Plans on Marketing Penetration

[TechSY730]

How are you planning on marketing this to a large number of people within your target audience?
I mean, you don't seem to have the huge stock piles of cash for TV commercials like many mainstream companies, and I haven't seen indie companies in banner ads much (but then again, I have an ad blocker turned on  ), nor do you have a massive enough fan-base whose support alone could make a product profitable (sort of like Starcraft II, I didn't see much in terms of advertising, but their shear size of the pre-existing Starcraft I fan-base was alone enough to carry it)

From what I can gather, the somewhat disappointing revenues of Tidalis was twofold. One, how many competitors in that genre you had to deal with, necessitating you to cut into your profit margins quite a bit to stand any chance of selling it. And two, a lack of marketing to get the word of the existence of your product out, thus not that many people bought it due to the fact they didn't know it existed.

There are the people on the forums (most of which are most certainly strong supporters , but IIRC, you need more than that to make this a profitable endeavor. You also got your Youtube channel, but that doesn't seem like it has enough visitors to significantly contribute to you revenue.

What other marketing outlets/avenues/whatever do you have that you can use? Or similarly, what other sources of customers do you have?

There is one other source of customers I can think of, people just browsing around digital distribution offering and stumbling across your products and giving it a shot. That's how I found AI War in the first place. But I don't know how reliable that source is.

[BobTheJanitor]

Steam will probably be the big one here, at a guess. Or you could try to make a video go viral. Perhaps the AVWW guy crying in a mirror and yelling 'leave brittney alone!' Then again, maybe not.

[TechSY730]

Steam will probably be the big one here, at a guess. Or you could try to make a video go viral. Perhaps the AVWW guy crying in a mirror and yelling 'leave brittney alone!' Then again, maybe not.

That does bring up a good question. What sources of advertising does Steam provide? How much do you have to pay to get onto the featured items or that pop-up that comes up when you start up Steam?

EDIT: Or if exact pricing is under a non-disclosure agreement, could you at least tell us if it is cheap enough for you guys to pursue?

EDIT2: Even though having the AVWW guy (does he have a name or something?) doing really silly things would be questionable choice for marketing (though it may do very good for marketing, you can never tell with viral videos), it most certainly would be hilarious.

[x4000]

We've got various things that we're considering, but a lot of that I'll leave to Erik to discuss more -- it's still early days yet, and just getting some preview coverage and general awareness on the other hardcore gaming sites (RPS, etc) is the main goal. 

Tidalis was a poor fit for those audiences, so that was a particularly tough sell.  If AI War was a tough sell there, too, but in a different way -- like Dwarf Fortress, you have to really "want it" to play it.  AVWW is more in the "mainstream hardcore" demographic, and the numbers of units that are sold for similarly-targeted games on platforms that we're already members on is encouraging that we'd be able to prosper on that.

I can't discuss details about Steam pricing on anything, or any other vendor for that matter, but we're not planning on spending significant money on advertising unless that's bringing a really obvious return.  So far, it never has, so I think our total outflow over the life of AI War has been about $800 on adverting.  A $350k return, and climbing, is pretty good for that.  

AI War is a niche within a niche within a niche -- very hardcore strategy within the strategy gaming niche, within the PC gaming niche.  AVWW is more of a niche within a niche, being the substantial adventure game within the PC gaming niche.  So far the enthusiasm within that niche has been greater than for anything else we've ever done, so part of the plan is to see what opportunities arise, and of course also to focus on doing what we can to get the message of the game out in a fun, viral way. 

A lot of that is waiting until the alpha period, though, because right now all we have to share is previews, essentially.  But Erik and I need to get down to more specifics before too long, for sure, and we'd of course love you guys' ideas and any help you feel like providing.

P.S. -- The "AVWW guy" is actually just one NPC/player-character design among many, he just happens to be the first we did.  He's designed around the main character in a book I was writing not that long ago, though, so his GameEntity name is Darrell.  In-game there will be many different characters with his visual look, all with different names.  Kind of like how you see various townspeople with the same sprite in FF6, for instance.  The difference here is that any NPC can also be a player character.  By 1.0, I'd love to have around 60 different character sprites, but we'll just see how it goes.  As of this moment, we have two -- Darrell and a new "Neutral Skelebot" that is blue instead of yellow, and has slightly different dimensions.  More are coming quite soon, though.

[Ozymandiaz]

Creating viral vids is hard, with 'forced meme is forced' and all that. But steam I guess is a strong bet.

I have also seen more good interviews and such latly, thats a posetive way to get known as well.

[x4000]

Sure, you can't plan on going viral.  And you can't force the humor, as you say -- not to mention, this isn't really a humorous game.

What we can do is try to be interesting and succinct.  As the game evolves, we'll be able to show more and more interesting bits via video, and that's something that can be a value whether or not it "goes viral." If something we do goes viral, that would be great, but it's like winning the lottery -- it's a bit abstract, and not something we can manufacture or that we plan on with our general business strategy.

Our goal, marketing-wise, is to first have a compelling product that people want to talk about, and then to have the visual aids -- screens, videos, brief descriptions, etc -- to back that up.  Then it's a matter of getting that in front of people through any and every avenue that we can think of, without spending much.  If some video or blurb becomes more popular than we expect out of all that, then, well, great -- but it's not a requirement for success here.

[BobTheJanitor]

I think the best way to draw attention and potentially get something viral is to just show of some feature that will make people interested enough that they want to tell someone else about it. Something like that minecraft video showing the infinite procedurally generated terrain flyover. That's the sort of thing you see and then feel the urge to show to everyone you know. (And most of them ask you why you're showing them this blocky game with bad graphics, but that's beside the point)

If you can get people to watch the video and start thinking 'wouldn't it be neat if you could...' and then follow that up in the video by showing that exact thing that they were wanting, then you've got them. Of course this requires some sort of telepathy. Good luck!

[x4000]

Fortunately, a lot of what we're doing seems to be inherently interesting to people, especially in the wake of minecraft.  A lot of people really want to explore infinite worlds, and minecraft only sort of lets them do that (it gets too repetitive too fast, but that's not the point of minecraft at all in the first place).  The amount of interest in this game outside the normal forums and such has been absolutely far and away more than in any other game we've ever even talked about, which I take as a good sign.  Distilling that into a video or whatever... you're right, that will need some telepathy or something!

[TechSY730]

I think the best way to draw attention and potentially get something viral is to just show of some feature that will make people interested enough that they want to tell someone else about it. Something like that minecraft video showing the infinite procedurally generated terrain flyover. That's the sort of thing you see and then feel the urge to show to everyone you know. (And most of them ask you why you're showing them this blocky game with bad graphics, but that's beside the point)

If you can get people to watch the video and start thinking 'wouldn't it be neat if you could...' and then follow that up in the video by showing that exact thing that they were wanting, then you've got them. Of course this requires some sort of telepathy. Good luck!

You know what else went semi-viral in minecraft? That ALU that some really bored guy made.

That's it! Construct an ALU in AVWW.

For those with busted humorous insincerity detectors, yes, that was a joke

[cupogoodness]

Everything discussed here is good stuff. I absolutely believe Minecraft has gained its current popularity (heading toward 2 million copies sold) through the many videos out there players make of themselves doing various impossible creations or just creating funny situations -- as well as the classic snowball effect. That's something we can't predict at this point since the game is still in early development and thus no players have the opportunity to play around or create. While it's a component we hope to see blossom down the road, I'll definitely say it isn't something we're counting on just at the moment.

A lot of what we'll be able to do for marketing will be determined by the budget we can set after alpha and beta releases. Since at current our budget is very tight, my job is to make sure all the logical avenues we can pursue without a big wallet are sufficiently investigated. So right now our main focus is to be active in the areas we should be at the pre-alpha stage: sharing updates (nearly) every week, seeking out press coverage from various outlets (both online and print magazines,) reaching out to audiences we think we'll have interest who both are or are not aware of AVWW, and ultimately hoping that the amazing power of word of mouth can come through for us come alpha release.

From there, we'll analyze our alpha sales and continue developing our strategies based on how much we have to work with. Of course, if we end up selling a ton of alpha copies and we have the extra funding to put into marketing, we would definitely consider online/print advertising, a video, maybe even a commercial, who knows? It's all up to what we can financially back.

Here's what we're doing currently for A Valley Without Wind for those interested:

• Submitting weekly progress reports as a press package to Games Press (all of which were successfully posted thus far)
• Lots of brainstorming to come up with cool things we can do for alpha release and beyond.
• Emailing our press contact list with our latest press packages
• Collecting press contacts interested in alpha keys for preview purposes
• Sharing updates across several social networks, portals and link dumps including: ModDB/IndieDB, Reddit, N4G, GameKicker, Facebook, Twitter
• Responding to any questions or concerns we find on various comment threads and forums.
• Screaming, "You should check out A Valley Without Wind by Arcen Games!" really loud out of my window.

And remember to visit the Arcen Games PR/Marketing thread as well if you're looking to drop a few discussion points or ideas: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8346.0.html

- Erik

[Ozymandiaz]

Sure, you can't plan on going viral.  And you can't force the humor, as you say -- not to mention, this isn't really a humorous game.

What we can do is try to be interesting and succinct.  As the game evolves, we'll be able to show more and more interesting bits via video, and that's something that can be a value whether or not it "goes viral." If something we do goes viral, that would be great, but it's like winning the lottery -- it's a bit abstract, and not something we can manufacture or that we plan on with our general business strategy.

Our goal, marketing-wise, is to first have a compelling product that people want to talk about, and then to have the visual aids -- screens, videos, brief descriptions, etc -- to back that up.  Then it's a matter of getting that in front of people through any and every avenue that we can think of, without spending much.  If some video or blurb becomes more popular than we expect out of all that, then, well, great -- but it's not a requirement for success here.

Indeed (it was not a criticism, and actually directed at Bob, but you posted just before me )

I am actually supprised AI War never did go viral, becuase its just awesome. Then again I guess we are very niche players...

And persoanlly I am a sucker for games like Zelda and FFVI and the like. Spent hours with them years ago (I only got hold of FFVI on a an emulator, tho, but still), but not seen a new good one. If there is one thing I have come to expect form arcen, its pure quality, and thats a good brand to have .

[x4000]

Thanks, Ozy.

[TechSY730]

...

• Screaming, "You should check out A Valley Without Wind by Arcen Games!" really loud out of my window.

...

Clearly the most effective form of advertising.  

[x4000]

Well, he does live in LA.

[RCIX]

Well, he does live in LA.

So, what, 2 people heard him over the noise of cars?