With the rapid growth of the digital game industry, publishing a game has become easier and faster than in any other period in history. More and more students, programmers, and artists have decided to join the game industry. Although the number of games is briskly increasing, most of the indie games in the past few years have flopped, and the developers usually lost a lot of money. At the same time, as a new graduate student from the Game Design program, I can heartily feel the pressure of finding an entry-level job in the game industry in the U.S. Now, game companies are seeking talented candidates who can do multiple roles and have more work experience. Thus, many of the students who recently graduated from college decided to go for a higher education or spend a few years on their own game projects. I want to help the indie game community develop successful games. To accomplish this goal, this paper will share effective methods to develop digital marketing skills as well as methods to build connections with players. In addition, the burst of the independent game (indie game) bubble has become a non-negligible issue in the market, the demand and the flooding number of games are totally unbalanced and it caught my attention. In 2014, 40% of the indie games bought on Steam did not get played, and this number doubled in 2016. (Vogel J, 2014) Reporting the unstable indie game market issues and finding solutions for developers will be the key parts of this paper. To facilitate this research, I will be interviewing different indie game studio cofounders as well as delving into existing publications of indie game research.

The paper will be divided into three parts: 1) The overview of the game market in the past decade, the status of the indie game market, and the influences of video game programs at different institutions. 2) Review of the digital game promotion platforms, and the introduction of major game festivals. 3) Case studies and interviews with the co-founders of various indie game studios like Fullbright, thatgamecompany, Noodlecake and Die Gute Fabrik.

Overall, the successful indie developers gave suggestions to other developers such as: actively attending game events, keep their design goal small, build connections with other potential investors, players at events/online forums.