Games Brief

Using social networks to build a tribe

2012-02-02T15:32:24Z

Marketing and community-building are mandatory for self-publishing games developers. Reaching out and communicating with your fans is essential to making money with a free-to-play game. This post is the third of three extracts from How to Publish a Game that we’re reproducing here, to show you how to attract customers and build a tribe of followers. For a complete guide to self-publishing and making money from your game, buy the book now.

Social marketing

'Social Media' image by Pascual Lopez

The golden rule for social marketers is “Go where your customers are.” It’s no longer cost effective to drag them to you – you need to go to them.

Facebook

Facebook’s growth has been nothing short of astonishing. With over 400 million registered users65, approximately half of whom visit the website every month, it has become more than a marketing and communication tool. It is now a games platform in its own right.

And as Figure 19 shows, it is showing exponential growth. The chart is from 1st December 2009, and within three months, Facebook had added another 50 million users.

Fan pages on Facebook can be very powerful. In the case of Pet Society, nearly 1.6 million people have Liked the page. That means that updates from the page appear in their newsfeeds and their friends will see that they like the game. This social proof is extremely powerful and helps to drive viral take-up of the game.
The purpose of a Facebook Page is to:

Allow gamers to show how much they like the game
Have a feedback channel for suggestions and ideas
Give a mechanism of talking to your customers in their own environment
Showcase how popular your game is

You should use it to keep players updated with changes, to initiate conversations with your fans and to provide additional ways of interacting with them.

Buy How to Publish a Game

I use a Facebook Page for GAMESbrief, even though I am not targeting a consumer audience. I import GAMESbrief blog posts via the RSS feed and fans can Like or Comment on stories, which spreads them across the Facebook social graph.

I go a step further: I include a Facebook “Like GAMESbrief” widget on my blog. Its purpose is not, in fact, to get new fans; it’s to show visitors to my site that people they know like GAMESbrief. (The fact that Facebook knows who you are automatically populates my Fan box with your friends is a worry for another day.)

Because people like what people they like, like. (I hope that made sense). By showing people that their friends like GAMESbrief, I encourage them to become Fans themselves. That allows to me to spread GAMESbrief further across the social graph.

So, I ask you to visit the Gamesbrief Facebook page. and Like it – You’ll get easy access to all of my posts and help spread the word about GAMESbrief.

Twitter

Image by Gwyneth Anne Bronwynne Jones

If your game is an online game, you absolutely, 100%, must have a Twitter account. If you use for nothing else but telling gamers when you have a problem with your servers, it will be worth it.

id Software’s Twitter account for Quake Live is an excellent example. It is not used primarily as a marketing tool, but as a way of keeping players aware of any issues with the service.

This is a great use of Twitter: responsive, real-time and addressing issues of pressing concern to gamers.

It is harder to use Twitter to build buzz. The site is still nowhere near as popular as Facebook and with only 140 characters, there is a limited amount you can get across (which, of course, is the point.)

My top Twitter tips are:

Be human. Twitter is often best when people can follow a person, not a company
Build a personality
Create tweets that can be retweeted. Aim not for 140 characters, but for a message that can fit “RT @youname: ” in front of it.

For those of you who would prefer formula, max length = 140 – 6 – user name length

If you want to see how I use Twitter, follow GAMESbrief and me.

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Games for TV

2012-02-21T15:09:56Z

Nicholas will be speaking at Games For TV, an event co-organised by Games for Brands and C21 Media. Learn how to enhance the value of your intellectual property by working with traditional media, and how to drive monetisation by combining your game with ‘traditional’ content.

Nicholas will be part of a panel on monetisation, and will give a talk on 10 things that TV companies get wrong when making games.

Early bird discounts continue until 20th March, so book now to save £100!

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Real Entrepreneurs Don’t Multitask

2012-02-09T16:27:54Z

This guest post was originally published at digiogi and is reproduced here with kind permission of Steve Taylor

Photo by Ryan Ritchie

When my powerhouse (mother, wife, MD) friend Jaya Chakrabarti asked me at the beginning of this year, via this blog ,for my top ten tips for creative entrepreneurs, some readers were a little surprised by Tip No. 5: “Stop multitasking; it’s the devil’s work”.

We are so used to being bombarded with advice from productivity gurus, downloading tools that transform our desktop or inbox into a task management hothouse or sitting through do-more webinars delivered by toned-down sociopaths disguised in Brooks Brothers suits that we are now brainwashed into thinking that the more things we can seemingly do at once, or within a ten minute window, the more squarely we are set on the road to success. Not so.

Sure, there’s a place for multitasking. The kitchen, for example. Two-thirds of the time I single-handedly run a household consisting of myself and my teenage sons, so I have adaptively developed new behaviours – I can unload a full dishwasher in exactly the time it takes for a teabag to brew, for example. Or cook risotto whilst hanging a wash on a drying rack in the next room. You get the picture.

What works in the utility room, though, doesn’t play so well in the office or studio.

The optimum mental mode for stirring a pan of flavoured rice is not so different from that which is most conducive to bagging the recycling or erecting an ironing board. That kind of multitasking, often evoked as a defining characteristic of women – sometimes by women themselves when pointing out the essentially unevolved nature of the male psyche – is a highly useful skill to learn, one that could potentially save a few marriages.

I suspect it is the unconscious transfer of this piece of contemporary folk wisdom into the work sphere that has led to quite a bit of manic and hopelessly ineffective behaviour by the leaders and senior managers of growing businesses.

There’s a simple exercise I’ve done with several clients – corporate and entrepreneurial – over the years. The account I offer here is a generic composite, but if you do recognise yourself in it, then I suggest another exercise – building a well-known phrase or saying around the words ‘fit’ and ‘cap’.

All I do is get the person in question, the director or MD, to write down, literally minute by minute every single thing they do, for two or three successive days. A wonk-y colleague once extrapolated this to a more scientific extreme, identifying some 160 tasks going on daily in a particular team and mapping them against a timeline for each team member. Not only did this reveal damaging levels of multitasking but it also showed that almost everyone was working on tasks that were three levels below their role and experience, most of the time. Very useful intelligence, which we subsequently used to nail down job descriptions to improve work satisfaction and productivity.

Nothing I encountered in corporate entities prepared me for the entrepreneurial sector, though.

Here, multitasking can be virtually sectionable. Tasks lasting just one or two minutes each, wildly fluctuating in focus; from a new business call to a snippet of project management to editing a newsletter entry to signing off a payment to scheduling an appraisal to fixing a software bug…It’s the mental (in both senses) equivalent of doing a triathlon by running a few metres, chucking yourself in the water, only to immediately jump out and onto a bike before pounding the road on your feet once more. Result: you don’t get very far, and your body can’t take it. Well – surprise, surprise – nor can your mind.

These behaviours are acute in growing companies for a number of reasons. There are fewer people to get things done, especially senior people who take responsibility for stuff. Staff aren’t always paid top rates, so there’s a reluctance to ask them to do apparently demeaning tasks. Not least – let’s be honest here – many entrepreneurs are control freaks, manic micro-managers, which is precisely the reason they work for themselves.

Some simple advice. Accumulate similar mental-mode tasks into ‘bundles’: project management; financial; client direction (not client management, that needs to be done in real time by people you employ); strategy; organisational development; operations and so on. Once you have two hours worth of stuff to do in a category, do it. That’s enough time to stay in the flow and capitalise on the effect of being in a consistent mental mode. We all know this already, experientially, from doing biz dev calls; we’re much more confident, articulate and effective when we set aside a morning and do one after another – we ‘get on a roll’ and our self-limiting fear of rejection and failure, the one Steven Pressfield calls The Resistance, falls away.

So save the multitasking for the kitchen, the garage – or even the bedroom. If you want to achieve maximum entrepreneurial efficiency in the workplace, leave it there where it belongs.

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50 questions: How does a VC evaluate a company’s product?

2012-02-14T16:13:47Z

Together with Nic Brisbourne of The Equity Kicker / DFJ Esprit, I am writing a series of 50 questions you should ask when raising venture capital. We expect the series to run for a year, after which we will collate the answers into a book. We view this as a collaboration, so please comment to help make this series even more useful. This is #44 in the series.

How do venture capitalists judge the fruits of your labour? In Nic Brisbourne’s latest contribution to the 50 questions series, he gives a brief and clear overview of the methods VCs use to assess a company’s product. For this excellent addition to your bank of knowledge about venture capital, go to The Equity Kicker to read
50 Questions: How does a VC evaluate a company’s product?

Meeting the challenge: building a community of players

2012-02-07T16:53:36Z

In a recent Twitter debate, David Barnes and Wojtek Kawczynski argued that Gamesbrief has already won the argument about the power of free-to-play. Price points are no longer a pressing issue; the real challenge, they said, is tribe-building. They were right to want to clue up on this problem. In the introduction to How to Publish a Game, Nicholas points out that:

Developers who have been making games for thirty years will have to learn new skills. Designers will have to learn not just game design and art, coding and sound, but how to build a brand, a community, a sales channel. It’s a challenging task.

How will you face the challenge? We don’t have a magic formula for growing large, loyal communities of fans (yet – do subscribe to the newsletter just in case we happen upon it some day) but we do have some valuable advice to set you on your way.

Community building isn’t simply a necessary chore to make free sustainable: going free is one of your first steps toward community building. Free inspires a spirit of generosity and a sense of gratitude, which fuel virality and feed your conversion rate.

Community building

Community-building doesn’t initially sound like a numbers game. It sounds touchy-feely and personal; to some extent, it should do, because the main advantage an indie has when marketing a game is that you can make it personal. Your brand already has a face and a personality; your face, your personality, your voice, as Andrew Smith of Spilt Milk Studios pointed out in his Gamasutra post Be honest, be nice (also, go check out his series of developer diaries).

Marketing Strategies

Still, it’s no secret that games now feed back data that puts concrete figures on the relationship between your game and your players. Community-building is as much about taking advantage of your indie status – which lends itself to permission marketing – as it is about metrics-led marketing. These are discussed as opposed to the AAA strategy of launch marketing in the post Three ways to market your indie game.

Tribal game design

Building a relationship with your fans also opens the door for some great qualitative data; without slavishly obeying every demand of every player, it gives you better knowledge of what your players want so that you can find games for your players, as advised in Tadhg Kelly’s guest post. This really is essential reading. Tribe-building indies must follow these to-dos from the post:

Be or become an insider in a niche
Find out what its chief cause is
Build a platform (as in a website or blog) to talk to that niche.
Talk to them a lot. Push for the cause. Expect resistance.
Build a community. This aids formation of a tribe.
Build a game that speaks to the tribe
Give the tribe the means to evangelise about the game

Will the nature of the AppStore Kill Zynga’s cloning strategy

2012-02-14T18:14:39Z

On Facebook, no-one can hear you scream.

At least that is true of a cloned company. If Zynga, or anyone else, clones your game, there is little you can do about it within Facebook. When the primary distribution channels are cross-promotion and in-game virality, the fact that Zynga has cloned your title won’t be visible to anyone within the Facebook platform. As a player, you’d have to be reading around the subject to realise this game was a clone, and few Facebook gamers are that committed to their hobby. .

Not so on iOS. Check out the reviews of Dream Heights, Zynga’s clone of Tiny Tower, below:

Dream Heights has got a 1 star rating. Nearly every review says that this is a rip-off of Tiny Tower, and you should download that instead.

In the world of Facebook, there is no equivalent of the chart. There is no review recommendation. All that happens is that you see whether your friends are playing the game (which is of course a powerful recommendation in its own right).

On iOS, there are star ratings, reviews and the top charts. They provide a direct feedback loop for fans of Nimblebit (the developers of Tiny Tower) to express their displeasure.

Is Zynga about to learn that its aggressive, plagiarising tactics, honed on Facebook, won’t transfer to a platform where fans can give their feedback?

I think they are about to learn the importance of having a tribe, and the dangers of antagonising someone else’s.

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Indie Exposure – Why’s it so hard?

2012-02-16T21:00:56Z

This is the first in a series of guest posts by Alistair Aitcheson, cross-posted on Aitcheson Games

Last Friday I was at the incredible Bit of Alright, David Hayward‘s smorgasbord of indie delights, giving a talk about Indie Exposure. Self-publishing the Greedy Bankers games has taught me a lot of lessons, not least just how much time, energy and creative thinking I’ve needed to devote to PR and marketing. The problem I’ve had, particularly with the original iPhone release, is that while it’s had a very positive response from those who have played it, getting into the hands of players has been a massive challenge.

In the next few blog posts I plan to discuss the issues involved: why it’s so tough to get exposure for indie and mobile games, and my strategies for getting that coveted exposure. So without further ado, let’s look at where these difficulties are coming from.

Growing Competition

There are increasingly many developers launching games into the indie space. The rise of free-to-access marketplaces with limited gatekeeping – the iOS and Android app stores, the web and portals such as Kongregate and Facebook – mean that it’s never been easier to release a game. In fact, without this I probably wouldn’t have been able to operate as a one-man studio at all.

Unfortunately, this also means that if players come into the marketplace browsing for new games, they’re increasingly less likely to stumble across your work. You’re going to be less visible to the games press for the exact same reason: if you’re sending out promo codes and press releases to promote you’re game, you can be sure there’ll be plenty more developers doing the exact same.

Of course, there’s no reason to see other developers as “competition” – at least, not on an individual level. Community and cross-promotion are ways that the ever-populating indie scene can work to your advantage. Indeed, this highlights the fact that you’re going to need to get smart, because you’re no longer going to get spotted just by being in the market.

Open marketplaces don’t facilitate discovery

On platforms such as XBLA and PSN, curated by platform holders, and boxed game releases, curated by publishers, browsing titles is a reasonable way to discover new games. There’s few enough to choose from and enough of a guarantee of quality for a player to be happy to browse to find something they’ll like. Things aren’t the same in the App Store, which is why users almost exclusively look to the Top 20 and Featured lists – the curated parts of the store. If you’re not spotted by Apple (an exercise in networking and app design in itself) then you’re operating in a space not too dissimilar to Flash portals, but without the instant accessibility.

I’ve heard it said by fellow iOS developers that reviews don’t usually result in direct sales. I personally believe that this kind of coverage adds to a slow-burn of recognition, and reviews can encourage more reviews, more press interest, all feeding into more sales over time. However I do think (based purely on intuition rather than any reliable research) that mobile gamers don’t tend to look to app review sites for the next big thing. Even gaming enthusiasts tend to see mobile games as enjoyable throwaway experiences, and as a result it’s hard to generate an enthusiast following around your game.

The solution to this is probably to develop an audience around the game in something more niche and specific than the games scene itself. At the very least this should engage some kind of notable audience, and the game may thus gain momentum that can be spotted from outside the niche. But at the end of the day, it’s a question of the strategy behind your product; the App Store itself is unlikely to be a sales vehicle in and around itself.

The new gatekeeper

Plenty has been written on conversion rates, analytics and A/B testing, and a lot of it is very good. But ultimately, none of these strategies draw in new users. Knowing how many users I can expect to retain and monetise is useless without a meaningful userbase. This is why engaging new users is so important – because without it, nothing else can happen. In many ways, the user’s approach to the App Store has created a new gatekeeper, replacing the gatekeeper that was the publisher or platform holder. It’s the exact same on Flash, Facebook, Android and XBLIG.

Much like the old gatekeepers were human-led businesses, the new gatekeeper is a mass of human minds. The gatekeeper may have transformed from a small group of executives into the collective imagination of 60 million iPhone users, but it is still particular and unpredictable in its tastes. You no longer need the gatekeeper’s approval to get started developing the game, but you certainly need it to publish successfully.

I read a lot of great articles on indie marketing, and applied the vast majority of their recommendations for Greedy Bankers’ launch. There was a Facebook group, Twitter feed, website, blog, trailer, press kit… But all of these had the exact same issue as the game: it was hard to get people to look at them, let alone convert these viewers into new players. The reality is that promoting your game is probably going to be about getting one or two major breakthroughs, rather than having a seamless network of high-quality promotional materials. There are enough products out there with well-maintained social media that it becomes a starting point rather than a solution. As such, successful promotion is probably going to come from some radical new strategy, or a more personal approach that grabs enthusiastic hearts and minds.

Taking on the Challenge of Indie Exposure

Fortunately, in the process of building and promoting Greedy Bankers, and its iPad sequel Greedy Bankers vs The World, I have managed to make some headway on which areas generate interest from new users. There are no simple solutions, and a lot of woolly advice, but I’m starting to see headway being made and the right weak spots to keep pushing at. Here’s a rundown of what I hope to cover in the next few weeks:

Focus on your USP
Build on the core unique feature of your game that makes it awesome. Make your USP sing, work out how to promote it first and foremost, and find an audience that is likely to get fired up about it.

That personal touch
Indie studios are in a unique position where we can be real people, and have real and identifiable stories to get behind. New players, particularly early adopters, like to have something to believe in, and indies are in a perfect position to give them that.

Smart and agile entrepreneurship
Think fast, re-strategise frequently, and always look for new ways to break into the market. Getting your game well-known isn’t about doing standard things right. It’s about doing special things very right.

I’ll talk in more detail about each of these in the coming blog posts. Please do comment below and share your thoughts!

The Perils of Pandering to a Publisher

2012-02-14T14:48:34Z

I just opened up Triple Town on Facebook for the first time (I’ve been playing on iOS) since developers Spry Fox partnered with publisher Playdom. I was immediately greeted by this cross-promotion bar across the top of the page.

The implication, to me at least, is that my favourite developers SpryFox, also made Sorority Life. And Find Wheelbarrow. Which seems unlikely, not least because it is not true.

I can’t fault Playdom for this. We all know that the secret of success on Facebook is cross-promotion, and I imagine that this is their standard cross-promotion bar.

I think it’s more damaging for SpryFox. In the digital era, there is nothing more important than building and serving a tribe. The tribe that loves Triple Town is unlikely to be the same tribe that loves Sorority Life.

I understand why Dan and David signed up to Playdom. But this cross-promotion jarred with me. I wonder how many other SpryFox fans felt the same.

Connecting to customers: your Youtube channel

2012-02-02T15:30:04Z

Marketing and community-building are mandatory for self-publishing games developers. Reaching out and communicating with your fans is essential to making money with a free-to-play game. This post is the second of three extracts from How to Publish a Game that we’re reproducing here, to show you how to attract customers and build a tribe of followers. For a complete guide to self-publishing and making money from your game, buy the book now.

Make cool Youtube content

Photo by Rego Korosi

Every game needs a YouTube video. It is the anchor of your marketing campaign, and provides an asset that blogs and review sites can use.

The number one rule is to make cool content that people want to use and share. If your content is dull, no advice I can give you will help.

But assuming that you make a video that people want to watch, my top tips for a YouTube campaign are:

Have a single YouTube channel for your business (www.youtube.com/companyname might be good if you can get it.)
Encourage people to subscribe to the channel.
Keep your videos short. My personal opinion is that 2 minutes is the maximum for a promotional video. Thirty seconds is good. Five seconds might be even better.64
Make the content good enough that viewers will want to embed it in their blog or review.
Always allow embedding – 40% of YouTube’s views are via embeds. Why would you cut out nearly half of your potential audience?

A great Youtube channel

Trials HD has been very successful with a strong fan following. Their YouTube channel is a good example of how to go about marketing using YouTube videos.

Buy How to Publish a Game

This channel shows a lot of key successes:

RedLynx has a range of uploaded videos (23 in a single channel).
The channel is branded and has its own visual style.
They offer the chance to subscribe (although, to be fair, that is YouTube functionality).
I don’t know about you, but I feel good about this page.

You should definitely consider building your own YouTube channel. There is an important decision to make first: should you build a channel for your studio or for your game?

My instinct is that gamers have a stronger relationship with game titles than with development studios. Therefore it’s better to build a channel for your game.

There are circumstances when it might be better to build a developer channel – when you do lots of small projects, or a range of very different games – so consider experimenting to see what works

Is your game’s economy working for you?

2012-02-13T13:46:14Z

Zoya Street is editorial assistant at Gamesbrief. She is also a historian of design, studying Japanese video games at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Fictional economics: unlocking culture to monetise a game

If you’re going to make money from in-app purchases, your game has a fictional economy of some sort.

Fictional economics is about how the narrative, object design and user interface of your game tells stories about economies. It can be observed in both online and offline games.

This is not quite the same as a virtual economy in an MMO, although they overlap. ‘Virtual economy’ refers to the dematerialisation of traded goods in an economy that deals with real money.

The story your game tells about its economy, and the place of players in that economy, sends out a message. That message could transform the way your game monetises.

Learning from video game history

An extract from my poster presentation

Take an example from history: Final Fantasy games have all featured fictional economies. The message they sent players was that owning better stuff makes a person better. As long as players spent time and money acquiring better weapons, their characters would become stronger. They would be better equipped to fulfill their heroic destinies. They would kill more enemies and rake in more money. All because their weapon had better technical features. As a result, players spent hours upon hours acting out the very consumerism that the games industry relied upon.

Imagine how powerful that was.

Enhance your game’s economy

As in-game economies are now not just fictional but also virtual, the rhetorical power of simulated capitalism shouldn’t be ignored. It could be the key to selling more IAPs in your own game.

At this year’s GDC, I’ll be sharing some of my historical analysis of Final Fantasy games. To find out more, come to my presentation:

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone! Take this Historical Study with You
1pm or 1.30
Overlook 2 of the West hall.

You will see examples of fictional economics at work. You will learn how powerful fictional economics can be. You will use the lessons of history to make better games.

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