“Interaction” is a video game development meetup. They organize conferences in Medellín (my hometown) where they invite local developers to share their experience with both fellow and wannabe developers.
They are now an official Unity User Group, and they are planning to create bigger and better events. Interaction++ 2018.4 was the first of these events, where they had three talks instead of a single one as usual.
The first talk, “Introduction to Indie Marketing”, was given by Jorge Castaño of Amazing Soul games. It was an ambitious talk and it went well over its time limit, but it was pretty interesting.
Its first topic, foundations of marketing, gave an overview of some elements involved in the marketing of the game along with some useful tips:
- Create a compelling synopsis/summary to convert visits into installs.
- Have at hand your Unique Selling Points: What makes your game different. This may help change a first negative / neutral perception and make the player give a second chance to your game.
- The biggest markets like Steam, Play Store and AppStore are extremely competitive and it’s extremely hard to be noticed, smaller stores can even provide help with marketing.
- China is a very attractive market for mobile but the AppStore and Play Store are dead there. Tencent is the biggest store, but rules are different.
- A clear target market is a must to create an effective marketing campaign.
- Set a target to be in the top 200 of the store (it’s impossible to get to top 10 without +100.000USD daily marketing or a lot of luck)
- A great target for a small company is 5000 USD / day for 1 month. It should cover the investment in the game.
They also dug into some of the tasks of a publisher:
- Localization (not only language but also cultural) can drive a lot of installs. For example, Games in China must be properly localized, and including Dragons as enemies into the game may be perceived as offensive. For Japan, 80% of the players will only play the game if it’s in Japanese.
- Customer Care: Retention, especially important for freemium games in mobile. Some publishers provide a support team.
- Acquisition: It’s only part of the publisher task. Invest money to get more players.
- Marketing: Material such as trailers, icons, screenshots, they often have a specialized team.
- QA / Testing
- Monetization: Make the game make money.
They also had some recommendations for Indie Publishers:
- Tiny Build
- Indie Fund
- Adult Swim Games
- Devolver
Publishers will normally take 30% to 60% of revenue, and it’s currently hard for them to give money upfront.
Some advantages of using a Publisher:
- Better distribution channels
- They have useful contacts with the industry
- Higher visibility
- Cross promotion, they will leverage players in existing games.
- They assume part of the risk of investment
- Years of experience.
If you don’t have a publisher, you must cover all the above by yourself to a certain degree.
This includes creating a marketing campaign to generate interest of the game even before it is launched.
Some things that help here:
- Create a plan for your campaign with weekly goals and channels to be used every week.
- Use analytics to update your plan. What is working and what is not.
- Make a list of the websites, streamers or youtubers you want to cover your game. Start with the smaller ones, that will eventually bring interest to the mid-sized and the bigger ones if you are lucky.
- Create a presentation template to get in contact with writers
Sucess doesn’t depend on money alone, being aware of all the different tools at hand helps greatly.
In the second talk the guys from Dreamhouse Studios shared their experiences building three VR products:
- A training program for the Colombian Army FLIR program. (Infrared scanning)
- A multiplayer tower defense Halloween game.
- A training program for the local tram system
They mentioned their second game has provided them with some cash flow by renting it to be used in malls and events in the city. They shared some details of their development process.
Finally, the third talk was about the upcoming optimizations to appear on Unity to leverage on its Entity Component System to increase its performance greatly. This, in order to allow Unity games to run in lower-end devices, as well as extending its capabilities to manage a LOT of objects moving and interacting on screen.
All in all, I recommend their conferences especially to students or people looking forward to starting into the video game development industry.
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