A quick look at marketing results for folks who realize you need more than just a great game

News & General Discussion
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It’s often debated around here. One camp that firmly believes you only need a “great game”… like something really way above average (I guess in production value and possibly the actual gameplay too). Another camp that believes even the very best games can still die unknown (unless they are marketed).

Here is an example of how one company applied a little marketing effort to a mobile game that was already out there on the market. And increased the number of weekly downloads by almost 15x… in less than a month.

Of course, the other lesson here is that it’s never too late to do some marketing. If a game is just sitting out there barely known… and you believe it really is a game players would enjoy… you can always breathe new life into it by putting some effort into marketing. And for the vast majority of people who will be encountering it for the very first time as a result… it’s a new game to them. :slight_smile:

Just thought some of you might find this interesting.

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its mahjong though… how many mahjong games exist?

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About 57 million, the last time I checked.

Too bad all the probably-interesting changes they describe are in Chinese. But it does make the point nonetheless.

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OK now you need to show a great game that failed :smile: although that’s going to be a matter of opinion…

From what I’ve seen, it’s not that great games succeed without marketing, it’s that they tend to generate marketing amongst users, so they’re self-propelling to some extent. But they still the word to spread somehow. It’s not like each customer is identifying it as a great game and buying it, but when it passes the eye of someone with a little bit of influence, who recognises its quality, it gets going, whereas a crappier game does not.

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Additionally, if you can create a great game AND have a lot of time/budget left for marketing, I don’t think many people around here would try to argument against using as much marketing as possible.

But when time and budgets are constrained, something got to give. I think the point most people are making that there is little point in trying to market a turd like hell. Some early adopters might bite, the negative feedback will then start to make marketing gains more and more expensive.
When the foundation, your game itself, is shaky, there is no point in trying to build a large “marketing-building” on top of it.

Whereas, as @Billy4184 points it out, a good game that gets positive feedback from users can actually make up for bad marketing somewhat.
Its still a little bit os a risk just putting a well built foundation out there and hope for the community to build the marketing on top of it, but I would say its still less risky than drawing too much attention to your turdy game with overspending on marketing. It will most probably make just as little as the good game wihtout marketing, maybe even less. And it will damage your brand/name forever. things do not dissapear on the net.

“Isn’t this game from that developer that put out this god awful threes clone that was hyped like mad last year?” might not be the reaction you want from your potential customers every time you put out a new game.

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Great points guys. I agree with it all more or less. The main thing I was going after here is to show that even if you do make a great game (which of course we all know that is a very subjective thing… to one person that means something A-like and to me it is a game that is just a lot of fun to play period)… you shouldn’t just throw it out there and call it done.

From participating in these forums the past few years my impression is there are many people who do believe all you need is the game. Period. And I agree it certainly can work. You may get hyped up by Unity themselves or some other influential person may cover it.

I just think you should not rely on that because the more time passes, the more Indie dev teams grow in size, the more the tools progress and the more people (all of us) gain experience working with these tools there will be more and more high quality games released.

It’s already to the point (and has been for years) where the top YouTubers and sites can only cover a tiny very tiny percentage of the games released in a given week. They’ve mentioned that over the past few years. So it is important not to confuse a game performing badly in sales with a bad game period.

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@ sorry didn’t intend to ignore your reply. If I remember, the next time I stumble across a great game that is basically unheard of I will tell you. The fact is this happens all of the time for gamers. Someone will find a game that was released even many years ago that just never got any coverage despite being a very well done game.

If you are a gamer this has probably happened to you firsthand. Haven’t you ever stumbled across a game while searching for a different game… and thought how did I never know about this? This game is awesome! And sure that act of stumbling discovery can create a micro wave of awareness for the game.

Maybe a gamer community out there where someone shares their find and results in a large percentage of their members checking it out. Bringing in dozens of new sales. But it’s not like these gamers exist just to market peoples’ games for them. They have better things to do then head to their FB and Twitter and start posting about the game they discovered. Sure it does happen sometimes. Even when it does the average gamers circle of influence is tiny. And going viral is most unlikely.

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"I COULD go to the store to get some milk, but what if the guy at the counter is a member of Isis? Even if he isn’t he is probably a supporter of Donald Trump. If I am lucky, milk will be on sale but most likely… it won’t be.

I don’t think most people would argue against buying milk at the store, but for people like me, the $0.12 of gas to get there is just too expensive. Regardless of the fact that I don’t have a car, nor do I have a license. But still.

If you can get lucky, you can get a buddy to buy Milk for you, you can even give him the money, but if he’s a true friend you shouldn’t have to.

Besides. Buy enough Milk and you’re drinking crazy amounts of growth hormones anyway."

…

The POINT of the OP was this:

Success of a sales campaign is based solely on marketing. Product quality doesn’t sell anything. What do you call a gem that nobody knows about, that nobody tells anybody about? Mmmhmm. Hidden treasure. A Secret.

The burden for those who wish to refute this is this:

If you even know about a game in the first place, then by definition someone marketed it.

The place where I see people getting mixed up is they want to turn this into a good vs. evil argument, where marketing is selling out and all that nonsense. Hey. Maybe don’t be so judgy of folks who actually want money from games? It’s one thing to be unable to monetize anything, but there’s no need to go poke people who are making money. If there’s one thing the market has indicated, it’s clear: There’s room for everybody. Instead of informal conjecture and convos with imaginary strawmen… try to make a game and put it out there.

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Cannot speak of what others mean by their words, but in my case, I am just trying to defend against the “Marketing > a good product” vibe in the OP a little bit.

Sure, marketing has its place. Sure, if you have the money to invest in marketing AND a good product, go for it. Sure, we could probably discuss for days if it is a good idea to cut out some of the development budget meant to make the product better to improve your marketing campaign.

But the sole fact is: Trying to market a bad product with all your might is even more pointless than not market a good product.
As others have said, in the latter case you might at least get some word of mouth marketing for free, and you will not damage your brand like you do in the former case.

I am not judging about people approaching games as a business. If you can get more revenue from your product by investing more into marketing, hey, brilliant! I am happy for you.
But trying to sell an inferiour product is bad even from a business perspective. It might turn out some nice shortterm RoI, but will quickly fail to sell once people found out its a scam. Why even market it if your only hope to make good money with it is early adopters that spend their money carelessly and have too much money to ask for a refund?

I am really not judging this as a customer here. But come on, your product needs to meet at least some minimum quality requirements to survive in the market. Marketing cannot help against the product getting a bad rep.

So really, if we are talking about “You might need a good product, but you will ALSO need good marketing to sell that product in numbers without relying on luck”, I totally agree. But “Marketing > a good product” is just bollocks on all levels.

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Great games don’t need any promotion: they sell well trough word of mouth alone. They also generate a lot of free publicity which drives sales. The problem is that 99.9% of games are not great and If you don’t push them then they will be buried in a pile of gray mediocrity.

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@gian-reto-alig I read my initial post again and am not sure which part is coming across like I’m recommending creating shovelware and focusing hard on marketing?

Of course the game needs to be good. It may even need to have exceptional production value. That all depends on the target market and the things that are most importan to them. If you’re making a game that kind of seems like a modern AAA military shooter was your intention and for that audience… of course you better have some pretty darn good production value in the game. If you’re making games targeting people who love Dwarf Fortress or text adventures then clearly that is a much lower priority.

There is no one size fits all solution because ultimately it depends on what your audience values the most. Do they place the most value on high quality graphics, music, sound, voice overs… the works? If so the game better have them. Do they place the most value on simple fun gamplay? If so the game better have that and production values can be dropped as needed in order to get the core experience the players value. Do they want puzzles that rack their brains for hours on end? Again that is where the focus should be. Everything else can take a back seat.

I definitely agree the game has to be a good solid game. It has to be what the audience actually wants. But this is a very different thing than actually reaching the audience. The modern distribution systems can help a lot of course. They get some number of eyeballs to your game whether you did anything else or not. But still these are different things in the business of game dev.

It’s like anything else. I can start a computer repair shop and provide an exceptional value. Does that mean I will have a thriving business? Or should I actually invest some money and time into promoting it so people know my business exists?

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Anyway… it was a good discussion of different views. It could be I am completely wrong. I am just now gearing up to do the Indie thing. In my mind, marketing is every bit as important as the actual game development so I am focusing equal time on these two things.

Still I think there is some good value in the case study linked in the first post. Someone might get an idea from it.

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@GarBenjamin , I do believe that there’s a ‘threshold’ of popularity you have to get past and it’s not always going to happen with simply releasing the game and waiting. You either have to market it yourself to some extent or get it in front of someone who can (like some youtube personality). But that’s where the similarity ends - in my book, any game that has failed to make a profit while still achieving tens of thousands of downloads either has a serious flaw or entered the market with a severe handicap, such as being released at the same time as a AAA studio released their own take on the genre.

Mass marketing does help to some extent, but it doesn’t save anyone if the game is not great. Crytek no doubt had plenty of money to market Ryse yet the game failed and pretty much bankrupted them. It was a fantastic looking game, cutting edge graphics/animation, and pretty fun for a while - but lacked story and was too repetitive (from what I heard). It was just not up to par in every department.

When you hear about games like Assassin’s Creed Unity, people think that the fact that it was bursting with bugs means it was a badly designed game. It was not, it simply had bugs. You fix the bugs and the game is bought and enjoyed.

(Yeah these are AAA examples but I think they’re still useful - these guys have no lack of funding or knowledge in marketing)

So imo as long as you do a minimum of marketing, the rest really is taken care of by the quality of the game. And it’s just not worth it in a lot of cases to spend time and effort marketing something that you can drag along for a while but just won’t gain traction. I think an indie should allocate a certain amount of time and effort to it, and if it doesn’t work move on. It’s likely the only thing propping it up is the marketing gusto, and if you factor in the costs of your time, it’s probably even worse than before.

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@Billy4184 I agree with that for sure. If you’ve done some marketing and the game has tens of thousands of downloads / plays and just isn’t taking on any life of its own it probably never will happen. If the marketing is profitable enough to keep doing it then fine but definitely look at the game itself and see if there is some reason it is not taking off.

AAA are great examples. These are often well-established companies with well-known brands and yet they put what maybe 50% of their total game budget into marketing? I am thinking if they need to do that…

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@GarBenjamin , well, I do think there’s a difference between indies and AAA on that point. Fact is that once you get to real professional quality with tens of millions budget, and you’re fighting for the tiny spot at the top of the hill, you really need to market the hell out of it to maintain your spot. It’s like professional sports, at the top end they spend an incredible amount of time, money and effort to achieve not much more than they would otherwise - but as long as it’s enough, it’s worth it.

For indies, I don’t think they operate in the same kind of market. Your competitors are people that often fail in the fundamentals (and probably so do you!) so it’s much more important to focus on basic good quality and decent marketing.

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It’s possible but I am approaching it like my competition is better at every single thing than I am from design to development to marketing and already established etc everything. I think going in with that mindset I can carve out a tiny segment of my target audience.

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This isn’t something really specific to games but just in general. It’s all about raising awareness among the people who might be likely to download, play, purchase, talk about, share etc.

*** If people do not know your game exists, it is not going to sell, period, no matter how good it is. ***

There is an approach called “publish and pray” where you just make the thing and cross your fingers that people will find it. Or similarly, “build it and they will come”. Well, that might’ve been more true in pre-internet days of retail sales and such where finding product was much more a matter of being local to where it is distributed and advertised. Now when people shop online or on any device app store, they’re basically bypassing that and going “national”, so it doesn’t matter where you are located. So no longer can you say, I’m going to build my gaming outlet in the middle of a neighborhood where really game-oriented people live. It’s no longer “location location location”. Now it’s a matter of you having to find ways to create awareness in people who could be scattered all over the place.

Now, you could be passive about this, and you could say well, my game is good - “a good product sells itself”. There is something to that. Sometimes good stuff is self evident. And IF that product gets in front of the right people they might lap it up and get all excited about it and share about it and build a community around it and get into third-party add-ons and all sorts of ecosystem stuff. BUT the core product or service has to be pretty good or appeal in some way for that to happen. I think if you rely ONLY on word of mouth that way, it means you are letting people discover your game somewhat ‘by accident’. That might not be a terrible strategy. I mean, lets say you put it on Apple’s app store and somehow someone finds it and features it, or it gets a lot of reviews, or whatever, suddenly it springs into notoriety. Ok so you got sort of lucky. Or you happen to make it available on a game console and there’s a game app store and somehow enough people stumble upon it and gradually it grows a “reputation”. Ok, fair enough. Sometimes things “go viral” quite organically and not even necessarily for intended reasons. And maybe that is enough to really make your game a success, or what you consider a success. I mean, look at e.g. flappy bird and others, probably zero marketing, relied purely on being sorted from the massive competition but people stumbling upon it and developing word of mouth or social proof (reviews etc).

But, there is also a way to go about this that is PROACTIVE, where you are being somewhat more smart about getting sales. You don’t WAIT for people to stumble upon your game, you MAKE them aware of it. You’re actually using your smarts to figure out who the people are that might be receptive to your product, where they hang out, how they might become aware your product exists, what needs they might have that you address, etc. So this requires some research and finding out who your audience is, or potentially is. So maybe you find out there’s a cool youtube channel that features your kind of game and they’d lap it up and share it with their audience, or maybe there’s a blogger somewhere you write about this stuff and would love to do a feature, or maybe there’s a news website for indie games, or whatever… where would people hang out/live. This is you taking it back to finding the right ‘neighborhood’ where relevant, hungry gameplayers or influencers are hanging out and then asking yourself how you can get in front of either them or their audience. And there’s a whole level of marketing strategy to appealing to those who have their own audience - e.g. guest blogging, or being reviewed by a hot gaming channel or whatever, which can be more powerful than just trying to appeal to the final end user directly. That’s because you’re tapping into loyalty and trust that’s already developed among a refined audience who is already specifically interested in your niche.

Then also maybe you figure that having your own website might be a way to get ‘traffic’. See either you need to GO TO where the people are and put your game in front of them, OR you need to have them come to where your game is. The passive method with zero marketing is where you just let people come to you - you attract them, and you rely on third parties to basically ‘sell’ your product for you. This is sort of the publish-and-pray approach of just dumping something on an app store and crossing your fingers. But then there’s the go to approach which has you FIND where the people are lurking and shoving your product in front of their faces. Either way, or both ways, you have to raise awareness otherwise if people don’t know your game even exists at all, or there is no buzz about it, you’re basically dead from the start. You could build your own website and try to attract organic or social or referral traffic for example and then direct those people to buy/download a trial or go to an app store of their choice. It’s all about casting a net and moving people forward in a ‘sales funnel’… starting with “I don’t even know you exist” and going through “I know your game exists but I don’t know if I need it” to “I know more about your game but I don’t know if I want to buy it” to “I think I’ll buy it but I’m not sure” to “I’m going to buy it” to “I bought it and now I’m part of the community.”

While some products can really take off with pure word of mouth and social referrals and sharing and all that, organically, passively, I think it would be most powerful to include proactive marketing regardless… for games that have no buzz or games with buzz… it can only help. The more people you can find to know about your game and become interested in it the better.

This is why for example, not long ago on TV there was this period of time where the Black Eyed Peas kept having this annoying song that they kept performing in all kinds of different places… I didn’t personally like the song, but the song showed up in countless places, multiple shows, tv ads, commercials, whatever… all over the place… raising awareness that it exists, and I bet they sold a shit-ton more copies simply because people couldn’t ignore that they existed… versus other better songs which were just simmering under the radar. If people don’t know that your thing exists, they are not going to become customers no matter what. So if you have this game you spent a year making and you dump it on an app store and cross your fingers, you’re really relying on the app store itself to function in such a way that you end up with some sales.

But you’re in a huge store with hundreds of thousands of competing products and you’re starting out from NOTHING, with no reputation and no ratings or reviews or exposure. And you’re relying totally on the ‘magic’ of the store to just bestow its benevolence upon your game in hopes that it will somehow just magically start to sell. That’s seriously a load of wishful thinking hooey. You can’t run a business like that. If you had to run any other business selling products with NO sales tactics, no marketing, no advertising, no sales folk to get your game noticed, no market research, no raising of awareness, not getting your product in front of anyone remotely relevant, you can be sure you are going to be OUT of business pronto. Get ready to be poor. Having absolutely no business sense and no DESIRE to do anything remotely business-like with your game seems like the app-store dream come true - just throw it out there and it will sell itself. Well… good luck with that. You want sales, you need to be a business and act like one, OR you need a really appealing/engaging game that gets lucky and spreads on its own (often unintentionally).

App stores barely do anything to boost your game unless you’re either lucky and/or have a really good or interesting/ground-breaking game. And then they feature it for THEIR benefit because they think it will help them make more money. They don’t really give a dam about you and your game. Do you want them to be your public relations person? Your sales team? You just want the ease of handing your game over and letting the marketplace crap all over your game like it doesn’t matter? You’ll be joining the flocks of near-death games if you do that.

So its kind of like, you spend all this time working on your super game and putting all this effort and money and time and passion into it, you release it, you basically dangle it out the window and hope that someone might walk past and inquire about it… and it goes nowhere. Like, is that what you want for your game? To just sit like a duck? In todays ecommerce economy you really have to compete to get heard and noticed by the right people at the right time in the right places, otherwise you’re just going to get filtered out. People are becoming more discerning and screening. You have to stand out, as a product, but you also have to stand out in terms of getting NOTICED by people. You can’t whine about the game not selling if you have done absolutely nothing to bring it to the attention of the people who might actually listen and be interesting, hoping that you get ‘lucky’ by some fluke that enough total strangers stumble upon it and lift it to a higher place. It’s like leaving your game in the hands of fate rather than actually choosing and creating the future experience you want to have. Why be a victim about it and end up disappointed? Leaving your game sitting on an app store is like leaving it sitting on a dusty shelf at the back of some retail store. Who is going to find it or want it - hardly anyone. It’s not just about how you get front-row seats or a window display (ie top of charts), it’s also about how you get people to come to it from OUTSIDE of the store. Cus people no longer just live inside the store, they are socially connected and internet capable and are browsing and shopping and googling all over the place on billions of websites.

Your odds have to be far better doing some proactive marketing than none at all, even if your game is already successful. Why do you think Clash of Clans had tv ads even after it was massively popular?

(I can’t believe I just made so many business lingo references, lol)

I think overall what this boils down to is, game developers don’t want to run a business and don’t know how to. They want to just develop some game, send it off in a file and let someone else deal with selling it. Then they hope that the store it’s on will just magically send a ton of hungry shoppers along (you know, because your ego is so amazingly attractive that everyone is just going to love you all day long). There is just NO WAY that is going to produce sales unless you get really lucky. And it will be luck, because it’ll be totally out of your hands as to what happens. It seems so easy and appealing to just publish and I'm done … you know, lovely passive income, no more effort required. Ok… but, that means you’re in the hands of lady luck and its likely to be bad luck. There is a lot you can do to have some influence over who finds your game and how they find it and where and what they do next. You have NO POWER in an app store, but you do have power outside of it to help direct people there. Take your power back, people and quit whining about failure and unfairness.

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The point is that the tv ads came after it became popular. When you’ve got a winning horse, you use it for all it’s worth.

I think the idea is to do basic marketing, and figure out using analytics whether the game is doing well enough to pursue a significant marketing campaign. Like, what are the ratings and reviews like? How long do people play it for? How long do they keep it on their phones? etc.

If you have a game that has few downloads, but the reviews are 5 star, and the people who do download it, play it a lot - obviously it’s worth putting in some more effort.

What you don’t want to do is expend a huge amount of time and money in marketing for marginal results. That said however, most indies probably fall off the other side of the horse …

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That’s a bad point, or example maybe. Fact is I did not know the game existed until I saw a tv ad. And the same is true of a lot of people. The ad wasn’t for people who are constantly watching the app store. It was to acquire NEW customers, and has nothing to do with whether the game was already popular. The tv ad comes to where I am and tells me that it exists, that’s the point. That’s how you get in front of people and raise awareness.

As to your other point… if your game sucks so much that you’re umming and ahhing about whether to even market AT ALL, then obviously you were not thinking about business AT ALL from the get-go. Why would you ever release something that is just a total flop? You have to be putting out better quality products than that if you are to have any hope at all of making sales.

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Imagine all the potentially great games out there that you do not even know exist because there is no marketing and no buzz, nobody’s talking about them, there is no advertising, you don’t even know about them. And the developers are sitting there in desperation wondering if YOU exist. Hmm… Sobering. You have to build a bridge.