The workflow game marketing method for indie gamedevs
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- čas přidán 5. 06. 2024
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I'm Pascal a Dutch independent game developer since 2004 known as Orangepixel. I created various games including Residual, the Gunslugs series, Heroes of Loot series, Space Grunts series, Stardash and the Meganoid series released on PC, mobile and various consoles.
Half the money I spend on advertising is waste, and the problem is I do not know which half - Henry Ford
Half sounds on the low end 😁
Yes, very true PR companies know almost nothing about marketing like no one else. Last week I was at a seminar where there were publishers, and I got the same idea that they don't know how to get sales, but they know that they take 30% of the income and some even the IP rights. I asked how they reach the customers, I heard they have a customer base on Steam, in other words they try to get the old customers interested, they don't so much try to get attention in order to bring the game to the attention of more people.
Publishers and PR companies are not the same tho ;) very different interests, as a PR company just wants upfront money and doesn't even believe in a revenue share 😁
Passion is the glue for the house you are building.❤ All my games are Passionated and well sell like one. 😂still the fun and learning and confidence about being yourself is gread.🎉 cheers Orange
Passion is underrated !
Fully agree! Keep it real!
+1 for keeping pics/vids of cool stuff that comes up during production. Good points all-round - but different POV on market-research & trend-tracking. I think it's just a tool in the toolbox. Knowing what the trends are and how your game relates to them helps you better know your own audience, and assess how the expectations are shifting. It can even help seed & shape your own creativity! Jazz players actually do listen to pop, punk, rap, rock, classical, and the blues - you wanna know what your audience is & isn't already hearing, and then riff on [expand/explore] that.
I think we actually do agree on that tho 😁 I'm all for keeping up with trends ! and making sure you know what players like. But that's different from just making a certain genre of game because that has the biggest audience and is the most popular so the "easiest sell". Same with Jazz singers, they might get influenced by pop, punk, rock, what ever, but in the end a jazz singer knows that his audience is smaller, less streams on Spotify, not playing in the big venue's, and not being played much (or at all) on the bigger radio stations. But they keep singing jazz because that's what they like as a creative. Best case scenario, that influence of pop and rock becomes something new and a unique genre on it's own and a hit song! (like rare and unique hit games sometimes pop out).
@@orangepixelgames Ah, I got you 👍I don't think Chris Z is advocating that "fast-follow" approach like in mobile hypercasual though. I think it's more like, a lot of newer folks don't have a fully-formed game in their head. They may have a creative theme, or specific mechanic, they want to explore, but that could take shape in a number of ways (pluripotent!).
In cases like that, esp if it's one of these "bet the farm & the 401(k)" situations as we saw during the pandemic, then it's probably a good idea to merge that theme/mechanic with something more appealing for your chosen platform & audience. Or at least to go into it eyes-open knowing how much real-life risk you're okay with relative to exploring your idea.
Maybe you don't watch all those "quit my job & sold the house with a baby on the way - making my first 2d platformer!!" videos, but it's painful to see 😥 A lot of those folks could've still nurtured their creative spark while not losing their shirts - instead most end up giving up on game-dev altogether.
Love it
Good
I've lived in the Netherlands for the past 14 years, and just moved back to Italy. Pity that I didn't find your channel earlier: it would have been amazing to know you and have a chat about game development
Haha but you do get to enjoy the Italian weather now! 😉
Italian weather is getting weird lately 😐
@@Poltergeist88 All weather is getting weird 😁
07:15 Thanks! Thats what i really thought about when people say this "hey go follow the trend and make a game in gerne X"...no i don't want to lol.
09:00 i agree with you in this case - partically. Mostly yes - show your game as soon as possible. But : i had a small discussion about the strategy "Make the Trailer Before the Game" - literally it means i make a trailer and then start making a game :).
Also the art may changed a lot...i would say if you are in for some weeks and have a art style which you like and want to show then you should post it somewhere.
If you start a prototype but "block" everything out there are just some blocks to show :).
great video! Love your thoughts on the topic and glad you're telling people to focus on the passion and not what the statistics project. Too many professionals are talking about following the path that others make and piggyback off their success and make clones. This is just 1 path people can take and game dev is not binary. It's a spectrum but what is very clear to me and many successful developers is that passion trumps statistics. It's why there are games like Minecraft come out and popular when other highly visually-appealing games out there.
Side note here is that passion projects can be hard to sell or in a niche market. So make sure you plan the development time correctly for realistic returns! Shorter development cycles make projects for smaller audiences still viable (and lower the risks)
@@orangepixelgames Fully agree. Speaking metaphorically about games representing colors, a world of color is better than a world of black and white with shades of gray. Making a product and selling it is very hard to do and quite a feat for anyone working solo or in a team. Unfortunately, time and time again has proven that people who push something completely unique and original end up not as successful as the next person that piggybacks that idea and improves it just a slight bit before the masses start doing that. I think of examples like, The Palm Pilot before the BlackBerry, and Bullfrog's Theme Park vs. RollerCoaster Tycoon.
Not so much clones/trend-chasing, and more about setting expectations, only for the developers this time. You can make whatever you like, but it's critical to know who your market is, and how many of them are out there, so you know how much time/money you can afford to spend. If money is irrelevant to you & your game, then that's fine! But then marketing is also irrelevant 😅
@@mandisaw right. If you take game development as a serious business venture then of course, you have to see it from how the markets may react and what seems best from a business perspective. Most indie devs out there are getting the messages that they need to build their game following market patterns and trends if they want their passion project to be successful. The truth is, most indie devs that are solo artists should know that there's success in all different kinds of avenues, not just by following the practices of what large game dev studios do.
Bob Ross was successful not by making his painting TV show according to what people want to see on TV or what they wanted him to paint. He painted what he was passionate about, nature. Not everyone is a Bob Ross but anyone can be a Bob Ross.
@@jimkurth Except Bob Ross was incredibly talented at selling his art supplies/courses, and of course, the thing PBS actually "sells", which is edutainment 😅It was never [just] about the painting - it was about building your self-confidence and being able to stay calm & adapt to adversity [partly personality, partly learned in the military].
The painting was essentially an infomercial mixed with what we'd now think of as a tutorial speedrun and overlaid by his "just chill, bro, it'll be alright" life-lessons. It was actually a brilliant mashup of creative, educational & business goals, hence its success.
I was aware of most points, but hearing it from somebody else makes it more a call to action for me. The automation stuff may actually be the key to success. Doing the work while there is so much to do as a solo gamedev makes forgetting things you don't really like real easy.
Automation might take a bit of time to get it up and running, but long term, it's probably worth it!
Dear @orangepixel it would be nice if you could make some detailed vid about it.
@@WeAreNoJokeGames about what exactly? 🤨🙂
@@orangepixelgamesabout how to set up and run these automatizations
@@WeAreNoJokeGames oh! well I don't think there's a general solution for that :) Look at what you need to do for your marketing/posting stuff, and see how you can develop tools for that.. will be different for everybody's own situation
If making a game was a beast, marketing is its big dad
I'm not building a game. Instead, I am an idiedev building a (Flutter-based) cross-platform, native personal knowledge management app... point being that every piece of advice you provided is applicable to other non-game software endeavors, as well. Am I the only non-game developer watching your videos? 🤔 Anyway, great video with good advice. See you next week!
Haha not sure, I do know I have a bunch of web-designers wanting to be game developers watching my videos !
thanks
No problem
Thanks for sharing! Do you think this YT in particular has helped with your game sales?
YT is mostly community building and my outlet for sharing my knowledge. Any extra sales I get from it are awesome and a bonus! (Also not sure how to measure it 🤔 )
Damn, shots fired 😂
Thanks for putting this out there - as the kids say: 'based'. I love Chris' content and I agree on all your points. If everyone just chases the meta trends in gaming then there's a risk it'll end up derivative and dull like 'AAA' gaming.
My games are unlikely to ever be in a 'popular genre' but making a game I enjoy playing and developing comes first. That way there's at least a chance I'll finish something, lol.
👍
💪
Enjoyed this thanks! Particularly like the advice not to just follow the trends and make a game that's a copy of another game instead of something truly new or creative. With my own game, Roadhouse Manager, one of main motivators is to make mechanics and something new in a genre-mix that has never been done before (a roguelite/rpg/management game set in a bar) with cutting edge technologies that haven't been used like this before (AI-llm powered patrons and simulated historical figures, extensive AI made soundtrack, etc). So often I'll see game dev videos or articles saying you should just stick to popular genre conventions, and new ideas are a bad thing, but those doing something like that would not inspire me, as a creative and inventive game making dude.
Very true! Just keep an eye on the development time and worst case scenario for the sales 😉 and make sure that all works out for making another game.. and another.. and.. another!
As someone who used to watch Bar Rescue and Restaurant Impossible, a roadside-bar management sim all by itself sounds like a fun idea! If this were a year ago, I'd have said you should pitch it to Amazon as a tie-in to their Roadhouse movie remake (could've got some AWS credits in the mix 😄).
A Sofware Architect once told me "You get 1, maybe 2 tokens per project to exchange for using a new technology otherwise things get out of hand" In my own startup I thought I could do better. I took many hurdles but I didn't get to the end of the road.
Creating a number of proof of concepts (PoC) at least for the core gameplay loop might keep you inspired instead of bogged down, as each one can count as a win.
It might also be good idea to have the core game compiling and ready to go at all times. Things like AI music will then be automatically subservient to the core game instead of a component you just bolt on.
At the end of the day, a game is about the experience of the player while the innovation is only part of that.
is keymailer any good?
It's not bad.
1:51 What do you think about publicly shaming PR companies after they promise something big?
Letting gamedev's know how things went with a publisher might be constructive. Throwing mud will get some on yourself or at least a "good" publisher will think twice about doing business with you.
You either keep your options open or create exposure for yourself. If your combative and a relative nobody with little to lose publicly shaming a publisher might even make sense. When you are a professional gamedev making a living out of games, it's probably better to error on the cautious side.
I can barely understand code, marketing is an entirely different animal I have yet to even touch.
But touch it you will ! ... that .. sounds... weird 🤔
Uh... can I have that Wordpress bot? lol
No, it's very specific and code written for my situation 😁
Understood! It's still so interesting lol. So could you tell me did you write a plugin to push data or is it something like a hook? 😅
The bot runs in nodejs, and the wp stuff uses Postie plugin which was the easiest way to get it running