Game Marketing – How to create a game that sell!

In this post we are talking about game marketing and how to create a game that sell. Nowadays aside of the major and even medium game companies there are a bunch of solo developers working hard in the making their own games. And many other people also want to start making games, because they dream to create their own stories and make them as games!

Luckily many modern game engines like UnrealEngine, Unity, GameMaker, (and please let us mention K-Engine) that allow developers to create their own games in a quiet easy way, for sure easier than just few years ago when game making was pure coding from scratch. However, despite the game creaction process can be funny I’m pretty confident that many developers also want to sell their games, make money and see their work receiving the right awards for the effort they put into it!

But many people have no idea about how to sell a game, marketing and game marketing or at least how to properly sell a game. Well, please let me explain you some of the basics. A game is a product like any other product in the market, targeted for a specific segment of consumers. Please read the last phrase once again because that phrase contains an essential aspect of the selling process.

The STP model

Don’t worry, we will now easily jump deeply into it. Despite the game market segment is so huge, more than 3 billions people in the world play games, every game has his own targeted segment. For example, a very romantic 50 years old woman may not be interested in playing Call of Duty. Or maybe yes but she might be mainly interested in playing a casual game because this is what emerge from the financial game industry stats.

The STP model strategy explained in the chart above is the root where to start.

Segmentation

But what is a market segment? This is a very crucial question. Each of us belongs to a market segment. And this because we simply have different need, personality, taste and different life. And if you think your game can be bought by everyone just let me tell you this: even Google, Facebook and Amazon have been initially designed for a specific and well filtered group of potential consumers. Is that enough for you to convince you that your game cannot be promoted to everyone?

Let’s considering at least 4 important types of customer segmentation:

1. Geographic segmentation: Based on location, country, state, region, etc.
2. Demographic segmentation: Based on age, gender, occupation, etc.
3. Behavioral segmentation: Based on why, how, and how frequently users interact with your website, apps, or store.
4. Psychographic segmentation: Based on factors such as lifestyle, habits, hobbies, activities, etc.

Ok, after this premises we can now jump into the next important aspect of your game promotion. As you can see we started already in talking about promotion, which is an essential aspect of the marketing.

Targeting

When you have created four or more segments, it’s time to find the most valuable ones. So now you have to properly target to what you consider the best customer segment and the best way to do this is reading datas.

And if you dont have any datas? Start creating short and small ads campaigns to collect datas! There is no other way!

1. Size: Larger segments with more growth potential are always better.
2. Profitability: It may be a little hard to calculate profitability, but taking customer lifetime value (CLV) into account and other data is a good way to predict segment profitability.
3. Reachability: As a corollary to profitability, reachability is another important data point. Usually, customer acquisition cost (CAC) hedged against profitability metrics is a great way to conclude.

Positioning

Once the other two steps are completed, a natural question arises: how to best position the product or service in the brain of your customers? The goal of positioning is to connect with the audience on a personal level and, possibly more importantly, set yourself apart from the competition.

There are three important factors to be considered while your’re positioning your brand or product:

1. Symbolic positioning: Also known as lifestyle positioning. You can figure out symbolic positioning by asking what kind of image is being projected. To do this is crucial to know exactly what their customers think and want deep inside.
2. Functional positioning: What particular problems your products or services solve and how they make their lives easier.
3. Experiential positioning: What experience and emotions your products and service provided to customers.

Buying is pure emotional!

Let me ask you a question? Whenever you make a purchase what convince you to tap your credit card and buy that product? A cool packaging? Price? Your friend? Well, maybe all of that but trust me it is nothing from your consciousness, nothing under your full control and this is because of our brain system. The industry constantly studying this principles and how to drive their customers throughtout the purchase process. Buying is pure emotional! And luckily videogames are products that can deeply touch our emotions. And what is the most important emotion that really work in the selling process? Trust! Are you more comfortable to spend £20 for a game made by a young solo dev or £50 for the last Nintendo or Rockstar Game release?

So now the question is how can you create trust and awareness between you and your potential customers? And then how to achieve them and show them that your game is right for them?

Know your potential customers.

So all the STP model means that you have to properly know your potential customers, how? Do online research. We’ve been talking about market segmentation, targeting and positioning… well this is your first job before start to develop your game. Online you can find many resources in this industry that can strongly help you in figure out which is your ideal customers as mentioned above. Age, sex, interests, country, what games they play, social media they use, how many time they watch gaming videos and how, devices they use to play, how much money they spend to play and so on.

Create games for your potential audience!

Now you might say… hey but I just wanna make games as I want it! Ok, are you gonna buy your game or do you wanna sell them to players out there? Ok it’s fine if you wanna make your games as you want, I understand your point of view, despite that sounds quiet arrogance. Remember this, people want to play games that they want, not that you want! However if you’re an artist and you have nice ideas to bring to life that’s great but in this case you have to identify your target also according to your game idea, style, plot and gameplay.

While you’re creating your games please always think about your potential audience, remember the research you’ve done? So try to fit your idea with their aspectations when they will purchase your game!

Game Marketing

Game marketing and marketing in general as I said starts before you begin your game development process because as we see, first we have to identify our ideal customers and niche and develop our game always considering what they aspect from our game. Remember to constantly monitoring other games they play. And now how can we give our game as many people as possible in our niche and drive them to buy our game instead that others?

I said “instead that others” right? Yes because they can’t buy and play everything! Think about that… how much spare time and money do you think a customer can have? Do you really think they can buy and play all the games in the market? Even in a Niche? That is physically impossible, right?

How to create “trust” as a small developer.

Well, once clarified this important point let me jump back once again to what we mentioned before: trust. Developing trust is crucial if you want to create game for sales and how can you create trust as a small developer that can compete with bigger developers? One of the keypoint is that your game has to look professional. Why? Because the major difference between a professional and good quality game and an amateur made game is in details, and this is a rule for any production. High details with good quality graphic, sound and music, modern updated gameplay… these a the main aspects you should shown in your game pics, videos and demo. So, work hard in achieving a nice good looking result is a key point.

But that is absolutely not enough! Remember the STP model? That is the real “magic formula” for every succes! Spend time to study the audience you want to target to and create products that they want to have. Because this is the first key of the marketing journey. Doing this you will create trust in your customers even as soon as they will get in touch with your product.

And now basically we have to find out customers. And this is another key point that can really help you in increasing sells and create awerness of your game: ads!

Promote your game, the truth!

And now please let me tell you something very raw. There are several ways to ads your game and you have to try them all, but the best way still remain creating ads campaigns! Ok, you may now arguing about that… in the age of the influencer marketing you’re still talking about spending money in ads? Nobody buy after clicking an ads anymore! Nobody watch Youtube video ads! It is not for me!

So why big services like Google Ads or Microsoft Ads or many others are still ongoing if they are not profitable anymore? Because the truth is that those services are still extremely profitable for them and for everyone is able to properly use them for their business. Why? Because you can exactly decide how much money to spend, because you can exactly target the audience you want to share your message to, because you can trust them, because you can read the results and change your campaigns accordingly and so on, because you can save time…!

And even offline ads is another amazing way to achieve your segment. So if you want to create a game for sales you have to start in considering your game as a product cause otherwise still remains one of the numerous games on Steam or Itch or EpicStore or other stores.

Dont be scared to invest a small budget in promoting your game. You will see that after some initial mistakes you’ll be able to generate an income for every click you will get… just properly do your research, develop good games and you will get your loyal fanbase! … And enjoy the game creation process!