One thing I’m learning is that it is never too early to think about is Marketing. When I released Monster Face, I didn’t do any marketing beforehand and only showed very little content to small online circles. Monster Face didn’t sell well, but I consider it a success. I earned back what I put in, and I completed an entire project, from concept design all the way to release on a public platform. A lot of indies never hit the release stage, because it is so easy to become distracted by newer ideas, and unfinished projects get left behind. I finished what I started. I’m immensely proud of that.
This time around, I’m trying to use what I’ve learned and do better. That includes errors on the marketing front. I joined some online indie communities, attended some gatherings of my fellow developers, handed out some custom-made business cards, kept a development blog, and made an effort to nurture contacts I had made in the business. Most recently, I conducted a survey. Here’s why:
From my work with other studios, it had become habit and routine to develop for multiple platforms at once. I hadn’t even heard the term “Marketing Plan” until recently, so I didn’t know the pitfalls of that kind of general development plan. I only saw the up-side, which was being able to release to multiple platforms simultaneously. Surely, that would double, or even triple sales. Right? Well, it didn’t, and I didn’t understand why until I learned a little about marketing. To be fair, marketing wasn't our job. That's what publishers are supposed to do. They often don't, or promote themselves rather than the games they publish. Devs should always know how to market their own games. These are your babies. Claim responsibility for sending them into the world with the best possible chance to succeed.
I happened to see a link Alex Erhardt shared on facebook to his website www.gametomarket.com. What I found might as well have been titled “Things I wish I had known when making my first game”. I eagerly absorbed everything it had to teach me, and was prompted to immerse myself in dozens of similar guides and articles, both from the game development world and finances and general entrepreneurship. One question I was presented with that was the most pressing at the time was “How exactly do you plan to be paid for your game?” That’s easy. I want to charge up front for PC and consoles, and for mobile I could make the game free, but include some advertisements and maybe an option to watch an ad video for an extra life when you die. But then something occurred to me that I had never thought of before: What kind of payment method does my target audience prefer? And crap! Who exactly is my target audience?
I had described my target audience in my design doc as males ages 15 to 45. Most women may not find the game’s theme appealing, and parents may want to consider not letting their kids play it if they believed they might be receiving the wrong message. That was a very general and easy assumption of my audience. I still couldn’t picture exactly who would play my game.
Australian dev Matt Hall (Crossy Road) has an interesting method for determining target audience. He makes his games for one single person. When important design questions come up, he asks “Is this what our target person would like or dislike, or even care about?”. That seems like a solid approach, so I did that. I created a fictional person named Ryan, that I thought would be most likely to identify with my game’s main character, Arpy. I went to the lengths of researching cultural statistics from different countries and American states, cross referenced interests, and did everything to make Ryan as detailed as possible. Ryan was as fully fleshed-out as any of the plot-vital NPCs I used to create for my tabletop campaigns. Ryan was ready.
Ryan was not the kind of person who buys video games at all.
Back to the drawing board. Hey, you know who would love this game? Ethan from the webcomic CTRL+ALT+DEL (www.cad-comic.com). I’ll make it for him. He definitely buys video games. I stuck with this for a while, and when design questions came around, I asked myself if Ethan would be enthusiastic or disgusted by choices I was about to make. This is why Rocket Potato has so many explosions. But, when learning about games marketing, I realized that I had no real solid intel on how Ethan actually prefers to pay for games. I couldn’t ask him. He’s a comic character. I could take guesses or maybe write Tim Buckley and hope he indulges me, but that when it comes down to it, asking just one single person is no way to get the scope of information you really need to market a product. So, I had to redefine my target audience. Again.
The traditional core gamer is male and between 18 and 35 years old. They have the most freetime, and the best hardware on average. Ok, let’s go with that. Rather than going into more detail or narrowing down that group, I took that as a guideline without excluding other gamers, and did what may be my smartest marketing move to date. I went to places where gamers hang out, and I conducted a survey. Why aren’t more indies doing this? I have no idea, but it was the best and fastest marketing information specifically for my needs that I had ever gotten. Ask the players. It’s really a no-brainer.
After 2 days of running the survey, I have already learned much more than I had anticipated. As I write this, the survey is still ongoing, and if you would like to help, you can do so at Goo.gl.
I look forward to sharing my finding in my next entry. Stay tuned!
