The Invisibility Differential Diagnosis:
- Your game is a console-movie tie-in
- Your game is on the App Store, on the second page of the Strategy category
- Your game is named something like Town Ville
- Your marketing strategy is based on exposure via Applifier
- Your game launched in the middle of the charts
- Your art style is inspired by a genre leader
- Your game design is trying to appeal to all four Bartle types
- Your PR strategy consists of talking about unique selling points
- Your indie game contains ordinary retro graphics
- Your game gets described by others as ‘it’s like A meets B’
I’m afraid the diagnosis is: you are invisible.
Invisibility
There are many stand-up comedians working the clubs in London. They are funny, self deprecating and witty, but they are all the same. After their shows, nobody remembers their names, and after you’ve seen many such shows it becomes difficult to remember which comedian told which joke. Their problem is that they have bought into the idea of comedy as process. In order to be a stand-up they make jokes about sex and suburbia, talk to the audience, ask their names and what they do, dress casually and complain about life.
They are invisible. Then there’s Eddie Izzard, whose name is memorable, dresses like a transvestite and tells jokes about evolution, history and Star Wars. Or Bill Bailey, who uses music and a wild-man image to make wry observations about comedy itself. Or Bill Hicks, who used his Southern roots as a contrast against his liberal ideas and the troubles of America. Or Shappi Khorsandi.
Most games are, similarly, invisible. They sit alongside identical-looking games with the same art, same gameplay, same sales strategy and same chances of success. In your local store, they are the games that are quickly discounted, selling for a fifth of their original price. On Facebook, they are all the games that are isometric, with energy-and-levels gameplay quietly stalling on app strips.
Invisibility is the result of failing to be noticed. A game which is invisible is so because it is neither startling enough nor present enough in users’ attention spans for them to remember it. Big or small, branded or unbranded, online or offline, the game not talked about is invisible.
Sometimes being invisible to the whole market doesn’t matter, as long as you’re visible to a niche. Rail Simulator is an example of a game where no matter how awesome the game may actually be, it will never achieve much visibility because of the subject matter. If you are in the niche business then your market is likely limited in size, but also deeply passionate about the kind of game that you make. They’re not looking for rail simulators that now involve underwater modes or trains that go to space. All they want is the best experience of manning the London to Edinburgh route in real time.
Most games do not serve niches. They may sit in industry-defined genres (which mean nothing to most customers) pretending to be niche games, but genres are just cloaks of invisibility. Niches result from players who have a specific interest googling for that interest on their own. Most games, on the other hand, are searching for players to convince them to play.
Invisibility is usually the result of a mechanistic approach to game making. Just as average stand-up comedians are funny within their stereotype, so too average games are only fun within well-defined and well-worn boundaries. Game development is the same as any other form of entertainment in that the more mechanistic and ordinary it becomes, the harder it is to sell the result.
The audience senses what an invisible game is about from the moment they see it. They judge it instantly, internally saying to themselves ‘I already know exactly what this is’ and they make an immediate value judgement that tends to regard it as boring. If they know what it is, then they know what to expect, and if they know what to expect then they’ve already played some version of it.
Visibility Tactics
There are two ways to become visible: Spend unimaginable amounts of money to force people to pay attention, or create a great marketing story which aligns with their existing attention. The first is a tactic, while the second is a strategy.
Most people that I talk to about game marketing only talk in terms of tactics. Their idea of achieving visibility is to get featured in as many places as possible, whether with paid or free advertising, and through the resulting volume of noise eventually gain the required attention.
Provided your game isn’t so badly made that it’s unfit for purpose, the tactic of mass-attention-grabbing is perfectly valid. The market is resistant to advertising, but not wholly immune. So if your game can feature in enough channels that your intended market uses, receive enough endorsement from figures that your market respects, and continues to do so with sufficient scale then it will probably move units.
Tactics require deep pockets and broadcast channels. At launch, a game like Call of Duty: Black Ops features in every broadcast media outlet, is reviewed by every magazine and blog, and occupies lots of TV time and shelf space in retailers. The resulting blanketing of message cannot help but grab attention. That attention converts to sales, especially in the Christmas period, and that’s how the big games business makes its bucks.
Some channels are more amenable to tactics than others, and the tactically minded business tends to regard the more chaotic ones askance. While the iPhone is hugely popular, it is difficult to use tactics to dominate attention on it. The main portal to that attention (the front page of the App Store) is controlled by Apple, who deliberately seek out unusual apps to feature rather than expensive ones. So it’s harder (though not impossible) to make a dent there.
The largest mistake that the tactically minded make is to think that invisibility is a sliding scale. While some games are more visible and widespread than others, all visible games sit on one side of a divide. All invisible games sit in a gigantic heap on the other side. They are not more or less invisible. They are just invisible, in the pig pen with everyone else. 5% extra marketing budget or 7% extra development time won’t flip the switch.
The problem is simply that most developers in the same market think the same way, and use the same tactics. So all they really end up doing is creating a lot of noise. The key to achieving visibility through brute force tactics is to shout louder than the competition, and so if the volume of your message is not loud enough then it simply subsides into the background.
Zynga is so dramatically more successful than any other social game company because their advertising is committed to acquiring the attention of every last Facebook user, no matter the cost. Their competition adopt the same tactics, but without the same level of commitment. Even though their games may look the same and act the same, they lack the punch that Zynga delivers, and so they are noise. They become regarded as clones, and so even users that do notice and install them make the judgement that they already know what that game is, judge it to be boring, and subsequently leave.
Visibility Strategy
The other way to achieve visibility is through building a marketing story. This means creating a deliberate and authentic difference in your game in order to circumvent rather than overcome the noise. Marketing stories are strategic rather than tactical.
What do I mean by that?
Tactics are simplistic: If I get a celebrity to feature in a photo shoot for my game and distribute it in a big magazine, I will expect X responses. A tactic is easily understood as a process because it regards the end result (the response) in a mechanical fashion. Tactics are thus easily explained to marketing departments, easily packaged and easily distributed. They are like building marketing Lego.
However, aligning yourself with a market such that your users become your best marketers and you grow through surfing the wave? That’s hard. It’s hard to communicate because for every game the strategy is unique. It’s hard to explain to a marketing department, hard to package and distribute, and unlike tactics there is no Lego to put it together.
From the outside in, all marketing story successes appear lucky. They have no replicable tactic that everyone can understand, so – like any sufficiently complex system – the outputs look like magic. From the inside looking out, however, strategies are the only things that make sense and tactical marketing appears short-lived and vaguely insane.
A marketing story strategy often works best with over-delivery. Over-delivery means that the way that the game extends is such that it has never been seen before by the intended audience.
Over-delivery can mean delivery on content or on game dynamics, or some other factor like exceptionally funny writing. Angry Birds over-delivers on level content. For 59 pence (or 99 cents) the game gave the player over 75 individual puzzles to solve as well as 6 different kinds of bird. It also regular featured new puzzles for players to try, and a new kind of bird, such that the game now has over 150 puzzles and more still to come.
Another form of over-delivery is multiplayer modes. Blizzard have long allowed players to play multiplayer Starcraft across Battle.net for free, and Valve do similar with their Counter Strike and Left 4 Dead games. New mission packs, mod tools and other means also permit other kinds of over-delivery in those games.
Over-delivery is a great way to found a strategy as long as the manner in which a game is over-delivering feels special. An Angry Birds clone that also has many levels has much less chance of being taken up by the playing public because they already know what your game is, what it’s like, and so it’s boring. The fact that it has 200 levels doesn’t matter.
Summoning Techthulhu is also a prime source of mistakes when it comes to over-delivery, as the developer becomes convinced that the public really cares about realistic fluid flow, or unique faces for all 2,000 trolls that appear in the game. Likewise, tying over-delivery to money is often a big mistake. It takes the joy out of it. If Minecraft charged for updates and resources in the game on a metered basis, it would not feel as though it had over-delivered.
Over-delivery needs vision and follow-through both on the product front and the messaging front. It needs to be clear, so that the players understand instantly what makes the game cool. Over-delivering in every direction is simply getting swept up in unique selling points, and dilutes the marketing story. What you need to do is pick the right direction, and then over-deliver on it. A lot.
The strategic approach to achieve visibility needs both constant supervision and superior vision. And the issue for most developers is, like it or not, they do not have the money to rely on tactics. So they need to have a strategy instead. They need a marketing story. They need to over-deliver, or be invisible.
Like Eddie Izzard, it’s not just about the name or the dress style. It’s that Izzard over-delivers on the content of his act. The other parts just contribute to the showmanship, so that the audience doesn’t immediately say ‘I already know what that is’. The content is where his marketing story becomes authentic, and its images and threads stay with the audience for years afterward.
And that’s why he is visible.
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