A.R. – So, this talk is based on the good things marketing has, because normally indie studios are a bit afraid of it.
Most of us are developers and we think that the cool thing about doing videogames is programming, art, design…But instead, all those things that involve business and marketing…We often ignore it.
Well, my experience after doing mobile games, and some of them made at Ubisoft, I have learnt many things. In fact, there are a lot of indie studios that use marketing and I think it's very useful.
While using marketing is very suitable to have creative freedom. Utilize marketing basically to reach out the people, adapt the game to what they like and know how to make good decisions.
For example, the case I was explaining before, you want to launch a game on consoles, but maybe you can only afford to launch it in one console.
Which one you choose among the 3?
Thanks to marketing, you can inform yourself about the marketing and say:
Okay, the type of game I'm going to launch fits better with the type of players of this platform. Things like that.
Well then, this is a resume about the companies where I was.
. Since last year, I'm building Anarkade and I still didn't publish my first game.
I was working for 13 years in another study which begin as Microjocs, doing mobile games in 2002. I went in there in 2005.
This one, is Astro Odissey, sequel of Astro. It is the first game in which I worked as Lead Programmer and as Team lead, known as Producer nowadays.
Then Digital Chocolate acquired us, leaded by Trip Hawking (the guy who founded Electronic Arts).
The other development study apart from us was the one in Helsinki, people who manage Supercell now.
We were very successful on Free to Play, mobile, Facebook… Then Ubisoft acquired us in 2013. And I was there until I decided to fund my own company.
I've spent 5 or 6 years of my career programming, and another 5 or 6 years as a Community Manager.
While I was exerting as Community Manager, I was doing Customer Relations Management.
I was managing the community at the same time I had to do customer support duties. I've also worked on the Customer Support role.
First days in the studio, as we did mobile games, there were a lot of phones, and making "ports" was a joy, as the "master" knows (referring to Alberto González from Abylight).
First 3 weeks I was there, even though I was going to work as a programmer, they told me: "It'll be better if you test all the phones while learning all the bugs of each one.
Then you going to port and develop games given those bugs and problems they generate. Take charge and test around".
And now, I'm working on my company. I'm the producer and the creative director, so I did at Ubisoft, the other studio. In smaller projects, I designed and leaded the team too.
I've also been on Project management tasks, which is the same as leading the marketing duties, PR or even ASO, the optimization of the e-shop and user acquisition.
Here is Trip Hawking, who also founded the 3DO and the ESRB qualification system.
You pay for every game that is released in console, and this gentleman wins some money (laughs)
Eva (CEO Abylight): This is the one who founded the ESRB?
Alex: Yes, he is one of them. But I wanted to talk about the main challenges indies have to face and how marketing can help us.
Basically, one of them is getting the money. We tend to say "Oh, the publisher is ignoring me" or "Oh, the investor is ignoring me"
One of the things they want (I didn't go to demand it, but I know they demand it on Ubisoft internally, in order to do a pitch)
Basically, more than the Business Plan, the marketing plan and why your game is good enough as a product.
I mean, there is a real market where is going to sell? There's people who will buy it? Do they like it? Etc.
Then, if you have a good team (someone good at marketing which helps you out since the beginning of the project
S/he can help you get some financial support
Ensure that your game will be very good and they will probably put money into it.
There is money to invest, but they don't want to invest in something which is not surely going to work or not.
But if you have a marketing team capable of ensuring that: "It has this, and that, and this… And it's going to work because of this, and it's going to sell this amount…"
This is how you convince them.
But if you give to them your personal vision of the game, that is very beautiful, works well…
they will say, "yeah, it's good" they will ignore you.
Visibility is one of the principal problems. "Oh, no one is seeing my game"
Oh, maybe your game is bullshit
Maybe you are doing a game for a certain type of player and that player wants to play other things.
I mean, marketing can help you modify your game, having total creative freedom, but it can give you feedback too.
It can tell you" if you re-adjust this here and there, you have a bigger market
meaning your game can be bought by more people or there is a niche where you can attack, being a great opportunity for you."
Press and influencers ignore me.
They receive thousands of notifications
but maybe it can be because this youtuber or journalist plays other type of games.
For example, with Rawal Rumble,
one of the reasons why I went ahead with it is because, without starting any marketing campaign
people from Youtube or the Press wanted to try my game.
Because of that
the key is: if to this journalist or youtuber or whatever, you give a game with realistic graphics or another genre
maybe he does not like it because he wants a very specific game.
You can apply this to every type of game
In marketing
what you have to do is find people who like your game
who like this type of game, this graphics, webs specialized in those kind of games…
A fishing game
Maybe you go to Jara y Sedal (Spanish magazine about fishing)
they may like to know there is a fishing game.
Meaning that inside all of this customers
there can be people who will buy your game or are interested with it.
Instead of going to the top of the hill: "I want Rubius or Pewdiepie to promote me" or whatever
start from the bottom
Contact with youtubers, videogames press, or press who isn't specialized only in games…
centered on the type of game, or the theme, ambientation, visual style...
You'll normally get better numbers going to the specific niche
instead of aiming to the big ones
Within visibility terms
it can help you to know where to find players, to focus better on them
On the other side, there is the store.
A lot time happens that,
a possible customer goes to Steam
App Store or similar
they see the screenshots of the game or the ratings the users give and they fly away.
One of the things marketing people do is ASO (App Store Optimization).
Testing screenshots, title, icon of the game, description of the game…
They tend to identify the best combination to work with, within testing the target customer
This means that the conversion rate will go up
meaning that more people who lands on your page game, will buy it.
Talking now about the sales
"Oh, my game is not selling well"
This is what I said before
Maybe the problem is, that it's not in the right platform
It happens, maybe your game in another platform, pc, mobile, can change the sales number by a lot.
Maybe your game works very well on mobile devices, but not on consoles
Marketing specialists can help you to decide where a game will work better on
"this type of games work better on mobile, better on console, etc…"
About that, I will explain it
This is the videogames market scenario
This is Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America.
As you can see, Asia is very important
but for example we are with the same problem again.
If you release your game on consoles, in China (basically all of the Asian territory)
console games practically don't sell well
it's useless to traduce it to Chinese (in quotation marks, lots of) It's always good to traduce it to Chinese.
But if you release the game on mobile devices,
I dare you to have it in Chinese
Or for example, Steam.
This ranking (you'll see it on your pc) this is the ranking about the most used language of the Steam users. An official ranking from Steam.
The first one is Chinese with a 64%.
I can assure you that the majority of the games you release are not traduced to Chinese.
This means that Chinese people won't see the games at the Highlights on Steam
meaning that you need to know the countries and the most important markets where your target is. This is why the tables are for.
This is the money that is generated by country
There's EEUU at the first place, Japan, China… Sorry, first of all China, secondly EEUU, Japan, Korea, Canada, etc…
But we always need to know the market.
For example, Free to play and PC are very important in Asia. Japan, in mobile, generates an insane amount of money
For several years, they've been moving the great market of consoles to the mobile one. (PC was very small)
Nowadays, the revenue of mobile market is amazing.
About the countries, which is a very important topic, we have the game type
Demographics change a lot inside the same platform.
The genre of every game changes a lot
This example right here is from a survey, done by 270.000 players ( I was one of them) in 2007 by Quantic Foundry.
Basically they did a survey where they put a list of game type in which you had to say which one you like and you don't.
And one of the things they looked out on the survey was the percentage of women and men who liked every type of game.
Then we can see that there are games which have a similar percentage of women and men, and games in which there is a great difference.
By one side or another.
So, if you want to do a game for a determined demographic, you need to know if you will have an easy or a rough road ahead.
The big thing is: there are millions of tables on the Internet that can help you, for example the demographic ones.
Xbox one (this is from the last year) in theory this is a filtration of a document from Ubisoft, which gave to the people at the Build Conference
I have no clue if it's real or not, but it makes sense.
Basically the average player has 33 years. The global age of the gamer is at 35, and the "magic peak" is between 25 and 45 years. Where the big money is made.
For example, these are the demographics of the Switch, 6 months ago.
Tomorrow (link in bio) Nintendo publishes his fiscal numbers of the year and will give the new update to that table.
According to Nintendo, only a 11% of women have an account in the eShop on Switch.
Because of that, demographics can help us to think: "okay, this market is very big or this market is very small".
"There is a reason why, in this case, women are not buying Switch and what I can do. And because it's an enormous market, I'll do something to attract them".
In Switch, if you want to release a game focused on women
you have to know that, from the 17 Million of Switch sold, only an 11% are women
Maybe this number is like that because the father is the one in charge of paying with the credit card
Imagine that there are 5 people who can play
There can be men, there can be women, but the one in charge of the account and the console is the father, you know what I mean?
Maybe this is what explains those numbers, because these are eShop accounts,
but then, there is the Steam case in which I said: What the heck?
Mr. Steamspy, one day looked to the genre, look for the percentage about women and men in Steam
At first, he looked for it on Alexa and he saw that an 18% are women, but a lot of people told him that Alexa is not very accurate
because it only tracks you if you have a plugin installed in the browser.
Then, it's not very accurate
But he used a Google tool (which is more accurate and it does not require to have plugins and nothing in the browser)
and found that a 4% of the Steam shop are women.
What happens here? In mobile women are more predominant
I mean, it's not the case that there are more women in general.
The real thing is, there are more women playing than men…whatsoever is….
Alberto: Because of the type of game?
Alex: Excuse me?
Eva: The games are more direct. Well, they have an easy way to engage them.
Alex: For example, the type of game is more similar. When we see the genre table, if we look closely, there's some sort of pattern.
For example, Match-3 , happens to be what women like more compared to men.
What happens in mobile? That there are a bunch of Match-3.
There are the more popular ones like Candy Crush.
In Family or Farming Simulator, we have FarmVille or Hay Day which was from…
Eva: Supercell
Alex:...Which is one of the most sold ones in mobile.
What happens? All the type of game that women like are on mobile or in downloadable games for web, webs like Big Fish, King, etc.
Maybe if you release a game on console combining all of the genres women like, you'll manage to attract them.
These are tips, ideas and more that I write to all of you, you can download the presentation (link in bio) and you can read it at home.
Obviously, this is not how you write it on a Powerpoint. But well, some tips and details for you
These are things that I've been telling along the speech
like the part about how to choose an influencer or a media from a very specific niche to your type of game instead of a big media that's very mainstream.
Why? Because the type of people, the audience, which is going to see it will be more focused on your game and not the mainstream one
in which maybe you'll only attract a little percentage.
Talking about the PR, CM and CS, a lot of people tend to include it on marketing, thing that does not happen on big companies.
There are studios that handle it differently for many reasons.
Because they tend to be very different and they need people who are very specialized in the fields of marketing.
For example, someone who manages marketing, community, PR, customer support, is very rough
Why? Because as a PR s/he has to have a lot of experience and contact, and a wide knowledge.
A person who spent his/her whole life working on it is very rough, and may not know about how other fields work.
I recommend you to hire a PR agency or an advertising one, if you can afford it
especially a PR agency, specialized on the type of game you are going to create.
I mean, it's not the same an agency that manages consoles than another that manages mobile games
If you release a console game, the mobile games agency won't be useful
If you can, grab one that is used to work with indies and had succeeded, which is important too.
Someone who has never worked with videogames won't be able to help you. Some people think the contrary
That the main thing is that they have marketing knowledge and can sell sausages, videogames…
No, no, there are many specific things in videogames. You have to know about videogames and about marketing.
Eva: Well guys, thank you very much for coming. To all of you, everyone, thank you very much. Alex, thanks for sharing your tips.
Alex: Thank you guys.
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