Game complete - todo: get rich;

This post is about something that most indie gamedevs suck at. Marketing... Or really what to do before marketing. Our game WordRoom is completed and shipped to four platforms with a common Windows Azure based back end. There will always be updates and new ideas, but the game is playable and most bugs are killed off.

We have a constant stream of new players and in this volatile online environment most of the try it once and disappear in the search for a game that suits their preferences better. That's perfectly fine, our game is a niche game for word gamers. The number of played minutes per day stays pretty much constant. Of course we want the numbers to increase, but how do we do that?

As I see it we have several ways to increase the amount of minutes played.

Try to keep players

 

The first way is to try to keep players to stay and one way to do that is to merge a small amount of social gaming into this game. In the current version we have a chat but it only works for the Windows 8 version due to the restriction of screen space on mobile devices. The players are pretty much cut of from each other apart from the gameplay itself. There is also no way to mock your opponents, like posting it to Facebook. This is something that we will have to add.

We have a new secret social feature being developed right now that will help to keep players around.

However, there is a very special kind of players, the POWER PLAYERS that play a lot. These are the people we need to reward. Some of them even posts new word lists to us. An idea is to create a reward system within the game so that you perhaps earn rank every time someone plays a category that you created.

Yet another feature is badges and achievements.

All of the above boils down to communicating back to the user. That is what we need to improve!

Advertisement 

 

After all the above is fixed, we need to advertise. This is where our skills are next to zero. I don't know how to market a game or where to place the ads. Also the amount of cash we can spend here is limited. We have been pondering a lot about alternative marketing, such as funny Youtube videos and so on. Anyhow, this is where we need to improve, big time...