Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Some marketing thoughts

cliffski

I’ve been reading this book:

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Which is a bit old, but kinda interesting. I’ve always been impressed by the guy’s marmite theory of middle east peace. Anyway, part of the reason for this was for me to challenge my own thinking, and led to be scrawling all kinds of stuff over that big blackboard in my office. I was trying to re-evaluate all kinds of stuff. In some ways, F2P is the absolute perfect example of lateral thinking. It’s a totally different way of running a games business, as is pay what you want and kickstarter. All massively successful. Sadly, I did not reach a similar epiphany. However, it does open my mind.

I recently, out of curiosity, found myself adding up the total development cost (excluding my time) of Democracy 3. I then compared it to my proposed marketing budget for the game, and got a figure of 33.96%. In other words, for every dollar I spent on artwork/music/other stuff for the game, I was planning on spending $0.33 promoting it. This is lower than games like Call of Duty, where historically the marketing budget has dwarfed the mere development cost, but I can’t bring myself to do that :D.

However, with my lateral thinking-expanded mind, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a sensible way to analyze the optimum marketing spend anyway. In the back of my mind, if I’m thinking about what would be a suitable ROI, and looking at my costs, that’s probably the wrong metric. If I assume (conservatively) that D3 sells as well as D2, shouldn’t I really be looking at the marketing budget as a percentage of the projected revenue? not the costs? If so, then that 33% figure shrinks dramatically. As a result, what in my mind I can consider a reasonable marketing budget rises dramatically, because if I’m being rational, and I was happy to spend 33% I still should be, but of the larger (revenue) figure.

Now I know what you are thinking. In a perfect world the marketing budget expands infinitely as long as the ROI on each marketing dollar spent is positive, but that’s in a theoretical world with perfect information. If I spend $100 today, I might not see the ROI for six months, so do I halt my spending entirely tomorrow? Obviously you have to guess what’s going to happen and budget accordingly.

I find analyzing and managing this stuff fascinating, but am not aware of any games built around it. Gratuitous Marketing Battles here we come!

 

6 thoughts on Some marketing thoughts

  1. I think that D3 already has an advantage over D2 due to the success of your previous games like Gratuitous Space Battles. Positech Games will be known to more gamers now than when D2 came out, and hopefully this will translate into more sales of D3. Also, you have Steam now as well. In conclusion, the game could sell better than D2 because of your reputation without increasing the marketing budget.

  3. Marketing is an expense, not a form of revenue. It can be revenue-enhancing, if it’s done right, and the time is right, and the entrails say good things, because marketing isn’t a science. But taken strictly in abstract? It’s an expense. :)

  4. I was wondering why you don’t include your own time in costs/expenses. I would have thought that “your work time” is the primary expense, especially as you have/are the company and thus (I expect) are on a wage (rather than say being self-employed were you are not on a regular wage).

  5. Indeed, that only makes the cost greater, and thus the sensible marketing spend higher! (although of course eats into profits). because I’m the only full time employee, and also the owner, it seems redundant as 100% of the profits go to me, and the time I put into things is a constant… most of the games take about the same time to make… I can’t see an easy way to account for it in a sensible way, that would affect my spending decisions.

  6. Perhaps you could survey purchasers of one of your games to find out how they discovered it–personal recommendation, ad at XYZ, previous Positech purchase, etc. That would help you narrow down better marketing devices for your product, at least in so far as people who already buy your work is concerned. Won’t help define how to expand your userbase, of course.

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