The Marketing Question
August 26th, 2008
I’ll have more on the ongoing prototype saga in the coming days, but I wanted to take a brief detour back into Business Land.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people about what I’m doing now (friends, family, colleagues) and the second question I usually get asked after “so…how do you make a video game?” is usually “and how do you go about marketing something like that?” This is an excellent question; one that I’ve been giving a lot of thought to, but one that I haven’t answered for myself yet.
In the world of “big games”, the EA’s of the world can spend millions of dollars marketing titles. They run print ads, TV ads, ads before movies, ads on gaming sites, and they have entire teams of PR/marketing people making sure that hundreds of millions of people hear about their game before it goes to market. In the indie world, things are quite different. I don’t have a marketing team or a PR team, and I certainly don’t have millions of dollars to spend on marketing. So how am I going to get my game out there and how am I going to get people to buy it? After all, even though I’m primarily doing this because I want to make games, I also need to make a living off it so that I can keep doing it.
There are primarily four distribution models out there for indie games that I’ve come across so far. Keep in mind that I’m concentrating on games built for a PC or Mac, not console games; that’s a whole different ball of wax. For each of the first three methods it’s standard practice to distribute a free demo version of the game that entices the player to pay to play the full version of the game. The fourth method changes that quite a bit.
1) Self-Distributed
With this option the developer is responsible for all marketing, advertising, and costs associated with hosting and bandwidth usage. The big upside to this type of distribution is that most of the revenue generated by game sales comes back to the developer. Small percentages of revenue would go to whatever credit card payment system is used, but the majority of the money goes to the developer. However, because the developer is also responsible for getting the word out, sales numbers might be much smaller than through other methods.
2) Publisher-Distributed
There are publishers out there who specialize in indie or casual games. If you can land a publishing deal the publishers handles marketing and advertising and getting the word out. However, they often take a substantial cut of all sales revenue generated. However, say you get 35% of sales (and the publisher keeps 65% – I’m basing these numbers on what I’ve heard Microsoft takes if they publish your game on Xbox Live Arcade), but you’ll sell five times the number of copies of your game, then it’s a better deal. There are other potential downsides with this model, depending on the publishing deal: the publisher might want ownership of the product, for example.
3) Portal-Distributed
There are a lot of casual games “portals” out there (e.g. Playfirst – whose free SDK I’m using for my prototype, or Big Fish Games). I don’t know a lot of details about how these work, as publishers and portals don’t like talking about specifics of deals, but my understanding is that they work similar to a publisher. You give them rights to distribute their game on their site. They may (or may not) promote it on their site depending on whether or not they think it will sell. They keep a percentage of each sale and the developer gets a percentage. That percentage can change based on whether or not they have exclusive distribution rights for the game or not. Often games are sold to several portals at once (the main difference between working with a portal or an individual publisher). The big downside with portals is that there are hundreds (or thousands) of games on them, with several new games being posted every day. I’ve read elsewhere that you make almost all of your money in the first 1-2 weeks of being listed on a portal. Things rarely stay in the top 10 longer than that, and it’s the top 10 that really make the money.
4) Micro-Transations
This way of paying for games is huge in South Korea right now, but hasn’t really caught on big in North America and Europe yet. In this model the entire game is given away for free. You can play the whole thing without paying for it. However, there are usually countless aesthetic things that you can customize in the game…for a fee. Say you want a red hat for the character in your game; that’s $0.25. Now you want a cooler looking sword; that’s $0.50. The transactions are all handled online, so there’s virtually no way for piracy to take revenue from the developers. However, in North America, gamers tend to like to pay once for a product and then fully enjoy it, so it hasn’t caught on like it has in Asia.
Like I said, those are the four main ways I know of to market and distribute indie games. There may be (and probably are) other ways that I don’t know about or haven’t thought of.
For now, I’m letting all of this settle in my mind. I think I need to figure out more about what the game is going to end up being before figuring out how I’m going to distribute and market it. Once I know the product more intimately, I think I’ll know better how I need to sell it.
If you have any thoughts on the models I’ve described above, or you think I’ve left something out, please feel free to post in the comments.
Owen