How much money one should be expected to spend on paid advertising to get good result? Also, according to your experience, what ad platform perform the best? (google, facebook, youtube,…)
What kind of budget do you have? Paying for ads usually has pretty much no benefit if we’re only talking about small sums of money
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Is your game good? I think that would be the first question to ask.
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I don’t have a game/budget yet. I just want to know how much I should prepare if I want to make it big.
A lot of money if you want to make it big. I was at a mobile game conference panel talk where this was discussed. Everyone on the panel agreed it is best to focus on a big launch marketing hit to get in the charts and then benefit from the sales boost from chart visibility. The sum several agreed on was $100,000 for launch day.
Using advertising to make it big is not really an option unless you are already big. Reinvesting your income into advertising to build over time towards a modest success is more achievable, but still difficult.
Your questions need more context. What platform are you on? Paid or free-to-play? What genre? etc. There are many variations that make decisions individual to your game.
Ad networks vary over time. I’ve had ads in my game where eCPM was great for a long time, then tumbled massively in a few weeks. That probably reflects a change in desirability for advertisers. In that case all the adverts started to be for the same game. The publisher of that game must have been gaming the ad network algorithms to dominate during a push.
Having said that, I have heard good things about Unity Ads, and it seems well suited to the first time advertiser.
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As much as you can afford and not one penny more or less.
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Unless all you can afford isn’t all that much, then don’t bother because it won’t pay off, and you’re much better off spending that money elsewhere
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Marketing isn’t just buying ad space. Marketing on a small budget just means you need to be more creative.
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The OP specifically mentioned advertisements though, not marketing in general (different story imo)
True, but the title was “marketing” so they probably lump all marketing under advertising.
I would look towards exhibition space and events instead of ads for a first game. A booth at PAC might cost 1500, plus flights, accomodation and labour. It will probably bring more return then the same amount in ads.
There are many smaller events that will cost you less, or even have a free showcase.
Ads are very impersonal. They don’t really allow you to build a community. I personally haven’t found them worth the effort for low dollar amounts.
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In addition to this, you should have a good idea from metrics in your soft launch, whether your game UA spend is greater than the average player lifetime value in your game. If not, then spending money on advertising/UA will just net you a loss.
For smaller budgets, I would go with YouTubers whose audience matches players who will want to play your game. As the bored mormon said, shows are also a great way to get eyeballs on your game.
A professional PR campaign can also go a long way, although your game will need to look polished.
At the end of the day, you need a fun game that looks good.
You can’t market a turd.
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Very successful game:
Not a single penny spent on advertisement.
Of course this all depends on your market. A game that relies heavily on Steam sales will have consumers more involved with finding out new games.
While casual games tend to need to put themselves out there more than they need to rest on the quality of their product.
That said, the effectiveness of advertisement is ridiculously overstated and all the “research” is mostly done by advertisement companies who, surprise-surprise, “find” that you can never spend too much on advertisement.
It’s one of the reasons why the industry is stuck on hit chasing.
Also keep in mind the whole Lynch and Kayne 2 debacle. A guy got fired for giving a major advertiser a mediocre score.
While on the flip side of the spectrum, Nintendo fell sharply out of favor of game critics right about the same time that they moved their advertising funds from game media to more traditional media.
Point is, it’s a real sleazy industry and as a little fish in a big pond I think your efforts will be better spent making more content, better content, or at least doing some clever viral stunt of your own.
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Speaking of which, I’m still happy to do reviews/play throughs ect for Steam keys. It’s certianly a cheaper way to get views then paid advertising.
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Well, at least in the Mobile market you will find out that the amount you need to put into ads to get ANY return on investment most probably is more than you can afford.
The likes of King and similar big names in Mobile gaming got big by advertising the shit out of their games, and are still pumping a ton of money into ads. Trying to compete with them means you either have deep pockets your own ad campaign will be a drop in the ocean.
Better to try to use different channels, and try to have word of mouth work in your favour (first thing to achieve that is, as said, a good and original game, not some cheap threes clone!)
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I’m going to echo the sentiment that ads aren’t worth it unless you have a ton of cash. I’ve spend $50-100 here and there on Facebook and Google ads and got no increase in sales. This was years ago, so I don’t remember the numbers (or even what I was advertising), but it was definitely not worth it. I had a client who hired an actual firm to market an app I made for her. She spent thousands, and the sales results were not impressive at all.
I got a bigger boost when some random blogger decided to cover an app of mine years back. So I’d say that your best bet is to create something worthy of being talked about and try to get bloggers, review sites, or Youtube to cover it. You can also post updates on places like IndieDB, or use the #MadeWithUnity or #IndieDev hashtags on twitter to try and build some kind of following for the game as you are building it. There’s also the WIP forums here and over at Tigsource as well.
You can also try Reddit, but I don’t think many subreddits are okay with just popping in and advertising. There’s one specifically for Unity Assets that I just posted LumenLights and Retrograde to. It doesn’t seem to get much traffic though. LumenLights has had like 7 or 8 upvotes, but no sales yet. Retrograde got downvoted to 0, with the Youtube video getting around 20 views in the day or so that it’s been posted. No sales on that either.
In the end, I don’t think you are going to have the budget for an ad buy to be very effective. Instead you’ll need to spend a whole lot of time finding places that will allow you to post about the project without getting mad at you for spamming, or post a devlog, or instead just engage in conversation and build a reputation at the various places. Unfortunately, many of us (myself included) don’t take the time to do all that. There’s always another project or another section of the same project to work on and marketing because something that just gets ignored. When you post anywhere, it certainly helps if you ask for feedback, preferably something specific, so the community is engaged. Not only will it help improve the product, but it will help build a sense of community around it much more so that just talking at people would.
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This. TotalBiscuit even has a 45 minute video about how games get featured on his channel.
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I’ll have to remember to watch that one day, it may be useful information for getting others to cover a game as well. I have a 10gb a month bandwidth limit, so TotalBiscuit’s long videos mean I have to wait until the unlimited time between 12am-5am to watch them. I’m usually up then, but I’m also getting caught up on TV shows, or working, or doing other things that require bandwidth.
10gb a month? Good lord, that must be nightmarish. I burn through that much in like… a day.
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If I recall correctly the audio is the only relevant part of the “video” with the video being random gameplay footage. For videos like that I usually just use an online video downloader (SaveFrom) to grab the audio portion (42MB in this case).
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