Exodus Of The Machine Teaser 1

[keith.lamothe]

Your trailers are nice, but I desperately want a hook. Not even a strong enough  hook to buy it outright, but a hook to make me want to learn more.

When trailer/game-store-page-copy time comes along, I'll be sure to come after you for feedback on the first couple sledgehammers it should hit the viewers with

[tigersfan]

That's actually an incredibly useful point: we do tend to bury the hook in the trailers.  Come to think of it, looking back at all my time working on perfecting queries for literary agents, that's one of the big sins of something like this.  And while the trailers and so forth are really good, we're bad at identifying and communicating the hook through the trailer and through the original marketing text.

I think that's definitely an area that we need to really focus on, yeah.  I can think of a couple of potential hooks to focus on for Exodus, and for Skyward Collapse I've had a really obvious hook in mind from the start with it.  SC should probably be our most obviously-unique game we've ever created, in a lot of senses.  Just from a surface glance I mean, not that it is actually more unique than our other titles under the hood (some of those are just as much out there).

Actually Chris, I've been thinking a good bit about the hook in Skyward Collapse too. Let's make sure we discuss that on our next call.

chemical_art - Thanks for your feedback about this. I think you raise some good points.

[chemical_art]

Your trailers are nice, but I desperately want a hook. Not even a strong enough  hook to buy it outright, but a hook to make me want to learn more.

When trailer/game-store-page-copy time comes along, I'll be sure to come after you for feedback on the first couple sledgehammers it should hit the viewers with

Yay!

I warn you, I give vague and even sometimes contradictory statements of my wants!

On the other hand, this is normal behavior, so maybe I can be your "normal" guinea pig?

[Wingflier]

*Shrug*

I'm not sure I would want players to buy my game that are either too busy or too lazy to try the demo. Judging a movie by its cover is a pretty foolish thing to do. From the way you make it sound Chemical_Art, you watch the trailer and if not interested, just never look at it again.

I can't imagine making my movie choices based on something like this. Most of the time, the quality of the trailer has NOTHING to do with the quality of the movie. In many cases, it has the OPPOSITE effect. In other words, if a movie is bad, the producers spend a ton of money on the trailer in order to sell it because it lacks actual content.

The same goes with games. The Call of Duty Series may have the best commericals and trailers of all the FPS games, but I certainly wouldn't call them the best by far. There's all kinds of games that look amazing based on the trailer, but just play like crap. If a game even looks VAGUELY interesting to me, I will try the demo. Games that don't HAVE demos are typically the ones I'll avoid, because I'm wary of shelling out $30+ for something I may not even like. This happened recently with Star Drive, which had an amazing trailer and webpage, but is actually extremely crappy in my opinion, and had no demo.

So in other words, if you (the customer) won't even take an hour to try a demo for a game that looks interesting to you, that's not Arcen's fault. Nor should Arcen pander to players with such a short attention span. It's the same reason it bothers me when people add a tl;dr section at the bottom of their posts:  Learn to read, or gtfo.

[x4000]

In a perfect world, sure, Wingflier.  The problem is the glut of information that we have.  I go through movies mostly the same way he does games, I think.  I look at reviews and recommendations, skimming just a bit of each, and if it seems uninteresting move on.  My time is limited, and it's not like I'm going without movies -- right next to the ones I skipped are others that DID do an effective job catching my attention, and I watch those.

I think the message here is that you want to be the one that gets noticed out of the sea of potentials, not the one that just fades into the background.  It's not about lazy consumers, it's about consumers trying to parse an overflowing firehose of information.  When a few things stand out of that firehose, most other things get forgotten.  And if I have (say) 20 hours of gaming time in a month, spending an hour on each of a lot of demos that I'm unsure about is unlikely.  I actually don't really play demos anymore, either.  I just don't have the time.

Not to say you're wrong, and back when there were fewer games being made that was absolutely the way to go about it.  When AI War came out on Steam, it had startlingly little competition from other indies on there.  Not so with our latest stuff.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm not sure I would want players to buy my game that are either too busy or too lazy to try the demo. Judging a movie by its cover is a pretty foolish thing to do.

(...)

So in other words, if you (the customer) won't even take an hour to try a demo for a game that looks interesting to you, that's not Arcen's fault. Nor should Arcen pander to players with such a short attention span. It's the same reason it bothers me when people add a tl;dr section at the bottom of their posts:  Learn to read, or gtfo.

I would be less harsh, but that's basically my own internal take as well.  It's not our responsibility to get through to people who aren't going to at least meet us half way.

But a key realization here is: if we want to succeed, we have to go beyond our responsibilities and meet people where they're willing to come.

That doesn't mean we have to try to reach everyone, but we can't just stand on our dignity/rights/whatever and depend on the remaining audience to support us.

[x4000]

I think there are two different perspectives, though:

Producer: Hey!  You can't even give me the time of day!?  What kind of human are you!  Where's the respect?

Consumer: Oh, god!  There are 10,000 producers all saying that to me!

[keith.lamothe]

I think there are two different perspectives, though:

Producer: Hey!  You can't even give me the time of day!?  What kind of human are you!  Where's the respect?

Consumer: Oh, god!  There are 10,000 producers all saying that to me!

True.

I don't think the same goes for reviewers (whose opinion should have weight proportional to the amount of effort they actually put into reviewing the game), but as I said earlier a consumer has no obligation to give us the time of day.

[chemical_art]

Chris says it well.

When there are dozens, if not a hundred, producers wanting my attention every month, the result is that with my limited game reviewing time is spread very, very thin. I simply don't have the time to look in depth for every game that has the possibility of being interesting. I have to filter, period.

On some hidden level I think "I'M the one giving money, you should come to me and get my attention." Almost all other markets outside games do this, so why should games be the exception?

[Wingflier]

I guess I just don't feel overly divided on my attention. In terms of games coming out in the Space/Sci-Fi RTS or FPS genre (probably my target category), there may be 15-20 per year, and that's if I'm lucky.  You can just slash 50% of those off instantly because they are vaporware or get terrible reviews.  The other 10 games you should find time to try within 365 days.

Maybe my tastes just don't branch out as far as some other's, but at least for the games I tend to go for, I have plenty of time to try all the ones I'm interested in.

[keith.lamothe]

On some hidden level I think "I'M the one giving money, you should come to me and get my attention." Almost all other markets outside games do this, so why should games be the exception?

It depends: is what you're looking for in a game easy to communicate quickly?  If so, you're fine.  If you want something that just can't be articulated quickly because it's complex, nuanced, etc, then you're not going to find it if the amount of time you allow each game is under the minimum amount of time that such a message can reasonably be communicated in.

There we get into something of a game like: what can we (the producer) show right at the beginning of the trailer to buy us a few "bonus-seconds" with the consumer so we have enough time to explain why this is cool before they just close the window.

I honestly don't enjoy trying to solve that problem, it's far harder and far less interesting than programming or game design, but I'll do what I can.

Not all game ideas have to be hard to get the hooks in for, thankfully, but if it was only possible to make the game ideas that had readily shown hooks that'd be a tragedy to the industry (both producers and consumers).

[Professor Paul1290]

It's worth mentioning that not all customer groups are created equal and some customers have a greater attention spans than others. Some developers don't have to care as much about marketing as others do because of the customers they cater to.

[chemical_art]

It depends: is what you're looking for in a game easy to communicate quickly?  If so, you're fine.  If you want something that just can't be articulated quickly because it's complex, nuanced, etc, then you're not going to find it if the amount of time you allow each game is under the minimum amount of time that such a message can reasonably be communicated in.

There we get into something of a game like: what can we (the producer) show right at the beginning of the trailer to buy us a few "bonus-seconds" with the consumer so we have enough time to explain why this is cool before they just close the window.

I figured my brevity in my my post would cause problems.

What I meant was that the publishers have, if this was law, a preponderance of evidence, meaning the publishers have to do go further then consumers go. For me this is just an evolution of business. Buy my car, I advertise to you why it is nice. Watch my movie, I'll tell you why its nice. For these two examples I have maybe a dozen (tops) producers shouting at me. For games, I have more like 4 dozen. The result is I have a higher subconscious filter due to time constraints.

Games don't have to go for hooks, but on the other hand, game's hooks don't have to be integrated into the game. For AI Wars my hook is pretty key, but not the be all: FS doesn't worry about the hook.

You don't have to use a hook, as long as you are OK that your game sales will suffer tremendously from not having one.

[chemical_art]

It's worth mentioning that not all customer groups are created equal and some customers have a greater attention spans than others. Some developers don't have to care as much about marketing as others do because of the customers they cater to.

Yep, as long as for budgeting you are OK with the lesser sales. That is where things a finicky. Nothing wrong with making a game where one out of a million gamers would want to buy it...just don't expect a million gamers to buy it

EDIT: I am NOT arguing is adding/removing a core game mechanic to appeal for me people, but what I am saying is that for more appeal emphasizing (even expanding) the "hook" of a game will cause a lot more sales.

[keith.lamothe]

Right, evaluating the probable risk and probable reward when selecting a project to execute is very important.  Something doesn't have to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if it only takes one guy 2 months to make.  We're aiming a bit higher than that here, but we're also very conscious of keeping costs down so this thing doesn't have to shoot the moon to be a success.