If you build it, he will come. It's a great line, but not a business plan.
Field of Dreams was about ghosts who already loved the game. Selling yours takes a lot more. I tried the Kevin Costner method — build it, polish it, ship it, wait on the sidelines — and stood there a good while, looking at a lot of corn.
Building the game is the fun part. It's also the easy part, being the only part you control. Then you ship and the outcome stops being yours: now it's up to strangers, and strangers have to find you before they can ignore you.
Having a game is good, having players is better
I thought my first game was good, blinded by love for my first creation — just like a parent would look at their child. I was hoping people would come in and play it over and over, but even a cursory check of the App Store showed me that I had a lot of similar games I was competing with. Why would someone pick mine instead of one of the others?
Reminder #1 — You have to stand out.
There's no bulletproof formula for getting found — anyone selling one is just selling. But there's table stakes: dull, laborious chores that won't guarantee anyone shows up, only guarantee they won't if you skip them.
Be findable
Your marketing's first reader is a robot: the store crawler, the link-preview bot. If the machine can't read you, no human gets the chance to. So you grind through the dull chores that make you legible to machines:
- Tune the store listing — the App Store runs its own search, so put the words people actually type into your title, subtitle, and keyword field, not the clever name you fell for.
- Serve real HTML — a page a crawler reads as words, not a blank JavaScript shell.
- Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console (and Bing's, which somehow still exists), then go back and check it actually got indexed.
- Add the invisible metadata — Open Graph tags for link previews, JSON-LD structured data, alt text, canonical URLs.
None of it is clever. All of it is tedious, and skipping any one of them quietly makes you invisible. I once spent an entire post teaching headless Chrome to read my own homepage. Riveting. But that is the front door.
Show up
Nobody's coming to your website, why would they? The people you want are already somewhere else, busy doing something else, so you go there and post, well past the point it feels worth it. I find this excruciating — shipping a build is comfortable; going "hey, look at this" on Instagram feels like me waving at a bus that already left. Do it anyway. Consistency is just persistence in a nicer shirt.
A little help from your friends
The one that works, and costs the most pride: ask people to play it. Most won't. A few will, and one of them will say something true and faintly wounding — the best sentence you'll hear all month. If they genuinely like it, ask them to tell one person. A human saying "try this" beats every algorithm ever shipped; you can't buy it or fake it, only earn it and then be brave enough to beg.
Reminder #2 — Put in the work if you want players.
So, did they come?
Mostly they did not. One game out, few sales to date, barely a ripple. Sounds like I've got even more work to do.
And that's the whole point. "Build it and they'll come" lets you believe the hard part ends at launch. Launch is where it starts. That field needs players, and yours are hidden in all that corn. RSS, if you'd like to watch me keep learning this the hard way.