原文作者：Torulf Jernström & Taija Kanerva 译者：Megan Shieh

实际上，这个标题有误导性。你当然应该把责任归咎于市场营销，但不是像大多数人认为的那样。

“市场营销”这个概念远比大多数人认为的‘广告和促销’要宽泛得多。

当与独立开发者交谈时你会经常听到他们谈论自己所开发的、一个没有被正确地推销的“好游戏”，然而这就是他们在游戏中赚不到钱的原因。

让大众知道你的游戏

毫无疑问，利用有限的资源和名气为独立开发者做营销是非常具有挑战性的.

应用商店成熟得很快，大开发商在争夺客户注意力的同时，预算也在大幅增加；在这种环境下小开发商很难让他们的游戏获取关注和玩家。

然而更大的问题经常发生在其他地方。一般情况下，未能实现盈利单纯地指责营销是不公平的。因为这经常是核心游戏开发团队不懂的部分，所以归咎于营销似乎比较容易。

为了可以让开发人员专注于纯艺术、不必考虑销售产品的污糟部分，独立开发团队似乎总是想要将这个苦活扔给别人做。

现在让我们来谈谈营销的基础。现代营销学之父 Philip Kotler 说市场营销由“4个P”的“组合”构成。即是：价格-Price、宣传-Promotion、地点-Place、产品-Product。

注意，产品也是其中一个！营销不仅仅是广告。即使大多数人听到“营销”一词时立刻想到的就是广告，但这只是其中的一个部分。

shadow-fight-3（from gamezebo.com）

4个P

让我们来回顾一下4p对手游营销的意义。

地点 – Place

这个很简单。在现实世界中，它是关于你在什么地方销售你的产品（比如特定的自助餐厅或零售商店）。

在移动领域，这一切都将归结为Apple’s App store和Google Play——至少在中国之外(我谈及的不包括中国的其他200个选择)。

价格 – Price

这也是相当基本的。我们在这里讨论的是免费下载，以及硬通货的4到6个IAP价格点。

通常这些价格点从2、5、10、20、50到100美元不等。这是基本的，所以在这里不多作讨论；让我们继续讨论更重要的事情。

等你的游戏得到一些牵引力时，你可以再想根据市场和玩家行为调整你的价格。如果你没有内部框架，Scientific Revenue可以帮助你解决这个问题。

宣传 – Promotion

大多人认为宣传就是营销，其实这只是广告的部分，这一部分可能具有挑战性。

有时我在会议上看到一些顾问告诉开发者他们需要为游戏发布的新闻稿预留资金，这是F2P手游和高端PC /游戏机游戏的不同之处。

对于高端游戏，这是在发布前增加期待。有一些游戏玩家(他们自称)会关注即将到来的游戏，并想要了解他们。当涉及到F2P手游时，玩家通常不是这样的。

在手游领域，有很多玩家并不认为自己是游戏玩家。通常情况下他们并不会对即将到来的新游戏充满期待，也不会阅读很多关于手机游戏的新闻。

因此，新闻发布和游戏评论(游戏特定的)媒体只会为F2P手机游戏提供少量的额外下载。

新闻媒体一般会让早期采用者对寻找下一个大事件感兴趣。这些早期采用者可以成为高端游戏的一个巨大市场，因为他们会预先支付。

早期采用者非常不适合F2P游戏。根据定义，他们很快就会对接下来的大事感兴趣并遗弃你的游戏。因此，依赖它们将导致糟糕的留存数字。

性能营销是不同的。如果你有一个产品的LTV大于CPI，那你就可以做广告宣传。

如果你做得很好，说不定还可以做品牌营销，但老实说对于大多数独立开发者来说这是相当遥远的事情。

总的来说，宣传可以让你的游戏被注意到；但是如果你的游戏(产品)不咋地，那么就只会得到一个暂时的提升。

是的，做宣传需要储备大量的金钱和精力，这是必不可少的；但在你这么做之前最好确保你有一个值得推广的产品。

产品 – Product

做F2P的时候比任何其他时候都更清楚明白：产品本身就是营销组合的一部分。获取下载量只是赚钱的第一步，大部分的盈利手段都是建立在游戏中的。

你的客户完整路径看起来是这样的:

广告=>AppStore=>下载=>教程=>用户留存=>扩散=>盈利

我们需要注意的是，F2P将销售“内部化”了。在过去，游戏开发者可以只负责开发游戏，然后将卖产品这一环节交给实体零售商和它的员工。

如今，你自己的货币化机制需要发挥作用。你需要利用这些曾经被丢给实体店的用户行为数据。

以前是实体店经营圣诞节的促销活动，现在你需要在你的游戏里运行整个圣诞促销活动。

你需要为一个特定市场创造出一款产品，而不是为你已经创造出的产品找到一个市场。问题是如何在80万个游戏中脱颖而出，且实现你想要瞄准的具体市场或市场部分的特点。

为此你将需要竞争对手的数据、以及特征趋势，需要知道在哪些地方要与其区分开来，从而使自己可以被注意到；还要学习其他竞争对手成功的地方。

不仅是新游戏不断地进入市场，而且不同的新方法使游戏变得有趣、能够持续产生收益；你还需要识别和实施适合“你的游戏”的特性、最好地投资你的时间和努力。

最后你需要使用病毒性营销（virality）来将用户获取构建到产品本身中。这一点非常明确地说明市场营销从一开始就被整合到产品的核心中。

总结

那么作为一名游戏开发者，你该如何利用产品部分的营销组合来发挥其全部潜力呢?

问自己几个关键问题:

为什么我的玩家会把我的游戏推荐给他们的朋友？

我的产品有趣又吸引人的点在哪？

在保证玩家一直想要回来玩游戏的同时，从长远来看我怎样才能让这个游戏更好、更有趣？

你将需要创建一个能够为这些问题提供答案的内部分析团队，或者你需在整个开发周期和全球发布很久之后，从外部找到这些答案。

当你具备了营销组合中所有必要的信息、设计技能和知识，你将增加你在竞争市场中成为赢家的机会，而你的营销团队将会有一个基本上可以自我推销的产品。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Actually, this headline is misleading. You definitely should blame marketing, but not quite in the way most of you think.

If you bring something to market, and cannot sell it, then your marketing does not work. But “marketing” is a much broader concept than just the ads and promotion that most people associate with the term.

When talking to indie developers, you will often hear them talking about a “a good game” they did, which they unfortunately failed to market properly. Hence, they made just about no money with their game.

Getting heard

Marketing for indie developers with limited resources and fame is really challenging, no argument there.

The app store has matured quickly, with big developers with big budgets fighting over customer attention. In this environment, it is really hard for a small developer to get their games noticed and played.

However, the bigger problem often lies elsewhere. Usually, it is not fair to simply blame marketing for the failure to get to profitability. It’s easy to blame marketing as this is the side of the process the core game development team often does not understand.

It seems common for indie developer teams to want someone else to do the dirty work of promoting the game. This leaves the developers to concentrate on pure art, without having to think about the dirty parts of selling the product.

Now, let’s go back to marketing basics. The good old Philip Kotler who every marketing novice has had to suffer through in college said that marketing consists of a “Mix” of “4 Ps”. Namely: price, promotion, place and product.

Notice that the product is in there! Marketing is not only about advertising. That is only one ingredient of the soup, even if that is the part most people instantly think about when they hear the word “marketing”.

The four Ps

So, let’s review what the 4Ps mean for marketing mobile games.

Place

This is pretty easy. In the physical world it’s about where you sell your product, such as a specific cafeteria or retail store.

For us in the mobile space, it will all boil down to Apple’s App store and Google Play. At least outside of China (let’s not get started on your 200 other options inside China).

Price

This is also pretty standard. What we’re talking about here is free to download, and four to six IAP price points for hard currency.

Usually, these price points will be from the set of two, five, 10, 20, 50 and 100 dollars. As a starting point, just do it and move on to discuss something more important.

Later on, when your game gets some traction, you likely want to tailor your price points to your players based on market and player behaviour. If you don’t have the framework in-house, Scientific Revenue can help you with this.

Promotion

Promotion is what most people think about as marketing. This is only the advertising part, and it can be challenging.

At times, I’ve seen some consultants at conferences tell developers that they need to reserve money for press releases at launch. This is a part where F2P mobile and premium PC/Console games differ enormously.

For the premium titles, you are building up expectations ahead of the launch. There are gamers (who self-identify as such) who follow promising upcoming games and want to read about them. That’s often not true when it comes to mobile F2P players.

On mobile, there are lots of gamers who do not think of themselves as gamers. Usually, they do not really follow upcoming games with anticipation, or read a lot of news about mobile games.
As a consequence, press releases and game reviews in (game specific) outlets will give you a measly handful of extra downloads for a F2P game.

News outlets will, in general, interest the early adopters searching for the Next Big Thing. These early adopters can be a great market for premium games, as they will pay up front.

For F2P games, early adopters are a really bad fit. By definition, they will soon get interested in the Following Big Thing and abandon your game. Thus, relying on them will lead to bad retention numbers.

Performance marketing is different. If you have a working product where you get the famous LTV > CPI (Lifetime Value is larger than Cost Per Install), you will be able to advertise profitably.

If you do really well, you might also be able to do brand marketing, but honestly, that is quite far away for most indie developers.

All-in-all, promotion can get your game noticed, but without a really great game (product) you will only get a temporary boost.

Yes, you do need to reserve tons of money and effort into promotion – that is essential – but before you do that, make sure you have a product worth promoting.

Product

When doing F2P, it’s clearer than ever that the Product itself is part of the marketing mix. Getting downloads is only the first step of the funnel towards making money. Most of the funnel actually happens inside the game.

The complete path of your customer will look something like this:

Ad=>AppStore=>Download=>Tutorial => Retention => Virality =>Monetization

What we need to note is that F2P “internalises” the selling of stuff. During the old days game developers could develop the game and leave the selling of the product to the physical retailer and its personnel.

Nowadays instead, your own monetisation mechanics need to work. You need to use all the behavioural data that used to be left to the bricks and mortar stores and their marketing.

A physical store used to run the Christmas sales, now you need to run the whole Christmas event yourselves – inside your game.

You need to create a product for a market, not find a market for the product you already created. The question is how to stand out among 800k games, and what features to implement to target that specific market or segment you’re aiming for.

For this, you will need competitor data, and feature trends – to know where to differentiate to be noticed, and where to follow others for the things that just work.

It’s not just new games coming to the market constantly, but new ways to make games interesting and able to generate revenue are invented all the time. You will also need to recognise and implement features that fit the synergies of *your* game, and are the best investment for your time and efforts.

Last, you need to use virality to build the user acquisition into the product itself. Again, this a a very clear point where marketing is integrated into the core of the product from the start.

Key Takeaway

So how can you, as a game developer, utilise the product-part of the marketing mix to its full potential?

Ask yourself a couple of key questions: WHY would my players recommend this game to their friends? WHAT makes my product interesting and appealing? HOW can I make the game better and interesting in the long run while keeping players coming back for more?

You will either need to create an internal analysis team able to provide answers to these questions, or you’ll need to figure out where to find these answers externally throughout the whole development cycle and way after global launch.

When equipped with the necessary information, designer skills and knowledge in all the parts of the marketing mix you will multiply your chances of becoming a winner in the contested marketplace – and your marketing team responsible for the promotion will have a product that will basically sell itself. （Source: pocketgamer.biz）