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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I will throw out a game that I believe was really really good but died relatively unknown.
MissionForce:Cyberstorm (ignore the sequel, it sucked so so much)

It was from around 1995, was a hex-based, turn based mech game, you could fit out your mechs how you wanted, there are a lot of different mech chassis’ that had different restrictions on fit-out, had terrain advantages/disadvantages, line of sight, fog of war (based on line of site & radar detection, which was in turn affected by the type of radar selected).

The game catered for so many play styles, I’ve replayed it so many times & the only reason I don’t play it now is that it has become to unstable playing it emulating win-95 & I’m not technical enough to work out how to do it ‘properly’ so it is playable.

Edit: found this base play through

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Main question I would have about this game … what happened OUTSIDE the game? You can’t look to the game itself to be the marketing team or the sales team. Well, to some degree yes. But this game could easily have had no marketing and just sat on a shelf and been ignored. I did not know it existed. Never heard of it. I’m one of the audience members that it lost because it did not bring itself to my attention. See how that works? You have to think outside the box of the game itself and how it interconnects with society and how it builds relationships with people. Developers are so ego-driven unfortunately that they just think they will make something, it ‘contains coolness’ and therefore it will just attract every single person on the planet. But that means all the good stuff is INSIDE the box and everyone else is OUTSIDE the box and how do you get them into the box? If there are no inroads, who cares if its the best game on the planet.

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Not really sure that’s the case, but I guess it’s a matter of opinion at this point.

One more thing I’d like to add - I think probably the most important thing is to build a base of loyal customers, through some form of regular communication such as your own site/blog. This really helps to lay the foundation of your marketing and raise your ‘social status’ on the internet. It makes you seem more relatable and thus attract popularity, easier to take seriously, and you’re a ‘low-hanging fruit’ for youtubers who are looking for stuff to promote on their channels.

24

I agree to that. Those who are a better match for your game, a closer fit, who find it more relevant, who feel a sense of trust in it, who are loyal followers, who are more engaged etc… those are your core audience, and you should treat them like gold. And then go find more of them.

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25

Another thing is, if you go to the extreme and look outside game development, at the way a lot of people peddle shady stuff on the net - a lot of times there’s a lot more value (at least to some people) than one might imagine - and that value is personality. All these self-help gurus that push the same old ideas with different syntax - they wouldn’t sell a dime if they did not back it up with the full force of their personality. So I think game developers who make an effort to sell not just their products but themselves stand a much better chance of attracting popularity and thereby selling games.

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I think maybe there are different viewpoints between people who have done business stuff before and the ones just starting now. What @imaginaryhuman_1 just described above is about exactly the way I see it. And that is based just from having businesses in the past including trying the shareware thing many years ago.

I get the App Store, Steam and so on are very good to get our games some views. And that is awesome! No doubt about it. I think a lot of people are relying on that because the past few years or so has been kind of a gravy train ride for Indies. Many people just through dumb luck (mainly timing right person saw it at the right time) found huge success. And now people are relying on that.

The other thing is most of these hugely successful games if you really look into them have been doing hardcore marketing nearly from the days of the concept. Devs went to various game expos, contacted tons of people until they finally got featured in some big YT videos or websites with a huge reach. So it looks like “well obviously the whole key is just to make a great game”. But people are not looking at all of the effort these people actually put into marketing their games. And it came in various forms. Sometimes visiting game events to show it off. Other times YouTubers or websites. Other times keeping a dev log / blog for years building up an audience over time. And of course combinations of all of these things.

But this thinking that if your game is really great it just does not make sense to me. First “great” is just a matter of viewpoint. On the day Clash of Clans or any other well known games were released I am 100% sure there were many other games that also were very good, great and perhaps just possibly there may have been one or two that were even better.

If someone makes this fantastic game and puts it out on the market tomorrow… the only way it will do very well if is someone promotes it heavily in some way. Maybe the mobile store will feature it. Tons of eyeballs on it. Maybe just maybe some big YT or game website staff will see it and cover it. Again creating a large amount of awareness for this game. Or the developers themselves have marketed it all along. Through events, blogs, etc. But there has to be something.

But the thing is these external factors (anyone other than you marketing the game) can only happen to so many games in a given day. For every popular game we see that is now well known I’d bet on that same day there were several other games of high quality that were deserving of coverage. But these outlets have to choose which to cover. The game that was skipped over today may have been the great game if released last week or next week.

I imagine these people choose the games to cover based on what will give them the most value. Sometimes they might choose the best game (in their opinion) to cover. Other times they may choose the worst game to cover. It just depends on what their focus, what the story is they need, for that day.

So just building something and throwing it out there thinking it’s a great game just seems like completely leaving it up to random chance. Not the way to approach a business. Again… just to me it seems like that. Maybe it does work for others.

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27

Yeah, it was from a time when internet reviews weren’t around. I found it because I used to scan the shelves at the store each month looking for games that looked interesting. I don’t know what marketing they did for it as I never bought PC magazines back then & don’t recall any in store promotion. It was a Sierra game from memory & I think they had bigger IP that they were concerned about. That said though, some people have told me this was the precursor to, & possibly set in the same universe, as the mech warrior series but I haven’t bothered researching to find out if that is true or not.

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Picture this. There’s a massive warehouse with no people in it. Its huge. This thing has tonnes of shelves in it. Every shelf is filled to the max with video games. Hundreds of thousands of them. And every single day these shelves get even more filled and more shelves added, by the hundreds of games. It just keeps growing and growing.

Now, you take your one little game that you just beavered away on for months on end believing it’s going to save the world. You take that little game and you throw it out toward the middle of that warehouse and it just lands somewhere, who knows where. You hear it clanking around as it falls down some shelves and wedges itself between some other who-knows what games that some total weirdo strangers left there.

And you walk away.

And you call this running a business.

And then nothing happens.

And then you are unhappy.

Now, if you’re lucky and this is a well-run warehouse, maybe there is a little bit of organization to it… maybe there are some categorized areas and you get your way into one of those… so now you narrowed down the competition a bit, and at least those people are bit more likely to like your game. Previously, 50-year old Mildred found your game and was disgusted with it. 30-year old Sam found it and liked the box art but threw it aside when she saw rainbows. 17-year old Mike found it and though it looked pretty cool but then was distracted by some other game he spied that he heard other people talk about. You’re tossed aside. But at least by being in a category you think your odds improve. You also hear rumors that sometimes, the special powers that be come along and hand-pick some game out of the middle of nowhere and make a fanfare about it. You pin all your hopes on that, like the lottery… only a select few are going to win the prize but because you technically have “a chance” you think you will win. But… not likely. Cus they are biased and they don’t choose fairly and they don’t like what you like.

So you fail. And you get frustrated and want to quit and then blame it on mobile or competition or anyone else’s fault.

You’re the one that tossed your game onto a steaming pile of dung and hoped that people would like it. You have to do better than that if you hope to stand a chance of some success. Maybe you need to get out of the warehouse entirely and go out on the streets and find some people who might like to give your game a try.

The same is also true for websites nowadays actually, you can’t just publish a website or piece of content and hope that people come and magically find it. You have to optimize. You have to really create something special and relevant. And you have to find out who it is for and what they want and how to appeal to them. And you have to market it. And you have to go out there and build connections and inroads and get yourself listed and ranked in the search engines and prove that your piece of content is worthy of being voted higher, so that you get more traffic. And maybe even bypass that and go to people with their own audiences and tap into those in some kind of partnership deal. Otherwise you are going to get no ranking, no traffic, no people, no business. This is just the facts of life. This is what happens when there are billions of people on the internet. This is what happens when there are thousands and millions of people vying for your attention for billions of reasons. This is what the world is like. You can’t just act like everyone is your best friend and family member and will give you extra leverage out of kindness. Its a big world out there. You have to HELP PEOPLE to find your stuff.

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29

OK let’s try again. I’m not advocating no marketing, what I am advocating is avoiding spending hundreds of hours pushing a game that really doesn’t speak well for itself. If it gets bad reviews, if people are not sharing it, and it is generally not well accepted by those who do play it, then no amount of marketing is going to make up for it. When a lot of people review a game and give it a low rating, or don’t play it for more than half an hour, it’s not coincidence, there really is something they didn’t like that you’re going to have to change, and it has nothing to do with marketing.

That’s why I said above, you need to give it a preliminary amount of marketing, and assess based on that whether it is worth pushing further. If all you have is 50 downloads, and all the players give it 5 stars, then it stands to reason that if you get it in front of more people, it will continue to receive good feedback. So there’s real justification for spending more time, money and effort. I don’t have any argument against that.

Now I do think that games that are well made, to some extent, speak for themselves and self-market, but I think it’s far too difficult a point to prove one way or the other, so I’ll leave my position as this: if a game is badly made and poorly received by its players, no amount of marketing will suddenly make it do well - but if it’s well-done and well received it will benefit from a substantial amount of marketing.

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30

Well that makes sense sure. But that is still very different from the “just make a great game” we so often hear. That is a good common sense approach. Do some tests. If people like it and the problem is you are not reaching many people then improve the marketing. If people don’t like it and the problem is the game itself just isn’t appealing to them then improve the game.

All I was trying to get across is those two very different things are the reality. A great game with 50 downloads 75% Very Positive is certainly a great game (for most people). But that didn’t keep it from only getting 50 downloads. It can’t promote itself. Mainly this great game selling itself happens less and less because like @imaginaryhuman_1 said there are just too darn many distractions. Someone goes to tell their friend about this great game and before they can speak their friend tells them about this great game they have been playing for the past few days that everybody already knows about. Or sure it has 50 downloads and people love it but they still have 50 other games to check out. They plan on coming back to this game at some point.

TLDR: I agree @Billy4184

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31

I think it’s not true. The Mechwarrior series is based on the Battletech boardgame, which was released mid 80’s according to wikipedia. And BattleTech has copied (or licensed, I don’t know) from some anime (Robotech I think), some mech designs were pretty much identical. There are BattleTech books too, first one seems to be released in 1986. I’ve read roughly a dozen of them.

Missionforce:Cyberstorm belongs to the Earthsiege universe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaltech:_Earthsiege

So… BattleTech seems to be first.

Regarding the topic, I can’t remember when I last found a great game that I never had heard of. I consider myself rather well informed on stuff that might interest me. I had even played the MissionForce:Cyberstorm demo back in the days.

It’s more likely that I see a game and get a wrong impression of something that I would actually enjoy. Imho that should be the bigger concern compared to “getting the word out there”, because the satisfaction of people who buy your game directly affects the likelyhood of them recommending it to others and writing positive reviews. If you manage to convince people to buy your game and they end up hating it, they’ll write a bad review and then refund it. I’d try to avoid that. 95%+ positive reviews on steam have been the deciding factor for several purchases for me, I think.

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32

I read a funny article.
http://indiegames.com/2013/10/50_easy_steps_to_indie_success.html

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33

You could make a great game but it could be a such a niche genre that it only appeals to your small core audience. IE Assault Android Catcus great game, but it only sold 30k units
http://steamspy.com/app/250110

Or Furi only 15k units.
http://steamspy.com/app/423230

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34

Assault cactus… Who can relate to being a cactus? And I might be totally barking up the wrong tree, but that’s also part of marketing… People want to relate to human-like or humanized characters, hence the popularity of Mario and Sonic and so on. People can’t relate to strange obscure objects or objects with no personality.

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If it was a team of 2 to 3 people who made these games in a year that’s a very good amount of money.

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I guess thats the trick you need to be able to make a game of that quality in a very efficient manner, the longer you spend on it the more units it needs to sell to make it worthwhile.

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Well, to be honest, maybe I did interpret too much into your words. Reading the title and the first sentence sounded like “For the guys that think marketing is for chumps… in your face!” :slight_smile: … which, in hindsight, is a very valid statement to make, given the numbers presented, and is not like saying “marketing > good product”.
So maybe I did bark up the wrong tree, and I am sorry about that.

In the end, no business is the same, and everyones story is different. Because something works for someone doesn’t mean it works for anyone else. And the other way around. I guess many consumers are getting tired of the marketing hype the big boys are investing into, often at the cost of product quality.

And that might be what you are hearing here, from me too. Many people stopped listening to marketing, and instead rely on different channels to form their opinion on what to buy. That of course can also be treated as marketing, but you should be careful not to invest too much into that (working to closely with youtubers, or even worse paying them for a review will make their opinion quite invalid in a lot of peoples minds once that fact leaks out).
Hence why traditional marketing no longer works well for many products. Yes, there are still plenty of players that never seem to learn no matter what sh*t EA or Ubisoft pulls off with a new Arkham or AC game. I would bet many people are wary nowadays to buy those games at launch. They will wait for reviews, and then wait 6 months or more for the needed patches to roll in.
All the dough spent on marketing for your big launch day splash instantly has become way less effective. And in this case, no matter how much you invest into marketing, you have reached the point of extremly diminished returns already. Half of the playerbase interested will not buy the unpolished game you put on the market at launch no matter what marketing stunt you pull off. The other half is probably already reached and will buy the game no matter what.

Your ramped up marketing will not sway the people that got disgruntled by broken launch day games, and there are not many more people you could interest in your game anyway.
This is a clear case where a good portion of the marketing budget should have been diverted to the development budget. Given those are at least equal, or the marketing one is even bigger than the development one, that would be an easy thing to do.
Do you really need TV Ads for a new Arkham or AC Game? Is that money well spent? Or would that money be better spent on making the game 100% bugfree at launch? The launch day splash probably would be the same once people notice that games are not totally broken at launch anymore. Yet you will get more purchases down the line, as not all people waiting for the game to be patched still bother to buy it 6 months later. AND you would save some money as those patches also need to be paid for, and you already paid that during development with the funds you diverted from marketing.

Of course, its a completly different world for an unknown mobile game from an unknown dev without any known license being used. There marketing is way more important… as long as you keep the budget under control, of course.
But that just means you should not make such broad, sweeping statement in an industry where there no longer is a general truth that applies to all subsectors of it.
PC Players =/= Console Players =/= Mobile Players, Wellknown dev =/= Unknown Dev…

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38

Although - wasn’t it reported that Rovio created upwards of 50 games before Angry Birds? I don’t know how may of those were released to the public - and I would bet real money all 50 weren’t solid products.
Part of the process - is testing the waters - and also practicing all the ways you want to market a game.
I agree with your logic - although I think releasing something - that is potentially - average - is also great practice (for small indies) on the last steps of releasing an actual good game.
Marketing is also something that people can get better at but I agree - don’t market a turd - don’t even release it.

Not sure if I’ve ever heard that - maybe “the first step is to make a great game”, not JUST make a great game.
The thing is - games aren’t easy and great games are even more difficult.
The majority of game are only average - with the hopes of it catching fire and doing well - but applying ALL the marketing tricks and trades to an average game will most likely only result in slightly more traffic - ultimately will not overcome the point - the game is only average, and will most likely only recoup what it cost to make it.
The first step IS to make a GREAT game. :wink:

Odd that these are considered failures. 30k @ average of $10 = 300k, 15k @ average of $18 = 270k.
I’m sure they are considered failures because a ‘team’ was behind the development of these games and they were expecting a lot more, however - for a small team (1-4) or solo - these numbers aren’t bad.
Also - Furi is overpriced - so that probably had a strong influence on why it didn’t do as well as expected.

Perspective has a lot to do with success/failure I think. As a solo dev or possibly in the future a small team (1-2) 10k downloads @ something like $5-8 each - for less than a years worth of (part-time) work would be a great pay day for a solo developer - who also happens to work full time.
For a solo developer who doesn’t have a full time job, is expecting to support himself and family solely on indie game earnings - 10k @ $5 = not much after expenses. Better be working on 2-4 games per year that also earn the same amount.

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39

How do you get the 18$ average price for the 15k Furi sales? Does it take into account local price scaling for markets like Russia? In any case, even if taking 18$ as real average price:
18$ x 15000 = 270000$
minus steam’s cut (I don’t know for sure but afaik 30% should be about right) = 189000
minus VAT (no way to precisely calculate that so I’ll just guesstimate 20%) = 151200
minus income tax (another wild guess based on 1 minute googling and assuming profit is split between 3 people from a tax perspective - 30%) = 105840$
minus software licenses, contractors, marketing costs, etc. = ?
then divide the rest by the core team members and the years they’ve been working fulltime on the game, and you’ll have something that gets a little closer to the reality of what yearly income the devs got from that game if there are no long-tail sales in the future (which I hope there are because otherwise they might have financially ruined themselves). If they got into debt with the expenses they had during development, you’ll have to factor in the interest rates on the debt as another business expense. That game also doesn’t look like something that was done in a year by such a small team, more like 2+ at the very least.
Now if all that wasn’t depressing enough already, take a look at how many people are in the full credits:
http://thegamebakers.com/press/furi/credits.php

Disclaimer: I know my pseudo-math is still off in places, and I couldn’t factor in the investments they got from other sources like government grants. But you get the point I’m trying to make…

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40

Well, yeah, agreed, altough at that time 1. Nobody had heard of Rovio before, 2. Nobody really cares if a mobile game for 1$ or free is not the best game in the world (people will jettison it from their phones quickly and not recommend it, but hardly put the devs name down in their books of grudges).

So maybe I should rephrase that “if you release a product you know is not polished enough, and you are unknown, the damage can be controlled. If you release a free or cheap mobile game that isn’t polished, the damage can be controlled (besides not making much with that game). If you do it when you have made a name for yourself, you just risked loosing a big part of your community”.

We all start of making subpar products. Sure, at some point you need to release something, might as well be that subpar starting product.
But an established studio should never, ever release a subpar product.

Well, if you created a game only fitting a small niche, no amount of marketing is going to make that game get mass appeal. Especially for niche games, word of mouth > marketing… unless you know how to market to that niche with laser like focus.

If you create niche games, and you know it, you should probably make sure you focus your development budget as much as possible on the mvp, and polish that until it shines.
If your expected sales do not cover even the minimum viable product at a good level of polish, why even develop the game in the first place?

Furi only came out a month ago. Yes, that is some dissapointing splash sales, but then, if the marketing of the game was mostly word of mouth, what do you expect? It takes a while for that to reach your audience, so you might get less release splash sales, and more during the tail because of deferred discovery.
We probably should talk about their sales in a year to see how they did. Not everyone needs to sell 10mio units the first week else the publisher will be after their heads.

Given that this 200’000-ish $ were just the revenue after the first month, and they get a long and not so flat tail, they could still make triple or four time that in the span of a year. Which then would be a healthy sum for a small Indie Team.

EDIT: Searched the internet a bit.

The Team Behind Furi, the GameBakers, seem to be a two man (and woman) team. From different blogs I see that at least one additional guy joined their team for the Furi development. From that persons own words I would interpret the team was larger than just 3 people.
Also, the characters are designed by a famous japanese mangaka.

Development couldn’t have been much longer than 2-3 Years, as the company lists having been busy with other games until 2014. Furi was already shown off in 2015, so must have been in development some months by that time.

So I guess we are looking at a development of 5-6 people times 2 years.

BUT:

  1. these are just the Steam numbers. Game was also released on PS4. We will never know how it did there, but given it achieved the same success, that would already double the result.
  2. The game seems to be insanely difficult, to the point were people rip on the game in public because of it on Twitter, or confess their unwavering love for the game for the same reason. Pretty much a love/hate affair. Given how much of todays playerbase actually IS into hardcore games (not just talks about how they would have achieved a much better time than that youtuber that streamed his speedruns if only they would have enough to train as much as he did), that will certainly hurt their sales…
    Yes, they might get a cult following which might be the better thing in the long run. Still, no wonder splash sales where so low when everyone on the internet talks about the insane difficulty.

Wouldn’t be surprised to see many “fans” rave about the game, but prefer to watch streams instead of playing it themselves.

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