Investors, Marketing, and Funding

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    • Investors, Marketing, and Funding

      First, I realize this is quite a loaded question I'm about to ask... as I'm sure you can tell just by the subject. As such, I don't really expect a straightforward answer, and even if I got one I would have to tailor it to my situation. That being said, here goes:

      Quick background: Over the past few months, I've been working with a partner to build a team including designers, programmers, artists, as well as a business-minded fellow or two. We have built up a decent starting infrastructure and established contracts, ground-rules, etc.... We also have a GDD, initial concept art, and the beginnings of the game being built. All in all, it hasn't been easy, but I feel like I'm finally at a point where I have a leg up and have a real chance to make this thing real, provided we all meet our deadlines, complete assigned tasks, and push each other.

      What I'm looking at now is to gain an understanding to help solidify my chances, and best capitalize on the opportunity (or lucky break, if you will) that I've gotten. My first question is about marketing, because I'm sure it will influence/feed into the second part of my question. What methods, from your experience have worked in building awareness for games? Where to start? Are there certain places or things to avoid? Our initial thoughts were to begin obviously closest to home: friends, family, giving out some prototypes to familiar people and hope the word slowly spreads from there. We also have a website being built (as a central location is important to anything you want to keep organized), and were planning on hitting the familiar forums, threads, etc... Reddit, Facebook Groups, Youtube, a "meet the team", etc.... From there, we had intent to enter a kickstarter. Our thoughts being that we don't want to start a campaign cold, we'd much rather have some recognition beforehand. The second part of the goal being releasing the initial beta along with the kickstarter in a sort of event.

      Given the above, are there any suggestions, recommendations, or 'must-do' items to ensure the maximum possible success for this?


      That leads me into my second question (apologize for the lengthy post): The current climate certainly is not the same as when mobile gaming began: No longer do investors wildly speculate on new companies and give crazy investment sums with anticipation of returns (thanks, Zynga). What type of information or content would you recommend be available to investors to increase investment attractiveness? Obviously having items in a portfolio are about as critical as possible, but what other type of information should we build or have ready? How would you recommend we present it?

      Thanks for the info! I'm really loving the book. If you need some more info to provide a better answer please let me know. :)

      David
    • I've been working in the mobile space now for about two years, and looking at our own efforts at marketing and outreach I'm pretty convinced of one thing - that traditional methods of user acquisition such as Facebook and other online advertising, simply cost too much to be profitable. I think the last numbers showed at each user cost approximately $4.50 to acquire - and those aren't necessarily paying users either - just players.

      A recent article I saw with reams of industry data showed that the most efficient user acquisition method was via friend recommendation. Given that, any game that makes it easy and fun to reach out to your friends to get them to play has a leg up on a game that doesn't. A multiplayer game like Words With Friends is an excellent example - it has a very low barrier to entry and is only played with another person, making it spread quickly from person to person.

      Less obvious is whether techniques to "gain energy by bugging your friends" made so famous by Zynga and King are still roads to success. Both companies made billions adding with this strategy, Zynga's revenue peaked in 2012 and fell sharply in 2013. I haven't looked at the 2014 numbers, but it would seem that the gaming public has tired of this model and is looking for something different.

      If I were to create a mobile game now, I would focus on a multiplayer game that was trivial to learn, had a deep and interesting playscape, was downloadable free of charge but a one-time "unlock everything" IAP, and was easily localizable for global distribution. I'd also use Unity to push it out to a wide variety of platforms, maximizing my potential market.

      Once the game was developed, I'd certainly go along the route of pushing it to my friends and family, but in addition to that I'd acquire some "paid-for" users to bump my store position for a few days, getting a viral bump each time, until hopefully the game would begin spreading on its own. How much would I spend on these efforts? It seems that any person wishing to succeed in today's mobile market would be willing to spend as least as much money on user acquisition as they did on development.

      I hope that helps!
      Mr.Mike
      Author, Programmer, Brewer, Patriot
    • it did, actually! I did not realize just how expensive the traditional methods were. It's funny, so many people try to convince you that marketing is as easy as putting something up on the web and that there are so many alternatives to help keep costs down, but it still always ends up being one of the largest expenditures in the budget. The problem is there are so many pitfalls and money traps that it can be difficult to navigate through them.

      I know when it comes to in-game purchases, additional content, etc... I've developed a distaste for many of the practices. It's a tight rope between trying to get compensated for your hard word and looking like you are trying to be a money pit, but there are a lot of great examples of companies that are doing in-game purchases right. Rio, I think, is one of the best examples to look at in general. Much like Blizzard set the standard for how expansions should feel and what type of content they should have, Riot has really defined how a proper in-game store should run, in my opinion.