Comments on: Marketing influences game revenue three times more than high scores

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:24:08 +0000

Would I pay to get featured on NewGrounds? I would. Would they let me? Probably not.

Say I had £100 to spend on marketing a game – what I’m interested in finding out is how I can spend this and ensure that I will get over £100 back as a result (in addition to what the game would have earned anyway).

By: Nob

Nob — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:55:32 +0000

btw I love ur site. When do you publish your book on AS games?

By: Nob

Nob — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:53:22 +0000

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By: Ruslan

Ruslan — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:45:49 +0000

I think Game quality is more important . I saw many games with normal programming , but most of them have bad design and effects . Effects would make games more playable (I mean video effects).

By: Guest

Guest — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:40:30 +0000

I think the game “BLOONS” is very famous not because its the best of the best, … is famous because it has the support of Mochimedia… it’s always featured in the main page and is sent to all game portals thru mochigames… if your game has a good marketing support, it will succeed

By: Antriel

Antriel — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:05:49 +0000

You really can’t expect viral distribution to be enough. Flash games are free and must stay free (can have exclusive content thought). Therefore there will never be enough developers to pay for such a service, to create a system, that could work.
Quality is far more important. The primary thing that makes bad games spread so much is art. Players subconsciously go to play game with good art, even when it’s not a good game actually.

Still, it is true that if more people see the game, more will play. But I see future in social sites like facebook, not in being featured on some sites for money.

By: Maurycy Zarzycki

Maurycy Zarzycki — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:57:13 +0000

Well it can sound really discouraging. I _ALWAYS_ put quality far faaaar higher than marketing (Ok, let’s be honest, popularity discourages me from playing/listening/watching/doing something because over half of the time it turns out it is just crap in pretty wrap) and you present me such a stinking egg…
On the other hand, real high quality can spawn its own marketing pretty well. If you made game good enough to enter Newgrounds’ Top 50, you would be featured on front page, you would get on some other big portals “spotlight” places and you could easily grab millions of views, the same goes for game sponsored by well-known portal. Let me take a peek at my own statistics…

(Squario, a mario-gameplay clone) With CPMStar, a sponsored game, gave me 1.4 million of views. Add to it revenue from selling (around 10?)site locked versions (and I sell on average one to two per month) and cash from sponsorship and I can consider the value to be acceptable.

(Galagian, vertical wave-based space shooter) On the other hand, my second game which never was sponsored has been viewed, according to MochiAds, barely 55k times. It’s not even close to satisfying, yet I got some cash from selling a good couple of site-locked versions (7-8).

One important thing I noticed! I’ve been using Flash Game Distribution for some time, but recently I manually submitted that second game to around two dozens of sites and in last couple of days I noticed an increase from 100 to over 400 views per day. If your internet connection is faster than mine (18KB/s upload speed) Manual Submission is a way to get your stats higher, and I am surely going to distribute my next project this way (but somewhere where the internet speed is better).

Anyway, the point I was going to, before I forget. I don’t think any of these two games are either of high quality and none was marketed. What made Squario ~23 times popular though is the very simple fact that Squario is a “Mario Clone” and Galagian is “Galaga Clone”. No matter how you look at it, Mario is much more popular. On Google Mario gets 55.6 Million hits monthly and Galaga barely 0.2 Million, so the difference is terrifying. Squario just “rode” on Mario’s popularity to get to fame.
So, the big point being – Not only the quality and marketing matter, sometimes you can do some “meta-marketing” (can’t find a better name) by using a game title/characters/gameplay/whatever similar/identical/relating to something already existing and popular. This is a major strategy in what I call spam games these days – games which have Mario (or other popular character) in title, the players is Mario but the game has as much common with Mario as punch with face and their only objective is to make people install toolbars. But that’s discussion for some other day, I already spammed your comment box too much :).