从营销角度谈独立游戏不成功的五个商业化逻辑

原作者：Lewis Denby 译者：Willow Wu

我们有时会遇到这样的客户：他们之前是自主营销，一段时间过后遇到了瓶颈，因为他们的游戏没多少人感兴趣，而他们已经无计可施了。不管怎么努力，好像都无济于事。

当你的项目经验足够多时(这些年，我通过各种不同的方式推广了200多个游戏)你就会发现一些规律，能更容易地诊断、治疗这些病症。以下是我们总结出的独立游戏未能如愿得到关注的五大原因以及如何才能让游戏回到正轨。

1.无独创性

Steam平台每个月都有大概600个新游戏发行，2019年我们绝对是不缺独立游戏的。 其中很多都是机制设计精良、游戏体验有趣的优秀产品，但是几乎都被无视了。

为什么？因为即使是高质量的产品在竞争激烈的市场上也会因为缺乏创意而受阻。有这么多的游戏可供选择，再加上市场过于饱和、混杂，要突出重围是一件十分艰难的事。不会有玩家想“我希望2019年有更多独立平台游戏发行。”

关于游戏制作，坚定于某种类型是一种很好积累经验方式——有大量的资源、教程和社区可以帮助你——但如果你希望获得商业成功，这并不是最好的方式。在一个拥挤的市场中，能够脱颖而出的都是革新者。如果你也是这样的人，那么你的产品就可以把其它95%的游戏甩在后面。

warlords of drakendor(from gamesindustry)

2.看起来不够好

游戏市场拥挤的另一个症状是玩家不需要费力去寻找他们可能想玩的东西。如今，无论是App Store、Steam甚至任天堂eShop，游戏数量都多得惊人，这意味着玩家在一般情况下都在无所事事地浏览网页，只有在真正出色的产品才能得到他们的关注。

如果你的游戏看起来像是个mediocre游戏——这里的“看起来”的意思说从预告到截图到logo到品牌形象都让人有这种感觉，那么这就等同于告诉人们直接滑过你的游戏。

事实上，如今最成功的独立游戏几乎无一例外都是拥有好看的角色、娴熟的艺术指导、高水准的产品质量和强大的营销形象。认为独立游戏可以不像3A游戏那么精雕细琢是一种过时且具有误导性的观念（如果曾经是真的的话）。

3.知道游戏的人并不多

这听起来是很理所当然，但是如果你想让人们了解你的游戏，你就必须告诉他们。在某些独立开发者圈子中似乎存在着一种普遍的误解——给几个记者发发邮件、每周发几次推特便足以让游戏扩散开来，这绝对是错的。

潜在玩家对游戏从“感兴趣”发展成为“热衷”是需要一个过程的，而且有不少人会中途弃坑。这就是为什么我们谈营销时会讲到销售漏斗——上面开口大，下面开口小。Failbetter Games的营销经理Haley Uyrus就写过一篇相关的文章：Marketing indie games: Putting the fun in funnel，非常值得一读。Haley在文章中写道有很多独立游戏开发者只关注漏斗的顶端和底端，也就是游戏的公布和销售页面。事实确实如此，但是我想补充的是很多独立游戏开发者在一开始就没有吸引到足够数量的玩家，这就意味着等到你游戏发行时就只剩下那么点人还关注了。

营销是数字游戏，你跟x个人介绍你的产品，其中有y个人非常感兴趣会长期关注它的消息，有z个人最后会掏钱买。这z个人只会占y的一小部分，而y也只是x的一小部分，所以你要确保x的数值足够大。向所有人分享你的消息，策划不同的发行前公关活动，每个小时都发推特。不然的话，你必然会被别人的声音掩盖。

4.目标用户不对

很久之前，我有个客户针对青少年群体开发了一款游戏。他们投入了大量资金为这款游戏做广告，并试图在青少年网站和杂志上做推广。尽管他们花了很多心思，但是收效甚微。问题到底出在哪？

我们很快就得到了答案。我们采访了一些目标用户，其中有很多人表示他们对游戏的核心概念根本不感兴趣。

这是一个一不留心就会掉入的陷阱——去跟你预想中会喜欢这款游戏的人推广游戏，而不是去思考谁才是真正会喜欢款这游戏的人。另一个常见的现象就是像素风格的小型独立游戏开发者经常向IGN、Gamespot这样的网站推广自己的产品，然而他们不明白为什么就是没有回音。事实是IGN和Gamespot的用户不会玩这样的游戏，所以这些网站几乎不可能发布这类产品的相关文章。

把你的游戏展示给不同的用户群体，看看他们的反应是怎样的。搞清楚你的游戏在哪里最吃香，然后把注意力集中在那。

5.时机不对

也许在今年晚些时候，当我们在赶在圣诞节期间发行游戏时，我会被打脸，但管它呢，说实话很重要: 如果你选择在10月和12月之间宣布或发行游戏，你就给自己设置了一个巨大的，通常是不可克服的挑战。

虽说如今大牌游戏的发行日期都比较分散，但在这几个月里仍有不少3A游戏扎堆。因此，这期间也会有大量营销活动，发行商们要争取各种专题报道、宣传版面、点击付费广告（PPC ads）。竞争白热化也会导致营销成本上升，独立开发者们很难凭借原先的推广方式得到回应，因为记者和那些有影响力的人物几乎无法从3A游戏中脱身。

但这并不是说独立游戏在这期间发行就注定失败，任何事情都有例外。如果你计划在2019年底展示你的作品，你最好是确保以上1~4点都做对了，不然这第5点也只是帮你给棺材板钉钉罢了。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

We sometimes have clients come to us who have been running their own marketing for a while, but have hit a brick wall: they simply cannot get more than a handful of people interested in their game. Often, these clients are stumped, and at their wits’ end. They’ve tried everything, but nothing seems to work.

When you work on enough marketing projects (and I’d estimate I’ve publicised upwards of 200 games in some capacity over the years), you start to spot trends that make these issues a lot easier to diagnose and treat. Here are the top five reasons we find indies aren’t getting the attention their developers were hoping for – and how to steer things back on track for your game!

1. It’s unoriginal

With 600-odd new releases on Steam every single month, there’s going to be no shortage of indie games in 2019. A lot of them will be good, enjoyable experiences, with solid and polished mechanics, that get all-but-completely ignored.

Why? Because the success of even a high-quality product in a competitive market is hampered by a lack of originality. With so many games to choose from, another addition to the already over-saturated mix is always going to struggle to cut through the noise. No gamer in 2019 is thinking “I wish there were more indie platformers to buy.”

Stalwart genres can be a great way to cut your teeth in games-making – there are plenty of resources, tutorials and communities to help you out – but they’re not the best way to go if you’re hoping to achieve commercial success. In a crowded market, the people who stand out are the innovators – and if you can be one of those, you’re already ahead of 95% of the competition.

2. It doesn’t look good enough

Another symptom of games being such a crowded market is that players don’t need to look hard or far to find something they might want to play. The sheer ludicrous number of games on the App Store, Steam, or even the Nintendo eShop these days means gamers are used to idly browsing, and only paying attention when something really stands out.

If your game looks mediocre – and by ‘looks’, I mean anything from your trailer to your screenshots to your logo and overall brand identity – then you’re asking for people to scroll right past it.

The fact is that today’s most successful indie games – almost without exception – are beautiful creatures, with slick art direction, professional production values, and strong marketing imagery. The idea that indies can get away with looking less polished than their triple-A counterparts is nowadays – if it were ever true – an outdated and misleading notion.

3. You aren’t telling enough people about it

This might sound obvious, but if you want people to know about your game, you have to tell people about your game. There appears to be a common misconception among certain indie development circles that emailing a few journalists and tweeting a couple of times a week is enough to start the word spreading. But it categorically is not.

Taking potential players from ‘interested’ to ‘enthusiastic’ is a journey, and it’s a journey a lot of people will bow out of midway. It’s why in marketing we talk about a sales ‘funnel’ – with a big wide opening at the top and a tiny hole at the bottom. This excellent article from Failbetter’s Haley Uyrus explains sales funnels in more detail. Haley explains how a lot of indies make the mistake of focusing on only the top and bottom of the funnel – i.e. your announcement, and your store page. This is true, but I’d also add that many indies simply don’t add enough people to the funnel in the first place – meaning that by the time you’re ready to launch their game, only a handful of people care.

Marketing is a numbers game. You tell x number of people about your product, y number of people like it enough to follow it long-term, and z number of people end up buying it. Z will always be a small percentage of y, and y will always be a small percentage of x – so it’s vital that ‘x’ is big enough to begin with. Scream from the rooftops. Devise multiple pre-launch PR campaigns. Tweet every flippin’ hour. Otherwise, you’ll be drowned out by someone else’s voice.

4. You’re telling the wrong people about it

A long while ago I had a client who was making a game for teenage boys. They’d invested heavily in advertising the game to this market and attempting to be featured on websites and in magazines targeted to that demographic. But despite the heavy investment, they simply weren’t picking up any momentum. What exactly was going on?

We quickly stumbled upon the answer. When we spoke to a sample of teenage boys about the game, a large number of them said the very concept of the game simply didn’t appeal to them.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of talking about your game to the people you want to like it, rather than trying to understand who are the people who actually do like it. Another common example of this lies with developers of small, pixel art indie titles continually pitching IGN and Gamespot and wondering why they aren’t getting anywhere; the reality is that IGN and Gamespot’s audience doesn’t play that sort of game, so those websites are hugely unlikely to bother publishing anything of the sort.

Show your game to different audiences and find out how they react. Figure out where your most enthusiastic fans hang out, and focus your attention there.

5. Your timing is wrong

Maybe this will come back to bite me later in the year when we’re trying to book in work for the Christmas period, but screw it, it’s important to be honest: if you’re releasing or announcing your game between October and December, you’re setting yourself an enormous and often insurmountable challenge.

While big-name game series are spread more evenly across the year these days, there’s still a triple-A spike during these months. Accordingly, it’s also during these month that there’s a huge spike in marketing noise, as publishers compete for column inches and billboards and PPC ads. This fierce competition pushes up the cost of marketing, and it makes organic promotional efforts more difficult to land – because journalists and influencers can barely find a second to step away from all the triple-A madness.

That isn’t to say indies can’t do well during these months. There have of course been notable exceptions to the rule. But if you’re planning to show something toward the end of 2019, you’d better make darn sure you’ve got numbers 1-4 under control, otherwise number 5 on this list is likely to be the nail in your game’s coffin.（source:gamasutra.com ）