Saturday
Jul302011
Doing what you (might) already know -- the fine balance of making and promoting your work
Saturday, July 30, 2011 at 1:44AM We’ve recently been ramping up the attention we pay to promoting ourselves, our work and our upcoming games titles for iOS and the web. In a few short steps (writing up a launch task list, attending Develop and preparing for a couple of conference speaking engagements in September) we’ve come to realize this: all we need to do is exactly what we already know.
To clarify: we know how to market ourselves and our games, we just need to get on with doing it. In order to remind ourselves (and yourselves) of a couple of those basics (because this stuff is basic) we’ve brought them together in this semi-glorified bullet-point list.
General promotion
- Ensure you can balance sustainability (cash flow, sanity); development effort; profile promotion and title promotion. Without each of these playing its part (you can merge the latter two if it’s absolutely necessary and done incredibly carefully) you’re not going to see any significant forward progress – and in fact, you’ll likely fall apart or end up going backwards.
- Pay attention to everything. This is targeted primarily at other indies, but relevant to all, because: you should pay attention to what everyone is doing. AAA marketing budgets don’t come easily, but neither does the inventiveness and passion seen in the marketing and promotional efforts of indies.
- Talk to everybody. Network. Targeting individuals is fine, but talking to everybody is better – you don’t know where the pivotal conversations will happen until after they happen.
- Tell people about what you are doing. This is the most important thing. If no one knows what you’ve done, it doesn’t matter how great it is. Your blog, other people’ s blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, forums, mailing lists, traditional media – anyone who’ll listen.
- Get involved. Enter your stuff into competitions. Participate in game jams. Not only do they bring exposure to your work, but they also help you refine your processes around specific points in time and force you to show what you do best: create stuff.
Operational stuff
- Plan what you plan to do. If nothing else it holds you to account and gives you some method by which to assess your progress. Make sure you set yourself lists of forward moving actions – and make sure you review them to make sure they stay relevant and reflect the iteration of your plans as you progress through specific tasks.
- Do everything as cheaply as possible, but no cheaper. It’s astonishing what you can get for little or no money – whether it’s products and services or the time and commitment of others. Just because other people are paying through the nose for something, doesn’t mean it’s the only way.
- Invest in tools. Yes, yes – as per above – but it’s a worth remembering that great tools can make several orders of magnitude’s difference in your most valuable resource: your time.
- Get your commercial and legal bits in order. Legal incorporation and shareholding, banking, insurance, payroll, taxes, copyrights and trademarks. All of these can and will screw you if you don’t get them sorted early on.
Getting better
- Get stuff out there. Putting something out there is better than putting nothing out there. Especially in games development. Getting anything to the point of distribution is hard – regardless of the complexity of the title itself. Once you’ve done this, you can concentrate of improving the core product.
- Sunk costs. Understand the core principle of sunk costs. Make decisions based on what happens next, not what went before. Costs to date should not sway the balance of an otherwise clear decision.
- Analytics and metrics. For your promotional activities as well as for the games themselves. There are a wealth of services out there to help you with this (e.g. Google Analytics, Flurry). It’s amazing what you find out when you start measuring stuff. There’s no better way to challenge and improve your assumptions than with data.
- Take a look at the services others are using. See what they can do for you (can they meet needs you don’t know you have). We’ve seen value beyond solving our initial problems from Skype, Google Docs, Dropbox, BitBucket/Github, Bitly etc.
- Do all of this, then do it again. There is always scope for doing more.
Specifics on – conferences
- Do not dismiss conferences. There’s a reason why pretty much everybody in the industry (AAA, indie and otherwise) treat them as pivotal points in the year.
- It’s surprising what you can learn from others. Whether it’s an introduction to a new topic or reinforcing an existing one, giving yourself the opportunity to absorb information and reflect on your work is incredibly valuable.
- It’s very hard not to network. People want to talk to other people. Talk to them about their stuff; tell them about yours. It’s the whole fucking point.
- Present your stuff. There’s a wealth of interesting material in what we do – and for sure someone will be interested in what you’ve done. If you’ve ambitions on presenting at GDC you’re going to have to start somewhere.
Specifics on – funding
- Always think about getting paid. No one else is going to do this for you, but no one minds if you make this the most important thing – 9 times out of 10 they’re thinking about the same thing.
- Funding means everything that gets you paid. Everything from revenue based on past successes, self funding (subsidizing) and borrowing through to angel and VC investment falls into the same category.
- Learn from the pros. VCs and angel investors generally look at you & your team, your competition, their (and your) exit strategy, user acquisition, results to date and transformational potential – you should too.
- Look at yourself from the perspective of others. Regardless of whether you’re seeking funding or not, viewing your work (and more specifically your actions) from the perspective of an outsider can highlight stuff you might not otherwise have seen. If you wouldn’t invest in yourself (or your idea, current plan etc), why would anybody else?
