Week 4.03 Reflection — Creating Games with Appeal

Following on from our investigations last week into what makes a viable game, we now turned our attention to making games that appeal to players. At this point we start to cross the boundary from game design into the dark and mystical art of marketing — one of the core skills an Indie Developer needs to create interest in their games.

Two of the items discussed were Hooks and Anchors . The difference between them being:

• A Hook is a mechanism to attract the prospect’s attention. It brings them into your sphere of influence where you can convert them into a customer.
• An Anchor is a mechanism that keeps your customers interested in your product and keeps them engaged and coming back for more.

In video game terms, trailers and cover images are often used as hooks. When done well, they solicit interest in the prospective player thereby drawing them into your sales page where you intend to convert them into a player.

In many of the games I play, events are used to keep players interested and coming back for more. In that capacity, in-game events are anchors intended to increase engagement. Wargaming use this to great effect where their monthly events and daily rewards keep players (myself included :-)) logging in and playing day after day to obtain bigger and better rewards.

For my own game, Sorcerer’s Quest*, I am planning to record in-game video of the core spell casting mechanic to use as my primary hook along with a dungeon smashing rampage and, if I can get it to work, motion-controller graffiti. As yet I’m still working on what I can use as an anchor and indeed, for a short game with only a few hours of gameplay initially, whether I need one.

(* Sorcerer’s Quest is a working title for development and may change)

The challenge will be creating something that grabs the prospect’s attention within a few seconds and with no audio. To quote Nick Popovich, “Can your game design fit within a single gif?”

Conclusion

The videos contained in this week’s material by Ryan Clark , Mike Rose and Nick Popovich were extremely insightful. Combining the information from all three presenters, one can arrive at a very crude marketing plan:

• Identify and/or define the game’s hooks
• Create short, sharp ‘videos’ that showcase those hooks and publish them on the game’s Steam page
• Get the hook videos in front of prospective players with social media

Here’s the catch — I used to invest a lot of effort in Social Media Marketing (SMM) when I had my photography business. It takes time to build a community and, whilst SMM was very lucrative, people don’t like, nor respond to, direct marketing tweets. The threshold a few years ago was around the 10-11% mark

List of Figures

Figure 1. GDC & POPOVICH, 2019 Can your GAME DESIGN fit inside a GIF? — Screengrab of YouTube video

Figure 2. GDC & POPOVICH, 2019 A single GIF — Screengrab of YouTube Video

References

Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash