The difference between gamedev and marketing

I won’t bury the lede here: I don’t think there is a difference.

Most of the game developers I’ve spoken with seem to see marketing as a secondary element of releasing a game, like QA or localization. They’ll ask questions like “when is a good time to start marketing our game?”. To me, what they’re describing is sales, not marketing.

Marketing is considering what’s appealing, integrating that into your product, and demonstrating that appeal.

If you’ve got a finished or nearly-finished product and are trying to convince people to buy it, you’re stuck in the unenviable position of a salesman. With pure sales, your success is going to be bracketed by how appealing the product is — in ways you can’t really influence anymore. Marketing, on the other hand, is considering what’s appealing, integrating that into your product, and demonstrating that appeal.

Compared to something like a phone, where you have a functional baseline and can differentiate on other elements of appeal (materials, UI, etc.), a game is 100% about appeal. There’s no functional element of it. From the game mechanics to the art to the UI, it’s all about what will strike someone’s fancy. Your role in making a game is that of a marketer, whether you know it or not. Your game design, aesthetic, name, and every element of your process should be designed to appeal to people, and it needs to be doing that from day one.

Game Design and Audience

Making your game appealing isn’t about selling out. There is no overarching general audience you can appeal to or find a common denominator with, but rather just a bunch of different audiences of different sizes.

Your gameplay mechanics and positioning are going to be a major part of what appeals to people, so marketing should be your first stop when formulating the very first ideas of your game.

The first few questions you need to answer before or while designing your game are:

Who is my audience?

Does that audience actually exist (or exist enough to make this endeavor financially viable)?

(or exist enough to make this endeavor financially viable)? and what does that audience like in a game?

Whatever audience you choose to make a game for, keep them in the forefront of your decision-making process.

As mentioned, this doesn’t require any form of selling out, and can even be quite the opposite. For example, if you wanted to make a deep, artsy game, you should consider the audience of people who like that sort of thing and make choices with their interests in mind, like leaving out micro-transaction loot crates and copious DLC.

One game design concept we try to follow in Ooblets is to always be nice to the player. You can see this when your ooblets learn a new move; You don’t have to pick an existing move to overwrite and permanently lose, because that wouldn’t be nice for the player. We feel this don’t-punish-the-player philosophy appeals to our specific audience but wouldn’t necessarily work if our audience was more like that of Super Meat Boy.

Hooks and High Concept

I tend to write a lot about hooks as discrete draws that will grab people’s interest. It’s basically another way of saying appeal. You should be thinking about what hooks your game has, and make sure it’s got at least one.

A hook can be your aesthetics, humor, subject matter, or gameplay

You may have also heard of the term high concept, which is about being able to sell your idea on the pitch alone, and not so much related to its execution. This can definitely be valuable for making your game appealing, but it’s not the only way to have hooks. A hook can be your aesthetics, humor, subject matter, or gameplay — all of which are directly related to execution.

All that said, don’t rely on “good” execution as a hook; If you made the best-executed early-access multiplayer zombie survival game and released it in 2020, you’re still going to have a hard time selling it amongst the hundreds of other games that have saturated that market.

A few examples of hooks in games:

Minecraft: The main hook is that you have a level of interaction and control over a complex and open world environment that was pretty unheard of in gaming before it.

Flappy Bird: The hook was a very lucky (or possibly genius?) mixture of high difficulty, small units of measuring success, and bringing it all together by making it easy to compare your score publicly on social media.

PUBG: The hook is the Battle Royale concept which has become more recognizable to people through various media over the years, but hasn’t been fleshed out as extensively before in game format.

Gang Beasts: The hook is that a variety of naturally-emerging funny and strange situations can play out in a social setting.

Ooblets is definitely high concept in that it mixes a couple well-known gameplay mechanics that people already like and can imagine working well together, but we also try to leverage our aesthetics, tone, personality, and content to have as many small hooks as we can.

Differentiation

If I were writing this ten years ago, I’d put more of a focus on how well you execute your ideas, but with the extreme amount of competition in the gaming industry these days, I’d put way more of an emphasis on differentiating your ideas. It’s a struggle for mindshare, and if you have no momentum, you need to grab attention as quickly and simply as possible.

YouTube, especially looking at the top channels, is a great place to investigate this, as the concept has been distilled to an art over there. Using only thumbnails and titles, attention is clawed from the other millions of videos through techniques demonstrated below:

You don’t necessarily need to emulate these precisely…

Think of what will make a vlogger want to cover your game. Think of what headline about your game the press could write that would get them clicks. Consider someone rapidly going through their Steam queue and what it would take to make them pause on your game.

Visuals

It should be obvious by now that there isn’t a scale of graphics quality like there was in years past where everyone was rushing to make computers simulate reality better than the competition. As that competition has sort of evened out, there’s been a shift back to mechanics and aesthetics, sort of like the shift from realism to impressionism in art. This is great for you, because you don’t need to compete on graphical fidelity with AAA games, but you’ll still need to compete for visual attention.