I made a great game, what next?

Target Platforms Mobile
1

So, over the past 6 or so weeks I’ve developed a great (imho), simple, kind-of crappy (not buggy, just so simple that it isn’t amazingly feature-rich), but really fun little mobile game, which I was using as a simple project to teach myself about game development, from idea to publishing. The Unity community has been amazingly supportive and helpful the few times I’ve had to ask questions, and equally as helpful via threads and answers I’ve found by searching. I’ve tested the game on multiple devices, worked out all of the bugs that I or my few testers have found, and I’m really happy with where it’s at. However, having reached this point, I’ve suddenly hit a wall where there is WAY less documentation on what to do next. Every single game creation guide I can find ends once the game itself is fully functional, and doesn’t go on to the “second half” of game development. So, I’m reaching out to those of you who have been here before, and asking: what now? I really apologize for how general my questions are, but given the nature of my confusion, I have difficulty getting any more specific.

First, what’s the deal with intellectual property, publishing procedures, etc? I don’t want anyone stealing my game design (I know that there is only so far I can go to protect my IP, but I want to do as much as I can), but I’m not sure what I want to trademark or copyright, or anything like that. How much legal protection, if any, do I get simply by publishing a game? What process do I go through to publish a game, turning it from a working prototype to a page on the play store or app store? Are there any costs associated with publishing a game in the play store and the app store? Are there any major problems I might encounter with publishing to both Android and iOS? If I have a company registered in my state, can I publish the game under that company name, or do I need to do something special to account for the fact that the game might be downloaded all over the place?

Secondly, what about monetization and promotion? I have my strategies picked out but I’m unsure how to implement them.

I want to put in some very light Facebook and Twitter integration - specifically, just a script that allows the player to post their score to a facebook or twitter update, with a link to the game in the app store. I’ve downloaded the facebook SDK for Unity and fiddled with it, but I’ve found very little documentation, and have no idea where to start with twitter. I don’t even have a twitter, so I’m entirely lost there.

I’d like interstitial ads in my game when the player launches the app and when the game restarts. I want a $0.99 upgrade button that will make an in-app purchase and shut off these ads. I have NO IDEA where to start here, what ad networks to look at or how to compare ad networks, how to integrate them with the game. I’m not saying I haven’t read thread after thread about ad networks and eCPM and whatnot, I guess I just have no idea where to START because there is so much out there. I definitely don’t want to entirely re-do the ad process for iOS and Android, so something that allows me to easily integrate ads for both platforms would be, I suppose, an ideal starting point.

Finally, in an ideal world, I’d really like to advertise my game. However, I don’t know how to do this, or if this is cost effective. Perhaps I should rely on game reviews, facebook/twitter posts and general word of mouth to drive downloads. Again, my game is simple, it’s just designed to be a quick, fun little game that people might play to pass the time while waiting in line at the post office. I’m certainly not willing, or able, to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars for some ad time. Has anyone else faced this kind of problem, and do you have any advice?

Thanks so much! I don’t honestly know if this is the right forum for this, but since I have so many varied and general questions, I think gossip is the best place.

Also, I will do my best to update this post with any applicable links, advice, etc for those who hopefully come along this thread in a similar pickle to what I’m in right now.

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you can’t protect game design… look at flappy birds. anyways there is tons of information about the rest of the topics, use the search.

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Thanks, but I was looking for replies with some sort of content, something other than a childish analogy and the proverbial finger pointing at the search bar. I’ve clearly used the search engine, that’s why, firstly, I spent the effort on a post, and secondly, was able to finish the actual “game” portion of the game with just 2 posts on the forums and 5 questions on unity answers. As I said, the community has, for the most part, been particularly helpful, even with threads I’ve had to search for, ones that weren’t necessarily specific to my problem.

Let’s say I don’t want someone to just rip off my art assets, and use them over again in their game or project - what do I need to do to make this happen? I know certain game elements can’t be protected, especially abstract ones - obviously there is more than one FPS out there - but a Halo clone/reskin, with extraordinarily similar graphics, the exact same controls, the same story (even with character names changed), cinema sequences, same weapons, exact same multiplayer modes with the same maps, would definitely expect to encounter some legal problems when it was published. Why? How is that protected, through what process, if any? Photographers automatically have IP rights to the pictures they take - someone can take a similar photograph but isn’t allowed to just use the original photo as they please (all the websites you can upload photos to, like facebook, etc, have you release some of your rights to your photographs somewhere in the user agreement or something). I have no idea if the same is the case for art elements in games, or if I need to go through some particular process to protect the work.

It’s difficult to find guides on copyrights and trademarks and the like that even apply to video games, and those that do are sometimes 6-8 years old, predating the US Supreme court ruling in Brown v Entertainment Merchants Association which, having classified games as art, might have had some effect on their relationship with IP law. That’s what I assume anyway, but the problem is that I don’t know, very few people seem to know, and it’s entirely reasonable, having done plenty of searching and finding no answer, for me to ask the question.

4

Give me the source to verify if it’s good. Also, forget about your ideas, just put the game up and sell it. If it’s good, it’s going to get ripped off regardless of what you do. You can’t sue everyone.

1 Like
5

… unless you have a lot of money (King, Zynga, EA etc)

6

But even the big dogs give up chasing the little guy when the markets become flooded with clones. Many times putting the spotlight on a particular ripoff will give it a brief window of success because they even went out of their way to take action against them.

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It is extremely difficult to protect the IP. I’m no expert, but as far as I have seen, the one with more money (more legal power), will win the argument.
Now if your game is original and people will actually play it, then it will be more popular than the clones, so you have nothing to worry about. However, if it won’t really have much users, then no one will even bother to clone it. So as far as IP theft goes, just don’t worry about it.

To publish your app on iOS App Store or Android Market, you need a developer licence. Android offers a lifetime licence for $25, however iOS licence costs $99 a year. Buying the licence and uploading to market is a very simple process.

I also wanted to use IAP in my app to allow removal of ads, however it turned out that my country was not supported by Google, so I could only publish free apps with no IAP.

At first I integrated AdMob ads, however later I decided to use MoPub, which allows you to change the network you are using without users having to update the app. However as my app has so few users I have only earned a few cents, so I can’t comment on the eCPM.

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Even with any official legal protections following up on them will turn out beyond your means unless you are very successful in which case the protections from publishing should be sufficient (not legal advice my opinion, if you want legal advice on IP go see a lawyer). The person you are going to be going over likely won’t be covered by US law as they are from a different country. You will almost certainly have to go after them where they are located with their local laws. Not impossible but you are a long way from it being worth while.

There are plenty of companies which offer plugins for the various things you stated if you don’t want to write native plugins. I liked chartboost because it was so easy to implement and I get up to $10 for a single install from an ad. It blows me away anyone would pay that much money for a single install.

If you aren’t willing to pay for advertising then you need to hope for organic downloads and world of mouth. This of course limits your reach but you knew this.

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As far as people copying your artwork / models, unless its directly ripped out of the game it will be extremely hard to prove in a court that it infringes any IP that you hold on it. You would need to bring in experts, lawyers and pay other court fees. Its likely that your game would need to make you rich before would even consider going after copycats, in which case just “cross that bridge when you get there”. I believe game design and game mechanics generally cannot be patented or hold copyright.

10

trademark the name of your game so you can legally take down games that are named similar, this protects the “official” version and allows your sequels to be recognised as legit.

11

Why dont you make another game or sequel to the first one. Be sure to make it GRAND. This is what big companies do. They always make another one when they are finished with previous game.

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Put it on the app store.

Either charge for it or put ads in it.

As for promotion, you can make a blog, post on YouTube, send free copies to reviewers etc.

But the best form of promotion is just to make a really great game. Then it will spread by word of mouth.

13

Maybe step 2 is verify that your game is good by getting it play tested by a lot of people. There’s no point worrying about publishers, protecting your IP, etc, if the game isn’t good. And no your own opinion shouldn’t count for anything in this regard. Your friends and family will for the most part say its good even if it isn’t, so ideally you can get it in front of strangers.

Do you have analytics? You probably should but if not even high-scores can help to measure the games “greatness”… if you give it to people are they still playing it and racking up high-scores days later? Weeks later?

14

lol if you charge for your game it will be forgotten in 2 weeks. Make it free. Put in some in app purchases and some ads to get revenue. Designing good IAP’s that feel natural in a game can take longer than making the whole rest of the game by the way. But it’s the only way to make money generally.

For ads, I recommend Heyzap and Playhaven for best revenue.

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Ask hippocoder how to make some cash with it, he’s our master.

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Really? Interesting. I reckoned there are games with a price on them, which happen to make money, too.

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Three years ago, I began this journey in earnest. 20 years of development experience, was just the initial preparation for all that I still had to learn. Given your earnest request, you may consider these suggestions:

Copyright is automatic - put a blurb like ‘Copyright Gigi, 2014’ (for iOS, it’s part of the submission). Forget about trademarks and patents - they are expensive and won’t help you at all. Your idea is NOT worth stealing - and you can’t prevent people from stealing it anyway.

Monetization is as hard as development. So, if you’ve not factored this in yet, be prepared for a LOT of angst. Repeat - MONETIZATION IS HARD!!! Read “Free” by Chris Andersen.

This won’t help as much as you think, though there are many helpful Twitter/Facebook plugins on Unity’s Asset Store.

You are starting late - monetization is part of game-design. Given that you’re here now, you may as well look into HeyZap, Google’s Admob, iOS Ads, RevMob, Chartboost, or dozens of others. I’ve used several, and found them to be: 1) easy to use, and 2) minimal income - the industry average is in the range of $0.1 per 100 daily users.

So 5 years ago. No one cares about your product enough to remove ads. IAP’s must provide REAL value.

It’s a waste of money. Get the product out - contact blog sites, facebook, and every family and friend you have. That’ll net you a few up-votes - yes, just a few - and then, be patient. Building awareness takes time.

My recommendation - make your product FREE - that solves the Penny Gap (google it), which will get your product into 100x more users. Make your product attractive and fun. And stick in a few ads. Then, while you’re earning a few pennies per day, learn what did and did not work (don’t forget metrics - Flurry/GoogleAnalytics/GameAnalytics!). Watch people play your game - WITHOUT TALKING - and learn, as humbly and ego-free as possible. Then, begin the next product knowing that the one metric correlated with success is the number of titles already released.

Gigi

18

Thanks a ton! “Great game” was just rhetorical, I think it’s fun but I don’t really think it’ll do magnificently. More than anything, my goal with this project was to bring an idea to life, and to take each step seriously, from clean(as clean as I can with limited experience) coding with good commenting, to reasonable (but simple, 2D) art assets, to monetization (I always intended to do ads, from the beginning of the project, but started thinking I would do banner ads, and learned later that interstitial is a better way to go). I don’t know if I will even make any money with the game (I’ve always intended for it to be free) and it may very well be, in the short term, more worth my time to just release it ad-free and have a finished project, but my hope is that someday I really will make a great game, and hopefully knowing how the whole ad process works will pay off then.

I suppose that given that advice, I will drop the in-app “remove ads” purchase, and just leave IAPs as a to-do for my future projects. I know I personally spend a few bucks here and there when an app has an ad removal option, because I really don’t like mucking about through a sea of ads, but I guess I probably don’t represent the majority of app consumers.

As far as facebook and twitter goes, I want a share button so that the word is spread, but also just because I like the idea of comparing scores. I’m fiddling with the facebook SDK right now, I considered searching for social plugins, but without someone recommending something specific, and why, I’d rather not risk wasting my money.

Again, many thanks! I don’t have anything concrete yet but assuming I find any particularly useful guides or anything like that, I’ll update my original post with links to those resources.

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Of course there are the insanely rare exception here and there. Especially on mobile platforms though, it’s the worst mistake you can make - to charge for the game. On consoles and PC’s, you should charge money, totally different mindset there. Think about it, there’s more than 100 games released every day on iOS. The ones that get the most reviews and downloads really quickly may not get lost within a couple weeks. You’re only going to get a bunch of reviews quickly if it’s free though because of the exponentially more people that will download it for free. The game’s icon is about the most important thing to getting your game downloaded as well…

This all wasn’t true 2 years ago. But it’s definitely true now and for well over a year.

It’s reality and it sucks, but we can’t go against reality.

Oh, if you want a Facebook plugin, get Neatplug’s. It saves more time than the others by far. It does a lot of things “smartly” without needing you to code it.

I thoroughly agree with everything in Gigiwoo’s last comment :slight_smile:

20

Well, I disagree. We are going to try it with our game. And if we fail, at least we tried :wink: