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[stevesan]

I believe that "If you build it, they will come" is actually true. It's just very difficult to do, because you need to actually build a great game. Now you do need a basic amount of marketing, like posting it on forums and notifying influential blogs (RPS, IndieGames.com, etc.), but if your game is truly awesome, people will do your marketing for you. Minecraft, Braid, Fez, and more recently, CubeWorld has been getting a lot of attention.

You see a lot of articles against this philosophy, but frankly, I've only seen such articles from people that have built mediocre games that are not appealing at all.

What do you guys think? Am I naive to think that, if you just build a really great game (which takes years of hard work and experience, so it's not just a 'just'), then success will come quite naturally?

REVISING A BIT: I think I over simplified things originally, and what I really should be asking is: How much of a marketing budget should an indie dev plan for? Like, paying for ads, paying people to talk about your game...? The latter feels really sleezy and expensive.

[Christian Knudsen]

Generally speaking, yes.

[larsiusprime]

Pretty much. "Marketing" is at least as important as making something good. Even if you have something great, you need to accomplish the following things to succeed:

• Tell lots of people
• Get their attention
• Convince them that it's great
• Convince them it's great enough to give you money/respect/love/etc

Every single one of these steps is quite difficult. There are plenty of cases where "people will do your marketing for you" but these are generally specialized cases where you were able to cross a certain magic threshold for these individuals. Or just get lucky.

There's things you can do to "increase" your luck, etc, but these are also difficult.

So, with all due respect, yes I think your position is a bit naive

[ubik]

I think this is typically true.

If you look at the lower end of successful games, and the upper end of unsuccessful games, you will find that the lower successful games aren't all that great.  I don't want to name any names but there are a couple of rather successful ones that aren't very good.

If you build something and stick with it people will come.  They do have to know that there's a stadium in that cornfield though.

[Xienen]

...
They do have to know that there's a stadium in that cornfield though.

Nail on the head, imo.  If you build something good/great, but everyone just sees a cornfield, it won't work.  This was a hard lesson for us with Break Blocks.  Sure, we told everyone we could that there's a stadium in there, but people only saw the cornfield and consequently wouldn't even bother playing the game.  I'm not gonna sit here and say Break Blocks is the best damn game in the world...I know it has a ton of flaws, but almost every single person we convinced to play it has said it's addictingly awesome, yet the game's sales tell a totally different story.

Sorry if I misused your quote, ubik, as you might have meant that you need to at least tell people about your game's existence, which is also entirely true.  When I read your analogy, that is what I thought of immediately.

[stevesan]

Pretty much. "Marketing" is at least as important as making something good. Even if you have something great, you need to accomplish the following things to succeed:

• Tell lots of people
• Get their attention
• Convince them that it's great
• Convince them it's great enough to give you money/respect/love/etc

Every single one of these steps is quite difficult. There are plenty of cases where "people will do your marketing for you" but these are generally specialized cases where you were able to cross a certain magic threshold for these individuals. Or just get lucky.

There's things you can do to "increase" your luck, etc, but these are also difficult.

So, with all due respect, yes I think your position is a bit naive

I see you worked on Defender's Quest - awesome! It seemed like you guys got a decent amount of buzz via blogs, like Destructoid (where I found out about it). Did you ever have to actually pay people to talk about it? I understand that spending TIME on marketing is important, but how much money would you say you spent on this, if any?

[StripeyWhale]

I think we spent exactly 0 on marketing/advertising. We sent out a press release to games press, and then wrote individual emails to the various press sites, RPS and Destructoid among them. I'd say off the top of my head that about 1 out of every 5 people we emailed ran a story, review, or post about the game.

For best practices on contacting journalists, there's about a million articles on that, and they'd all have better advice than me because I just did exactly what the articles said

[Alistair Aitcheson]

While on the whole I don't agree with you that if you build it they will come, there is something to be said about developing a game that people want to talk about. Developing your game and marketing it aren't necessarily distinct from each other, and a game that is remarkable and warrants discussion is both a great game, and easy to market.

Of course, it has to be good in a way that is clearly identifiable. For example, I think it would be difficult to promote a game based on the quality of its story as that's something that's difficult to convey convincingly to new players. However your examples, Braid, Minecraft and Fez, are all pretty clearly remarkable from the get-go. It's obvious what they do differently or interestingly before you even play them. Perhaps the "mediocre" games you talk about are actually very good, but you just can't tell that from the premise. Just like Ubik's stadium-in-the-cornfield analogy.

So I think the product design behind your game does factor very clearly in its marketability. So in that sense, you need to build it in the right way to facilitate their coming! But there is still a lot to be said for getting that message out there, finding the best ways to describe to press and players why your game is remarkable. How do you notify indie blogs (RPS, indiegames, etc.) in a way they will want to take notice of? How do you draw players in who wouldn't normally have known your product existed (assuming at this point it hasn't gone viral)? That's all PR and marketing, and it's not necessarily trivial. Especially if it's a paid App Store game (my own experience), then all four of LarsiusPrime's points become imperative, and a lot more challenging!

Great product design and great marketing very much go hand-in-hand

[larsiusprime]

BTW: StripeyWhale is me writing from my friends' house, I was accidentally logged in to his account 

[stevesan]

However your examples, Braid, Minecraft and Fez, are all pretty clearly remarkable from the get-go. It's obvious what they do differently or interestingly before you even play them. Perhaps the "mediocre" games you talk about are actually very good, but you just can't tell that from the premise. Just like Ubik's stadium-in-the-cornfield analogy.

Yeah this rings very true to me. In a sense, your game should be able to sell it self. From the title to the screen shot to the video to the written description to the demo, people need to immediately be able to see why your game is remarkable. It was very clear for Braid - time manipulation with mind-bending effects. Fez? Awesome looking camera rotation shit.

Some games just don't have that quality. They may be good games, but it takes more effort to see why they are remarkable.

I think we spent exactly 0 on marketing/advertising. We sent out a press release to games press, and then wrote individual emails to the various press sites, RPS and Destructoid among them. I'd say off the top of my head that about 1 out of every 5 people we emailed ran a story, review, or post about the game.

For best practices on contacting journalists, there's about a million articles on that, and they'd all have better advice than me because I just did exactly what the articles said

That's good to hear. It would make me kind of sad if I had to pay to market an otherwise remarkable game. Congrats on your success with DQ!

[ubik]

The thing with marketing is that, in theory, it should more than pay for itself.  You're getting far more sales from marketing than if you weren't doing it. 

If you look at Warren Buffet's 10 rules for financial success, the first one is reinvesting your money.  That is, you don't spend it on something else.  With software, some good portion of it should unquestionably go to sales and marketing.  I think up to 50% would probably be good.

[b.rad]

I believe that "If you build it, they will come" is actually true. It's just very difficult to do, because you need to actually build a great game. Now you do need a basic amount of marketing, like posting it on forums and notifying influential blogs (RPS, IndieGames.com, etc.), but if your game is truly awesome, people will do your marketing for you. Minecraft, Braid, Fez, and more recently, CubeWorld has been getting a lot of attention.

You see a lot of articles against this philosophy, but frankly, I've only seen such articles from people that have built mediocre games that are not appealing at all.

What do you guys think? Am I naive to think that, if you just build a really great game (which takes years of hard work and experience, so it's not just a 'just'), then success will come quite naturally?

REVISING A BIT: I think I over simplified things originally, and what I really should be asking is: How much of a marketing budget should an indie dev plan for? Like, paying for ads, paying people to talk about your game...? The latter feels really sleezy and expensive.

no way. get real, its is way more cut throat and manipulated than you think

[ubik]

It certainly is cutthroat and manipulated but I do think there is a huge buzz factor.

I'm very skeptical about the success of some of these extremely rudimentary games that have been receiving a lot of notice...

At the same time I do think it's possible for good, innovative products to muscle their way in there.

My basis for this statement is the fact that, again, a lot of games that have been low level successes are not that great.

[stevesan]

It certainly is cutthroat and manipulated but I do think there is a huge buzz factor.

I'm very skeptical about the success of some of these extremely rudimentary games that have been receiving a lot of notice...

At the same time I do think it's possible for good, innovative products to muscle their way in there.

My basis for this statement is the fact that, again, a lot of games that have been low level successes are not that great.

What are some examples of such games in your opinion?  I'm mostly talking about the indie/downloadable/free scene here. Of course, when you go big budget into AAA games, yes you need tons of heavy duty and expensive marketing to get the size of audience you need to recoup of $10+ million budget. But for indie games?

[ubik]

What are some examples of such games in your opinion?  I'm mostly talking about the indie/downloadable/free scene here. Of course, when you go big budget into AAA games, yes you need tons of heavy duty and expensive marketing to get the size of audience you need to recoup of $10+ million budget. But for indie games?

I don't really want to mention names because I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.

There is one game which I do think is quite good, but which has graphics that are quite rudimentary though serviceable, and that's a shooter called Vibrant.  And that did receive a fair bit of attention though it was certainly not a hype-machine or anything like that.

My point is, it's possible to do. 

[Irock]

I think the games you mentioned had a lot more marketing and PR than you realize.

Based on everything I've read and heard, you don't need a marketing budget, but you do need to work your ass off. Do social media, do interviews, make a good website, make a good trailer, talk about your game, get your game featured on blogs, do temporary price cuts, go to conferences- it will all probably help your game a lot.

I think it's common sense that, the less marketing you do, the lower your chances for success. Wouldn't you want to do everything you can to be successful (without being a jerk)?

[stevesan]

I think the games you mentioned had a lot more marketing and PR than you realize.

Based on everything I've read and heard, you don't need a marketing budget, but you do need to work your ass off. Do social media, do interviews, make a good website, make a good trailer, talk about your game, get your game featured on blogs, do temporary price cuts, go to conferences- it will all probably help your game a lot.

I think it's common sense that, the less marketing you do, the lower your chances for success. Wouldn't you want to do everything you can to be successful (without being a jerk)?

Yeah, I agree there. I first heard of "Braid" when reading about Jon Blow's talk on GamaSutra.

I don't mind doing all that stuff, and it actually sounds like a lot of fun (at first). I just really don't want to spend much money (although, going to confs ain't cheap) or do stuff that is "unsavory" such as paying people to talk about my game or manipulating Google search results, etc.

[Magnesium Ninja]

I think the games you mentioned had a lot more marketing and PR than you realize.

Based on everything I've read and heard, you don't need a marketing budget, but you do need to work your ass off. Do social media, do interviews, make a good website, make a good trailer, talk about your game, get your game featured on blogs, do temporary price cuts, go to conferences- it will all probably help your game a lot.

I think it's common sense that, the less marketing you do, the lower your chances for success. Wouldn't you want to do everything you can to be successful (without being a jerk)?

Agreed there, all the indie games I've seen grow popular are cases of developers pouring their hearts and souls into the product. It doesn't have to cost money, but you need to invest time and energy into making sure people will hear about your game. Before anyone can spread the news, they have to hear it from you.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i think a game needs to at least be competent to sell well; e.g. you can't have a completely terrible, buggy game and market it perfectly and have it sell well. but you can have an average game and market it perfectly and have it sell well

unlike the others here i'm willing to name which particular indie games sold well that i am baffled as to why because i think they are pretty average or lackluster games (and yes this is a matter of taste): peggle, canabalt, castle crashers, snood, angry birds, and yet it moves, cortex command, insaniquarium

also here's a short list of games which i think are truly great and yet sold poorly: noitu love 2, the spirit engine 2 (it was commercial before it was freeware)

i think the entire indie game community implicitly is founded on the idea that popularity doesn't equal quality, because why play indie games at all if that were the case? why play niche games, either?

one thing i do agree with is that popularity / sales are correlated with how fun a game looks to play. in other words: perceived quality spiced with hype. how good the game looks in screenshots, from the trailer, and from playing the first five minutes of it. how much excitement there is around a game; how many of your friends are talking about a game. that determines how good someone *thinks a game is*, and how good someone thinks a game is matters more than how good it actually is (if the latter even can be said to exist at all)

there's a placebo effect where if you expect to enjoy something, you enjoy it. and this effect applies to everyone. we'd all like to believe that we personally determine how good a game is dispassionately, and that hype and advertising don't affect our judgements. but think of it this way: if advertising and hype didn't affect our judgement about how good a game is, why would companies spend millions (often more than a game's development budget!) on it?

a corollary to that is that if a game actually *is* good, it's a lot easier to make it *seem* good in videos, and a lot easier to create hype for it. if a game is only average, it takes more work to make it seem good in videos, and more work to create hype for it. so that good games "market themselves" much more easily than average games do. but just because they market themselves easier doesn't assure success

[mirosurabu]

As Tadhg says, you need a marketing story.