Category: Marketing/Business

With the World Cup happening this month, there are bound to be some soccer games made to take advantage of the attention it brings. While most will be terrible, and many will be nothing more than “swipe to take a penalty kick” games, a few will be good.

Of course, without the official FIFA license that EA has locked in until 2022, even good soccer games will have a hard time getting noticed without something unique to offer, such as zombies or combat or familiar faces such as Nintendo’s Mario or Capcom’s Mega Man. Otherwise, it seems only Konami has a serious contender in terms of official licenses. It probably isn’t likely that other publishers, let alone independent game developers, will be able to negotiate a deal to offer any official content in their own games.

No one told indie studio Team Football, who managed to secure the official license to England national team for their game Official England Football (which is only available in England). The small startup also managed to work out a licensing deal with France, Japan, China, and Brazil, and Official Brazil Soccer is supposed to be available around the world, although I couldn’t find it at the time of this writing on my Android tablet.

Many aspiring indie developers start out realizing that games don’t appear fully-formed, that someone had to make the games in the first place, which means it is possible that they can make games. Suddenly, they are excited by the possibility, and some get burned when they bite off more than they can chew.

Eventually, they stop deluding themselves into thinking they can make the the best MMO RPG/FPS/RTS EVAH! They internalize the lesson that they need to be “realistic.” The common advice is to cut down on your scope, to recognize that you can only do so much by yourself and with your limited resources.

But being realistic is also a good way to sell yourself short. You may have the capability to achieve something fantastic, but if you assume you can only accomplish something mediocre, you’ll stop before you should.

Granted, some indies have access to different levels of resources. Some managed to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars, others inherited, some borrowed, some are leveraging income from their day jobs, and some are struggling to make ends meet. Some have a team of talented individuals, others toil away in solitude.

Team Football benefited from Birmingham’s Entrepreneurs for the Future incubator, funding from Creative England, and some good contacts in the industry.

But they showed what’s possible if you go out and chase after what you want. An indie game development studio with official licenses for their sports games is able to stand out among the crowd, and in a heavily-saturated market, getting that attention is precious.

Are you setting supposedly-realistic expectations for yourself, or are you imagining what’s really possible?

A few years ago, I read that search engine optimization (SEO) wasn’t just a way to make sure Google and Yahoo! can find your website. iTunes is also a search engine, so if you had a podcast, you know where your content needed to be listed.

Similarly, YouTube is a search engine. Are you optimizing your marketing efforts there?

You have two opportunities here: leverage existing channels and publish your own.

Leveraging Existing Channels

There are quite a few channels focused on games, and some of these channels have dedicated viewers.

In the article Advertising Through YouTubers, Kevin Harwood makes the case for introducing your game through one of these influential channels by endorsing them so they review and play your game for everyone to see.

I was a bit turned off by the “let me show you the numbers” part of the article:

It would be completely within reason to pay $250 per video made and commission four 20-minute game play videos.

100,000 viewers

$1000

even if only .5% of the viewers go forward and purchase your game for $30 on Steam (you earn only $20)

You have earned $40,000 in revenue

No this is not a “get rich quick article”. I’m simply showing the ROI on a basic initiative like this.

Now, this article was not published years ago. The race to the bottom in game pricing has already occurred. Most indies are not selling their game for $30 on Steam, and I’m sure a 0.5% conversion is one of those things that doesn’t just happen.

Still, I don’t think the basic principle is off. YouTube videos are bite-sized content that your prospective customers are actively searching for. The same may or may not be said for your game’s website. If you can do more than merely send a link to a channel’s owner, you have a better chance of your game getting featured and in a positive light.

Harwood suggests incentives to encourage the reviewer to play the game with a goal of achieving some level. It would be terrible if your intricate strategy game was reviewed by someone who didn’t seem very invested in trying and misunderstood some key aspect of it. Saying something like “If your playthrough gets past the Cow Level, you can get three free copies of the game to giveaway to your viewers” means that your exciting and awe-inspiring Cow Level has a better chance of being featured than if you merely hope the reviewer gets that far and discovers it.

Obviously you can’t control how other people will enjoy your game, and if you pay to get your game endorsed, there are even laws governing disclosure. See the FTC’s 2013 PDF dotcom Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising.

The goal isn’t to deceive people into thinking that an influential reviewer loves your game. The goal is for the influential reviewer to give your game a fair chance, and you want to put in some work to make sure that your game is shown in the best light.

If you do nothing but spam emails to these video reviewers, having no relationship with them in the first place, you are just another faceless game developer. It is random chance if your game is reviewed in the first place, and if it is, who knows how the reviewer will play it.

Imagine if a game such as Mario Kart 8 was reviewed by someone who didn’t know that you can use the items that you pick up on the track. That is, this person picks up banana peels, or mushrooms, or a boomarang plant, but didn’t know to press the button that actually makes use of them. One of the key features of the game is completely ignored in the review, and suddenly the game looks somewhat flawed and confusing.

So no, getting your game featured on popular YouTube channels is not a guaranteed way to make your game popular. You still have work to do, and Harwood has some creative ideas for making it work out well for everyone involved.

Publishing Your Own

If, on the other hand, you want to make your own videos to similarly take advantage of YouTube as a search engine, there is a separate article on how to make videos for games by Alconost co-founder Kirill Kliushkin you would want to see.

My favorite piece of insight was how scripts are timed so that voiceovers are matched to on-screen events. I also really appreciate how the entire process is purpose-driven. The first question they ask is “Why do you need a video?” and the process flows from the answer.

Kliushkin covers teasers vs trailers vs in-game video intros, scripting and storyboards, and the importance of professional-quality voiceovers, among many other topics. Even if you plan on hiring someone else to make the videos for you, this article seems like a good primer on the basic things you need to keep in mind to create the right video for your marketing needs.

When I talk about making apps for Android, the question I invariably get, occasionally with shock or disdain, is “Why not make apps for the iPhone/iPad/my precious device?”

To be fair, I tend to bias against what’s popular.

But not in an obnoxious way. I not that guy who insists on not having a television and makes sure to tell everyone each chance he gets. And, I’m not a counter-culture activist consumer. I run GNU/Linux, but I do so on a Dell laptop. While I don’t shop at Walmart, I do shop at Target. I make games for GNU/Linux, but I also port them to Windows because it is easy to do.

I just get suspicious when there is a rush to own a piece of something, such as the iPad, or the original iPhone before it, or the iPod before. Camping out to be the first to own a piece of consumer electronics that will be patched and/or obsolete within months is not for me. The same goes for new game consoles or games. I can wait.

I am very clearly not an early adopter, nor am I all that interested in owning an Apple product. I was fairly happy with my Linux-based computing at home, and the idea of buying something I couldn’t tweak or configure bothered me. Of course, the idea that it “just worked” and didn’t need configuration appeals to a lot more people, so Apple has been very successful.

Eventually, I got a a smartphone. It was an Android device, an HTC Evo Shift II. It had a slide-out keyboard, which meant I could text and type easily without needing to learn some gesture-based input. It was bulkier, but I never had to worry about buying an external case for it. I liked it, although eventually I started running out of memory for the thing, and that’s when I learned about how fragmented the Android market was. Also, I ran into the problems with the U.S. market in that my phone is tied to the carrier and not just a device that I can plug the carrier’s SIM card into. That means updates to this phone’s OS were never going to happen unless I jumped through a bunch of hoops.

I now have a Samsung Galaxy S4, but I kept the Shift because when it is connected to my wireless, it’s still a relevant computing device. Plus, I could use it to test any apps I make for Android.

So now I have two Android devices. No, wait, I have a third: the Google Nexus 7 tablet that my wife got me for Christmas last year, my first tablet if you don’t count the EXOPC Slate I got after GDC 2011. That’s three different Android-based devices that I can use myself as well as use as test devices for apps I create.

Android today has a much larger marketshare (so much for biasing against what is popular), but it is common knowledge that iOS apps average more revenue for developers than Android apps. The thinking is that people who are willing to spend the Apple premium are also willing to pay for apps, and the numbers getting reported tend to indicate it is true.

Apparently if someone switches from iOS to Android, it is news. For major app releases, it is very common for the iOS version to be released before the Android version, if a port comes at all. I wonder how Microsoft feels being the Linux of mobile in this regard. If the app gets updated, it is possible that the Android version will lag behind, or have an unnatural UI, or will be otherwise inferior. Now the trend seems to be changing so that Android-first is becoming more common, but not everyone is happy.

The Fallacy of Android First documents one developer’s experience with trying to go Android first. Emu is a messaging app, and apparently Dave Feldman found that Android’s fragmentation was still an issue and the development tools were not as robust or stable as Apple’s. The larger potential audience doesn’t always translate into more users of your app, especially once you take into account backwards compatibility.

Feldman says:

Running a startup is all about learning. This has been a huge lesson for us, one I wish we’d learned faster…but perhaps our experience will help others to make a more informed decision. Android’s flexibility, and its greater strength in certain markets, still make it a far better platform for certain types of product. But it’s a difficult road, and best to travel with your eyes open.

He links to Steve Cheney’s post Why Android First is a Myth from last October which similarly describes a more complex development experience for startups developing on Android, especially those who rely on venture capital.

All that said, what’s it look like for games?

iOS is still dominant in terms of revenue earnings for developers, and if you are selling apps instead of doing a free-to-play model, Apple has demonstrated that they have paying customers. Plus, there’s very little variation and customization, which means you don’t have to do nearly as much work to ensure your game will work on an iOS-based device, and when you do, you have a significant chunk of the market.

Google announced cross-platform Google Play Game Services so that developers can create apps for both Android and iOS more easily. In fact, Google is using services to provide new capabilities without a need to fragment the userbase more than necessary. So, it is getting better there. And with a F2P model, more potential users means you don’t have to worry about how stingy your players are.

But is it really that hard to release simultaneously? If you use a library like libSDL or an engine like Unity, you can have a single code-base that ports more or less seamlessly.

In any case, for my next game, I’m currently wondering if not having an iOS device and a way to develop for it is going to hurt me. I’m looking into my target market to find out if my convenience of using devices I already own to develop the app will coincidentally line up with their own needs, but more and more I’m thinking that I will need to invest in some Apple hardware if I am going to be relevant to my customers.

Do you release for iOS first, Android first, or simultaneously? What has your experience been?