Hi all,
I just released an app to the Apple Store, (Frank the Spider… Shameless plug), the reason I am writing is because in submitting the app to reviewers, one major outlet, Steel Media (Pocket Gamer, App Spy, 148 Apps) has contacted me suggesting that I advertise with them.
I am wondering the communities experience with this or any other media outlet. As an indie, what did you spend? Did you feel it was worth it? What did you get in return? Did the investment pay for itself?
I realize how much money you recoup depends on the quality of the app and the actual monetization system with in but I was hoping to get a feel from the indie community on the matter.
Advertising should always done by product quality via word of mouth by those new to the business world. Once product quality is established and you know it because of the size of your customer base has grown very large via word of mouth, you then buy real advertising with money.
Yeah, I bought a small ad in a fantasy magazine for my self published novel and got zero sales from it. I can’t imagine game ads are any better. Save your money or put it into your project.
When I did my marketing training the trainer made it very clear (though I don’t necessarily agree with them) that “word of mouth” is a myth as far as a marketing strategy is concerned. They weren’t saying that it doesn’t happen, but that you can’t rely on it at a small scale and that it’s a small fraction once you reach a large scale. Basically, you have to make customers exceptionally happy to get them to advertise your product for you, and even then only a small percentage will actually do it. (Think about the number of products you’ve bought, vs. the number of products you’ve been so happy with that you’ve told others about them, vs. the number of sales actually generated by that. The end ratio is vanishingly small.)
And yet… at least when it comes to games I do often buy based on recommendations and/or what my friends are playing.
At any rate, I definitely agree that you should prove your product at a small scale before trying to scale up. It’s more the how and the metrics that I’m talking/thinking about.
I think I also agree with saving your money with your first few commercial projects. Something else from my marketing training (and repeated by others who know more about it than I do) is that if you’re advertising you need to hit people on multiple occasions before the message sticks. So people seeing your game once on Facebook or a web banner… no effect. Seeing it a dozen times means they might grow some familiarity with your product. Then, if that person happens to be interested, next time they go to make a similar purchase your product mightbe on their mind… but remember it’s also competing with everything else that’s also advertising. That’s not to say that adverts are useless, and I’ve not experimented myself to see how they work out, but I do expect that you have to buy a lot more of them than the typical small indie could afford before they give a practical outcome.
Do you know what most people do when they see an ad for a game they’ve never heard of from a “publisher” they’ve never heard of? They don’t buy it. Now if you can get one of the famous you-tubers to feature it, you’re golden.
That’s no different to what “most” people do with “most” adverts for “most” products from “most” vendors. I saw multiple ads for Uncharted 4 yesterday, and despite being a fan of the series I still didn’t rush out and buy it. It’s all a numbers game, for everyone. The question is how big the numbers have to get before we see a practical benefit from it, and whether or not that’s within a small indie’s realm of affordability.
LOL, don’t by fooled by marketing trickery, the marketing person that told you world of mouth advertising is a myth either didn’t know that you in your own experience rely on word of mouth more than placed advertising or ignored that you told them that. I’ll tell you right now, ignoring consumer experience is not a good marketing strategy but then to convince you to buy advertising and to grant their profession the power they desire they must convince you of your inadequacy with regards to marketing your product and with their new found power over you they can demand large sums of money to advertise a product that would have succeeded anyway if it’s a good product to be recommended by word of mouth.
Now if you want to compete with the really big business and make money off people that bored and simply looking to while away their time in spite of the product that’s being offered then you can spend outrageous sums of money to advertise your product and maybe even being perceived as successful if you have enough players, even if money outflow is more than money inflow. That takes oodles of money.
Simple mathematics: you, I, or the OP can’t afford a one million dollar rollout ad campaign so while Google might be delighted you’d spend $100 to pick up, maybe, if you are lucky, 1000 players that truly enjoy and regularly play your game those 1000 players aren’t anymore likely and are actually less likely, really, to recommend your game to their peers than someone that searched for and found your completely unadvertised game. You didn’t solicit and therefore the players you do obtain for your game are more likely to genuinely have wanted to play your game rather than by chance happened upon an ad for your game when they were doing something unrelated to you game, likely because they were bored, more than motivated to play your game.
$1 to get 10 new players? Sounds cheap but it’s very expensive and you’re not likely to have advertising results anywhere near that good in reality. Not without a game that would have succeeded on it’s own merits regardless of advertising outlay.
Was the email a person? Or an automated system? Ask for some free advertising or deferred payment based on success, they’ll probably say no because it’s not worth it for them… But if that’s not going to pay off for them why would it pay off for you?
I’m only speaking about my own personal experience with advertising as an indie. Cost me a hundred bucks and netted me a big fat zero return. side note: I sent my novel to a bunch of famous fantasy writers and George RR Martin was the only one who responded. He said he quite enjoyed my book and he wished me luck.
I would say you don’t buy advertising until you are sitting on 6 million dollars of gross earnings strictly from your games and apps.
That doesn’t mean you can’t promote your game by visiting your local newspaper Arts section or Lifestyle section journalists if you feel they would find it interesting. You have to read their columns to know. That and other things you can do for free will give your experience with advertising without spending money. Of course that works better in small towns and counties than in places like NYC.
OK, you are right. I based my 6 million dollar figure based on US tax rates, insurance costs, the cost to buy a home & car with cash, and finally groceries & utilities until retirement for an 18 year old living frugally. Other countries would have higher or lower amount you need to earn before you could consider your career paid for until retirement. Main thing to take away from it though is advertising isn’t buying you success, it will only buy you more success if used wisely.
Haha, right, because it must have all been a shill to try to get me to buy advertising from him. Funny thing was, the trainer wasn’t selling advertising, and the whole course was about how to get your products out there with the resources available to a common small business*,* ie: without relying on multi-million dollar advertising campaigns.
You’re right, if a product is good enough to succeed on word of mouth alone then it doesn’t need advertising. But that’s by definition - you’ve defined your product as something that will already succeed. It doesn’t need anything else.
Still, if your product is good enough to succeed from word of mouth then it’s probably already a success anyway. That’s what the trainer was pointing out by saying it’s a myth. Yes, there are successful products that claim it as their method, and they probably believe that’s the case, but do the math - it already had to be pretty big before word of mouth actually became useful. So how did they become that big in the first place?
Was this person volunteering their time to your class? In what field to they work? How did you find out about this class? By a chance advertisement or did you search to participate in this class? When you searched was it advertised or part of a university or government small business course offering? Would you recommend this class to other people? How much did this class cost? Now how much for that closest local course in wood carving to your community? Who would you ask? Where would you search? Apply that to your game. Just not anybody is going to pay any attention to your game advertisements. Be frugal and be stingy with your money. Get down to the nitty gritty and insist that the advertisement sellers get paid when you get real results on your bottom line. Google and such advertising is not in the position of having people sitting on a couch watching television and knowing a show with 1 million viewers that see all the beer and car commercials, even though we know of those 1 million people likely less than one percent are looking to change beers or buy a new car. Something else, I am in excellent health and I’m better 50% of advertising I see on television is for pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals that probably 3% or even much less of the audience has need for or technically speaking the audience isn’t even competent to know if the product being advertised is one that could help their condition. So they are advertising I suppose exclusively to doctors which means they are spending vaults full of cash to advertise to 1/4 of 1 percent of the USA population. Our games don’t have that sort of doctor - patient recommendation trust or advertising budgets. Advertising is over-priced because you are competing with huge corporations. Now you just taught yourself more about how advertising works as the advertising class likely taught you and more.
If you are looking to increase the success of an app or game that’s already failed then advertising on your or my budget isn’t likely to help much and mostly because you can’t afford enough of it if it’s truly a good but ignored game. Oh well, refine and repeat, so have a bit of fun doing it.
It’s true that occasionally in rare circumstances a failed musical single will become successful after being featured in a movie or TV show but you can count that as a word of mouth recommendation and not advertising. That failed single didn’t become successful suddenly 3 or # of years later because they record company decided they were going to pour millions of dollars into advertising the failed single although it’s still the same recording by the same artist.
If you wait until after something has failed then you’ve probably missed the boat regardless. The point is to be proactive before you put your product out there at scale to give it the best chance of success from the outset.
Well this is were we sort of agree…if you’re product’s good then you don’t need to spend a lot of money advertising. I do think it’s very worth while to have people you know or their children play your games locally so you can get a better opinion on what they think of your game.
One mistake I made is I did not use Unity Analytics - a failed game really doesn’t make sense any more if it’s really you developing in iterations until you finally make something worth while. So in that sense I think it is very possible that you or I have a game that becomes successful x # of years after released although the reality would be we did (possibly much) further development to improve that game over those years. No, it’s not a promise, but well we need to learn by doing and not by reading. Hey, that’s not so bad.
You can probably guess your game is being spread be word of mouth and hence can be considered independently, authentically good if it’s downloaded a lot in clusters and more so if those clusters are in the same geographic area. Maybe Unity Analytics will help with such analysis.
This guy must have not heard of a little album called “Thriller”
Or that indie game called “Super Mario Bros.”
That pretty heavily discredits whoever said this
I hear about most of the games I play from friends, because I don’t buy into hype trains(Assassin’s Creed 3 pretty much forced me to adopt that policy), If a game sounds interesting, I do my own research on it, then decide if it’s worth buying.
But the advice of just making a better game seems pretty intuitive and to me, very obvious. Make stuff people want to play, and they will create their own hype.
Yeah, but they saw the kind of success you would see with internet virality today, without any real internet to speak of (you seem like the technical type, so yes, there was an internet at the time, but it wasn’t the ridiculous advertising machine it is today). To be fair, Thriller was probably a bad example, I just know “music” people who always talk about the word of mouth hype for that album being insane.
And as far as the American success of Super Mario, that was more of an uphill battle, as at the time the US was not keen on home consoles due to the game crash. It’s launch was so small in America that no one actually knows the official release date of Super Mario Bros in America. I read an interesting article about some guy trying to track it down and having to do some real detective work to try and figure it out. So that game in America had HUGE word of mouth appeal.