it cost to make? Then be brutal.
Most "free" tactics score badly on both axes. Running a Twitter account where you post daily gains you a slow trickle of followers, most of whom are other developers doing the same thing to each other. It feels like marketing because it's tiring. Tiring and effective are different things.
The tactics actually worth your hours share one trait: they put your one-sentence game in front of people who are already looking for something to play, in a place built for discovery. Everything else is you shouting into a room that's also full of people shouting.
The few free things that actually pay off
Your store page. This is where nearly all your buying decisions get made, and it works while you sleep. Every hour here compounds. Your capsule image, your first two screenshots, your short description — these get seen by people the platform sends you for free. Fix this before you touch social media. We wrote a whole piece on how to write a Steam page that actually converts because it's that disproportionate.
Wishlists, early and deliberately. Wishlists are the one metric that quietly decides how much free visibility the platform gives you at launch. Building them is slow but it's the good kind of slow — it accrues. If you're starting from zero, getting your first 100 wishlists is a concrete place to begin rather than a vague ambition to "build an audience."
A short, honest trailer. Not a cinematic. Fifteen to thirty seconds that shows the actual game doing the actual thing your sentence promises. One good trailer outperforms a hundred posts because it's the asset everyone else reuses when they cover you.
Getting on discovery platforms and curated lists. Being findable where people go to find games is the whole job. Playkora's games directory exists for exactly this reason, and it's worth making sure your game is present and correctly described wherever players browse by genre or mood.
Reaching out to creators who play your kind of game. Not the biggest ones. The mid-sized ones whose audience overlaps with your exact game. A single relevant creator playing your game reaches more of the right people than a month of your own posting. This is where our creator directory helps you skip the guesswork of who actually covers your genre. Personalise the message, keep it short, and lead with the one sentence.
The things that feel productive and mostly aren't
Daily social posting. Devlogs nobody subscribed for. Answering every Reddit thread in the hope someone clicks your signature. Making a Discord server before you have anyone to put in it, then watching it sit at three members like an empty restaurant with the lights on.
None of these are useless in principle. They're just expensive in the only currency you have, and they pay out slowly if at all. A devlog series is genuinely great — if you already have an audience who wants the behind-the-scenes. Starting one to build that audience is a years-long play, and you have a game to ship.
The honest version of the advice is this: do these only if you enjoy them enough that the hours don't feel like a cost. If posting is fun for you, post. Just don't file it under marketing and expect it to move numbers.
When "it depends" is the real answer
Which tactics matter changes with your game, and pretending otherwise is how generic advice happens.
If your game is intensely visual — a striking art style, a satisfying physics toy, a screenshot that stops a thumb — then short video clips genuinely can spread on their own, and the effort-to-reach maths flips in your favour. If your game's appeal is mechanical or slow-burning, video will undersell it and you're better off leaning on the store page and creators who'll actually play for twenty minutes.
If you're a solo developer, protect your time ferociously; the game shipping well is your best marketing and half-finished promo work delays that. If you're a small team with someone who genuinely likes talking to people, that person doing outreach is worth more than all of you posting.
And if your game is hard to describe in one sentence, that's not a marketing problem to solve later. It's a design signal to sit with now.
Start here
Write the sentence. Today, before you build a content calendar or design a Discord banner or record anything.
Get it in front of five people who don't owe you kindness and watch whether they get it. When they do — when a stranger hears it and immediately wants to play — you'll know exactly what every screenshot, trailer and message needs to say. Everything else in marketing is just delivery. The sentence is the thing being delivered, and it's the one part no budget can buy for you.
Common questions
How long before launch should I start marketing?
As soon as you have something showable and that one-sentence pitch nailed. Wishlists accrue slowly, so the store page is the earliest thing worth having live. You don't need a finished game to have a findable page — you need a clear one.
Do I really need a Steam page that early?
Yes, because it's the single asset that works without you and collects wishlists over months rather than days. An empty or vague page early is still better than a great page that goes up two weeks before launch with no time to gather momentum.
Is paid marketing worth it once I can afford some?
Only after the free fundamentals convert. Paying to drive traffic to a page that doesn't turn visitors into wishlists just means you're paying to prove the page is broken. Fix legibility first, then spend.
What if I'm terrible at self-promotion?
Then lean on the tactics that don't require a public personality: a sharp store page, a clean trailer, and short direct messages to relevant creators. None of those need you to be charismatic on camera. They need you to be clear.