I got asked a question a short while ago. “When should we start marketing our game”? The person asking the question had activities such as establishing a Steam page or starting social media communications in mind. However, marketing heavily pertains to all of the aspects of making video games. The answer to the question above is “before you start making the game”. Doing proper research and investing in the quality of the product is the safest way of securing success in the market. What do I mean by this?
It’s very easy to make a game that’s unique. While genres have been established for quite a while, adding a small twist or combining two types of gameplay can make all the difference. Let’s look at the Mount & Blade series. They combine TPP combat with tactical mechanics and a grand strategy. People love them (and imo Bannerlord has surpassed Warband in terms of gameplay). Or Crypt of The NecroDancer. Combining a roguelike with a rhythm game was a genius move and it landed them a collaboration with Nintendo a few years later, even though the game isn’t overly complex, and without its rhythm-based combat and movement, it would be quite primitive. But the combination works really well.
Why am I talking about the uniqueness? Because there’s no way in the world your game could compete against, say, The Witcher 3 if you don’t have millions of dollars and a superstar dev team. But you can make an RPG with mechanics and a style of its own – they can be previously unseen and enticing. Sure, you can overdo the uniqueness and end up with a game nobody is going to want to play. This decision is crucial for the development, is deeply tied to marketing, and needs to be made before the game is being made.
What if you don’t feel like making a unique combination of genres? You can focus on a great story, setting, or theme. Another idea is to make a game with a unique art style. When it comes to entering an unoccupied and unpopular niche, it may be a gamble, as there could be barely any potential customer base to purchase the game.
Now, onto the other thing. When you give a look at indie games that look well and are enjoyable, you’ll be hard-pressed to find many of them that didn’t perform well in the market. And here’s the thing that I’d like everyone to treat as the biggest takeaway from this article.
The quality of the game is one of the key things that translate to sales.
It boils down to communicating vessels. If your game looks well and plays nice, the assets you make and post on social media will be noticed by people and your peers. Then, you’ll be able to build a nice wishlist and trickle down some info about the game to make the hype bigger. A demo will perform well and get you even more wishlists and catch the attention of the press. Then, when the time for the EA/full release comes, you’ll have an easier time getting articles about your game published by media outlets and influencers will also be more keen to give the game a shot. By the end, you’ll come with a huge stack of cash in your hand that will allow you to live well for a while and work on your next big project.
If it were this easy, everyone would do that. However, one of the things that makes this approach and model hard to enact is the bias of the creator. Of course, who would want to admit that the chosen art style is kinda iffy and the gameplay is boring – nobody would want to do that to their own game. Keep in mind though that everybody else won’t hold back in that regard. And there are plenty of games that you’ll need to compete against. It’s always worth having someone, whether in-house or outside, who will be able to tell you whether your game looks and feels off. It’s always better to sort it out before the games go to the market and it’s your disappointed customers communicating that.
I do realise this article could leave you wanting more, as I haven’t yet answered the question – when to start communicating your game to the world, in the press, on social media and when to create the Steam page for it. Unfortunately, there are no concrete answers to these questions, as they’re all case-based. However, there’s one important thing that should influence your choice: after a year, usually, less than 10% of wishlists convert to sales. So you shouldn’t drag it out over a few years and you need to plan out when to conduct the press releases (tip – only at the most important milestones: announcement, demo release, release), social media (tip – it’s good to create the profiles early, so you can keep the slowly build a backlog of content and to be faster than people who’d be keen to create a false profile for your game/studio) and paid ads. So, you need to find a sweet spot.
If you’d like to hire me as a consultant or a full-fledged marketer for your game/studio, let me know at jakub@heapsagency.com. Thanks for reading, hope this article was helpful. Cheers!
Heaps Agency 