11 deadly marketing sinsgame devs should avoid by Peter Fodor

The most shocking to me is the frequent absence of the selling proposition. It’s the essence of the game’s uniqueness in one sentence, the “why” when giving players or users a reason to download your software product. This should be the very beginning of the development process and serve as a sort of “lighthouse” when directing your game design and production.

1. Missing the Unique Selling Proposition

Are you targeting casual, mid-core or hard-core players? What are their gaming habits? How do they spend money on their favorite games? Sounds simple but you won’t believe how rarely I see a clear answer to this essential question. Having a clear persona in front of your eyes during development helps solve several game design questions and once the game enters the soft launch, marketers know who they need to reach.

2. A vague definition of the target group

Category research should come before writing the first line of code. It means you should check your competitors, trends, leaders but don’t forget the financial metrics either. Use AppAnnie, Priori Data, ThinkGaming or some other similar store intelligence to understand the download volume and mostly the revenue per category.

3. No category research

A premium game has to be “sellable” with a few screenshots. Not every concept is visually strong enough to achieve that. Featuring by Apple and Google, the cross-promotion and focusing on virality is all you can do in regards to marketing your game.

The freemium model offers more possibilities and it’s about the optimization of the funnel and tweaking the economics. Paid acquisition requires descent cash but the revenue potential is high.

4. Missing the F2P and premium difference

I strongly recommend picking one primary platform based on research. Check the data from store intelligence tools and compare the estimated revenue of your main competitors on all platforms and then analyze the differences between game versions.

If you have a small team, decide on one platform and enter the others only after establishing a strong brand and a vibrant community.

5. Launching on many platforms

If you build a freemium game, split your production budget 70-30 and use the smaller part for marketing only. Freemium is an iterative business and you have to invest in user testing, game analysis, a soft launch, A/B testing, data analysis and several tools. You should aim for a return on your acquisition investment after about 2-3 months depending on the genre, otherwise the game isn’t performing well.

6. Not having a marketing budget

Having a good game isn’t enough if there’s a cash flow problem. Let’s say you acquire a user for $2 and the average repayment of the investment is 2 months. Add 60 days to the pay-period by Apple and Google which means a cash flow gap of 4 months total. If you want to acquire 100K new users in a week then you need to be able to have 200K in your bank account for a quarter of the year to get your money back.

7. Forgetting the cash flow

It’s somehow in indies minds that ads are evil. For premium games, yes. But in a freemium, 95% of players won’t ever pay for in-app purchases so using ads to monetize this large group is absolutely fine.Having well integrated rewarding ads could help increase the session length and improve the conversion of paying users by giving them a sneak peek of premium features. In Ocean Blast, we have 37% of our revenue from ads!

8. Rejecting mobile ads

Most of the servers such as TA are fighting for an existence and large branding campaigns on these servers brings only about 1000-1500 clicks a day which is with a store conversion of 40% about 400-600 installs.The focus of readers has switched to Youtubers or browsing the top charts, which applies mostly to a young audience according to research by Tune.

9. Over-estimating the power of the press

Not doing a soft launch is equal to committing suicide today. In a soft launch, you should test messaging, A/B test screenshots and the app preview video, fine tune on-boarding, level progression and monetization. Test different ads to target and understand your audience. Having good KPI’s helps you to be able to pitch the game to Apple or Google as well as secure strong featuring.

10. Skipping the soft launch

Many indie developers jump from one game to the next one, switching genres and losing the opportunity to maximize on existing code, mechanics and their user base. Look at Supercell as “Boom Beach” is based on the foundations of “Clash of Clans”. Or look at Ketchapp games, which are simple one tap fast-reaction games produced in a few weeks but heavily leveraging the brand, cross-promotion, and have a regular publishing frequency.

11. Not building on foundations

Made by Peter Fodor

Founder of AppAgent, a mobile marketing service for gaming teams and mobile startups. Previously the co-founder at Flow Studio.

‣ peter@appagent.co ‣ www.twitter.com/petrfodor ‣ http://blog.appagent.co