At GDCnext I moderated a panel with Zach Gage, Rami Ismail, and Adam Saltsman on indie marketing. It was a fun session, made more so by the fact that they all walked into the room with one minute to spare before the session started (I was about to start pulling dev’s from the audience into the stage!).
It all worked out though, and now video is posted on the GDCVault! Enjoy!
Yesterday, I posted about ways to improve free-to-play games, which got one commentator to say that I was comparing traditional designers to creationists, and free-to-play designers as evolutionists. A science versus religion debate, in other words.
Well, that was not really my intent. Let’s say instead empiricists versus intuitionists.
That said, I think an important takeaway, which echoes my earlier post about dogma in programming approaches, is that taken to an extreme both approaches can be dangerous. After all, religion misapplied led to holy wars, and science misapplied led to eugenics.
The spectrum in the case of games might perhaps be seen as intuition leads to art, and empiricism leads to treating games as product.
Are either wrong?
Warning: giant (4700 word) post on basic marketing principles, prompted by some recent discussion on a forum about what makes for a well-retaining game.
A lot of folks, especially in social, seem to use the word “retention” when they should think “conversion.” I tend to think of this as an emotional journey.
You can think of this sequence as going something like this:
This is a shoutout to my younger brother Josh Koster (who has been featured on the blog here before) — his firm Chong & Koster, which does political new media services, has just announced a partnership with TSE Consulting, which is a company that deals with what can only be called the politics of sports. They’ll be doing their “nanotargeting messaging” thing for sport-related campaigns.
It is fascinating to me to see the sorts of convergence that are happening; here, it’s new media marketing crashing into Olympic bids with the tools honed during the last election cycle. The world is changing fast!
See the other great press articles that Josh has contributed to at Chong & Koster, or visit them on CrunchBase.
The Escapist’s new issue has an article about why I never found those t-shirts from the Experimental Gameplay Project at Target.
You know, alternate distribution methods like these are still a very good idea. But jumping straight to Target is challenging. Might the shirts have done better if they started out at something like Comic-Con instead? As of right now, few games have fandoms to the degree that they will follow a brand to a different store (my son’s Guitar Hero shirt was much admired at Cub Scout camp this weekend, but most games are not Guitar Hero).
To get crossover retail presence, the games are going to have be lifestyle brands to some degree, and be broadly recognizable enough to at least help get across tribal affiliation.
