Do you think that most indies don’t spend enough time on “making people care” about their game, compared to making the game functional and fun?
I’ve recently abandoned my game project because I felt that no matter how good I’d manage to execute the concept, the market at large would not care about it at all. And neither would I really, which is why I don’t have enough motivation to ever finish it in the first place. Making games probably just isn’t for me, but thinking and talking about them is, and until you stop me I’ll post a new thread every now and then.
Yesterday I was browsing steam and I realized that probably most people that ever see anything of a game at all, will only see a 120 x 45 pixel image and the name. That’s it. I’d be highly surprised if that isn’t the point where you already lose a large majority of all the people who potentially could be interested in your game. Can anyone confirm this based on actual data?
At this stage, what could be done to make a person care enough about your game to actually click the link and view the steam store page or at least hover the mouse over it and read the mouseover? Seriously, I’d like to know, because I can’t come up with a good answer. Titles with marketing budget probably do it by hammering the name into your brain on other channels so you’ll click it “because you’ve heard of it”, but let’s assume this is not an option. How do indies get someone interested enough to even view the store page?
I’m genuinely curious because I don’t really have an answer. My first thought is to choose title and thumbnail image to as best as possible communicate in which general genre and theme the game is set. If it has “tactics” in the name and I’m interested in tactical combat games then this might be a first step to making me click. If the same game sounds like a MOBA (e.g. “Heroes of …”) you’d already lose me there. Any better ideas?
Let’s assume we’ve managed to get someone over that first and very important hurdle, now s/he’s looking at the store page. Does any actual data exist in which order people check out information on that page and where the average user leaves the page again? I’d imagine most look at the steam review rating first and if that’s mostly negative they’ll leave the page again because everything else would most likely a waste of their time. Personally I always skip the video at first and click on a few screenshots to get a feel for what kind of game I’m looking at. It’s that reason why I think it is a really stupid idea to include only cutscene images or bullshots here.
Example:
None of the screenshots show the GUI at all. The camera perspective can be set like that ingame, but it is entirely impractical so when I’m playing it would never look like this. Those screenshots don’t tell me what I need to know about that game to get interested. Based on those I’d have most likely left the steam store page without investigating further. This is a huge problem imho, because it turns out this is my third most played game in my steam library with 163 hours, closely followed with 157 hours and counting in part 2 of the game. If the game hadn’t been gifted to me, most likely I’d have missed out on that, because the screenshots do a poor job at communicating why I should care about the game.
What do you think makes the perfect selection of 4 screenshots for the steam store page? You can upload more, but if the first 4 don’t hook someone I doubt they scroll to see more.
Let’s assume we’ve found a brave soul who is not discouraged yet and is now willing to read something about your game. I always go for the little descriptive text, top right below the artwork. For AS1 it reads:
Is that a good text? I think not, because it only adresses people familiar with the franchise. It doesn’t even tell me it is an RTS. I’d imagine this text area should focus on getting new people into the franchise, veterans most likely already care enough to dig deeper and scroll down for more in-depth text describing what’s better about this game, compared to other titles in the series.
To be honest I don’t think the trailer video is really that important. If screenshots and description didn’t make me want to investigate further I’ll not sit through 2 minuts of video. If I am already interested at that point I’ll click through the video to see if it has actual gameplay footage that answers further questions. If it doesn’t, I’ll find that on youtube. If the trailer seems enjoyable on its own merit, I might watch it. But honestly I don’t think it really has much power to change my purchase decision either way if it isn’t showing straight up gameplay.
Do you think I’m underestimating the importance of trailers? Would people rather watch a trailer than read 3 sentences of description? I’d rather do what is faster (read) but maybe that isn’t the norm.
When I sit in my room and look towards my shelves, I see a row of old cardboard boxes that games used to be shipped in, before the DVD case was invented. Some of the titles include: GTA 1, Pizza Connection, TFX, Jagged Alliance 1, Doom 3, Worms Reinforcements, Sim City 2000, Sam and Max hit the road, Stunt Island and Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. I realized that for almost all the games I have on display it would be pretty easy to come up with a 2-3 sentence “elevator pitch” or “steampage description” that at the time of release of the game would have gotten people interested or even excited. But I don’t think that carries over well into the present time. So much has been done already, so much has been explored, we are so heavily bombarded with new releases and gamers as a whole have become so jaded… what can still be done to make people care?
This seems like a really important question for me, because it has to be kept in mind right from the start of making the game, and can potentially have huge influence on how well greenlight campaigns, crowdfunding, press coverage etc. would work.
I know there still is hope, of the top of my head I know a few people on this forum are working on games that I think could make a significant number of people care enough about them to actively seek out more information and/or make a purchase. But I also see a flood of projects where I couldn’t think of a 2-3 sentence description to make people care about the game, no matter how hard I tried. And I also think this has not necessarily anything to do with “is the game fun?”. E.g. I played DayZ when it was still a mod and it was one of the buggiest messes that I’ve ever seen. It was heavily flawed, arguably not fun at all for many people, had a frustrating learning curve and ugly graphics, but it made me care because it offered me something that I hadn’t experienced before.
Novelty of some sorts seems to work well, and so does the polar opposite: well established franchises / IP. What else makes people care about games?
Should we invest more thought into this aspect of a game concept in the preproduction phase? I have the theory that it might actually be an excellent way to do a reality check on a project, if you built a mockup steampage screenshot with the description text and one mockup “screenshot” of the game. For me it would be a way to get a fresh eye on a concept and maybe get a more realistic idea if anyone would really care about that kind of game or not. You could even show it to a few people and see how they react. If they don’t say much, you might want to rethink the concept, if they get excited and ask when this is coming out, you are on to something.
Prototyping still needs to be done. You still might have something that sounds good on paper but falls apart when put to the test. But, if you have something that looks dull and boring on paper, but is actually quite fun to play, would you ever get enough people to try it and change their mind in todays gaming ecosystem? I feel like we have reached a point where extra thought needs to be put into this. I don’t even really see this as “marketing”, even though it confirms the saying “marketing can not be an afterthought” and it serves a very similar purpose.
Thoughts?
If you want to give it a try, write a 300 character (including spaces) description of the game you are working on. That seems to be roughly the maximum length that can be shown in that space on a steam store page in the top right corner below the artwork, more or less depending on how the line breaks turn out, so better keep it a bit shorter. Imagine this was the only chance to convince someone to even look at your your game, what would you write?
