Marketing

Overall

You want to have a marketing plan from day 1. Your game will not be played if you do not promote it, so this is essential in getting a good portfolio piece.

For a minimal marketing plan, make sure to cover the following:

  • Who is your target audience?
    • Describe them, what does a day in their lives look like, what is their culture, what are their interests, what are their passions, why are they your audience?
    • Explain how will your game fit within their media diet and their lives in general?
  • What other games like your game are popular with your audience, and - more importantly - what makes yours stand out?
    • It is important to understand what your unique selling proposition is going to be. You are likely making a game with limited marketing and a smaller budget, so you need to have something that will make it stand out.
  • What are the key features of your game that will appeal to your audience?
    • Relate your audience description back to key features, and explain why these are important to them.
    • Write up these features in a marketable way. Most games will literally list these key features in their marketing on online stores so figure out what those are for your game. Don’t make this overly complicated.
  • Where does your audience finds its information? What online communities/subreddits/discord servers/hashtags do they frequent, and which of these are you going to be using to reach them?
    • Be thorough about this. Just listing social media platforms is not what you need here. Describe specific communities within platforms and list what the rules of these communities are (if any). For example, while Twitter is pretty open, Reddit is very strict about what you can post on subreddits. (There is often a 1:10 ratio required between self-promotion and non-promotional posts for your account to be allowed to promote your work.)
  • When is the best time to reach your audience on these platforms?
  • Why would your audience subscribe/follow/engage with your game and the marketing?
    • What are the high level strategies that you are going to use to make your audience excited about your game and partake in its marketing? How are you going to make this an engaging and interactive experience for them.
    • Don’t just expect people to see a screenshot and be blown away. You want to think about how you can engage people. For example…
      • If you have a great artists, it could be a good idea to have them do timelapse videos of their work and ask people to react.
      • You could give the community a voice in certain design choices that your team has to make.
      • Playtesting early builds can be a great way to get people engaged and talked about your project.
      • Identifying relevant events and doing something special about your game on that day can help.
    • In the end, there are many ways to get your audience to engage with your content. Try to be creative and find things that work specifically for your project.
  • What content are you going to release to appeal to your audience, and when are you planning to release specific content?
    • Use the answers above to outline an actual week-by-week plan from today until either the end of the semester or your launch day that describes what content you are going to be releasing and what activities you are going to run to promote your game. Make this a part of your deliverables for this class and add it to your project plan (in your project management software) so that creating marketing materials is done on time and part of the project.
  • When are you planning to release your game and in what form?
    • The date matters as you do not want to conflict with bigger, competing launches or major sale events. Look up what releases are coming out and when it would be a good time to release your game.
    • You also have a choice on whether you want to do a full release or a pre-release or early access version. Again, you want to think about this as both have advantages and downsides.

To help your research, make sure to do a few searches on Statista. Northeastern gives you free access to Statista Links to an external site.and there is a lot of information for marketing purposes on there.

The goal of your plan is to build up an audience that wants to play your game, well before you are ready to release your game. Ideally, you want tens of thousands of people willing to download your game on release date, so that when you finally release it, the distribution platform’s algorithms will boost your game up to their front page.

To get to this point, you need to put out quality content related to your game at a regular interval: Show off your progress, talk about how cool the team is, ask people for advice and feedback, relate the game to online events, etc. and try to do all these things with high quality content as much as you can. In particular, try to post content that is unexpected, genuinely funny or technically impressive as much as you can.

A key part of your marketing plan is your launch day to do list.

The 4Ps (but only 3 here) of Product Management

In marketing, we often talk about the 4 P’s: Price, Product, Place, and Promotion. However, for the scope of this class, we are going to focus on product, place and promotion.

Product (What)

This is what you are selling. Your product should embody your brand identity.

Brand Identity as a function means the way that consumers will identify your product and differentiate it from the competition. This is stuff like your name, logo, symbol, characters (including your team members - tell people who you are and what you stand for), slogans, and design. Make these elements unique, memorable and consistent with each other and your brand meaning.

Place (Where)

Place, as far as this class is concerned, was somewhat covered above:

      • Where are you promoting/placing your product (and how will it be communicated to the consumer within that place)? To reiterate above, this includes placement through Reddit, Discord communities (including your own), Twitter, and other social medias. Figure out where you are going to promote your game and how your content will fit within that space.
      • Where will you distribute your product (but also when will you be distributing)? Are you going to distribute on Steam, itch.io, GameJolt, your own website, or even all of these? The answer to this question needs to be communicated and has implications for your marketing as well as different distribution platforms have different conventions.

Promotion (How)

Promotion is asking questions such as “Where is my audience most commonly consuming information?” or “What is the ideal period for promoting a product?” or “How do competitors plan their promotions?”. You do not have the luxury to setup a perfect promotion since your timeline is already set to the timeline of the class, but you still want to think about these questions. More specifically, if certain events are going to happen that fit your game well in the semester during which you are taking this class, you might want to think about what you can do with that event. Similarly, you need to know where the audience of your game is consuming information about the games they download.

Your Marketing Kit

It is strongly recommended to get the following:

  1. A press kit - Check out presskit() on IndieDB.com
  2. A website - Set up a Wix, Wordpress or Squarespace for your game, or simply make a one-page webpage yourself Links to an external site.- I recommend bootstrap Links to an external site..
  3. Store pages - Set up your page at the distribution platforms that you will be using and update them throughout your project.
  4. Social media - Set up your social media accounts.
  5. 6 screenshots
  6. A trailer (see below)
  7. Some GIFs (see below)
  8. A press list - Look up journalists that might want to write about your game and add their contact information to a list. Once you are ready to release, email them all your press release as well as inbox@gamespress.com.
  9. Launch day list - A list of tasks that need to be completed on launch day to maximize the amount of traffic to your store pages.
  10. A press release - When your game is ready, you want to let the world know through a press release Links to an external site.. For examples of professional press releases, check out gamespress.com.Links to an external site.

Items 1-4 need to be done as soon as possible, preferably on day 1. The other items need to be completed and updated as you are making progress.

Your Key Assets

Two key assets that you need for marketing are a trailer and some GIFs:

Use the following best practices for a trailer:

  • You have between 3 and 5 seconds to capture the viewer**’**s attention. Especially on the Internet where anyone can just move on to the next video. Get them hooked with a powerful intro!
  • Write the trailer’s story beforehand, plan your work. Don’t just try to wing it, figure out what the narrative of the trailer will be before you make it.
  • Use footage from the game! This is a game trailer. People want and expect to see your game. They want to know how the game plays and what they might buy.
  • Have great music and sound effects. Sound is your best ally to convey a certain feel or emotion
  • Use animated text and make it look as good as the in-game graphics. Use short expressions, up to 5 or 6 words long, to convey key pieces of information. In the trailer of Hollow Knight, a Metroidvania set in an underground world, the developers use phrases like “Forge your own path”, “Unleash the power of charms”, to great effect.
  • End your trailer with a call to action. Tell the viewer where to get your game all what he should do after watching. If this is a launch trailer, you want people to know where they can buy your game (Apple and Google store, Steam, etc.) and where they can find your landing page
  • As an example, check out the Hollow Knight Release Trailer (Links to an external site.).

For a GIF, add the following:

  • Make them part of your PR plan
  • Recycle your trailer by cutting it up in many gifs
  • Mind the 1st and last frame of your gif
  • Twitter - Movement stands out, experiment with #screenshotsaturday and #wipwednesday
  • Imgur - Blog post format, 1st frame and headline are key, don’t forget the #
  • Reddit - Learn the rules of the subreddits. Be part of the community.
  • Email - Post gifs in directly, mind the file size