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It’s the classic boss battle at the end of the game. The enemy is huge, tremendous, seems nigh-indestructible and as old as time… While you stand there with only your sword.
The battle seems impossible to win… But you know that it is not, that no enemy is perfect, and that even this leviathan must have some fatal flaw, some weak point through which to drive your blade.
Welcome, Indie Game Company. Your enemy is Epic Games, EA, Ubisoft, Bioware and many, many more. Your weapon? Your newest, perhaps first, title. But as wondrous as your blade may be, it is useless unless you drive it into the beast’s weak point. Only then may you claim title as the ruler of the realm and live to fight another day.
But how do you find that chink in their armor?
First off, you must answer the question, “Why should someone buy our game, instead of any of the most popular titles in existence – ones with heavy marketing and established brands?”
Think about that question a moment – and don’t you dare try to argue “we’ll charge less”. If the main argument for your game is that it costs less money… You’re already setting yourself up to fail. Besides, why would you want to spend months of your life making a product designed to be inferior? You wouldn’t – so throw that out with the trash and let’s get back to slaying this dragon.
So why should someone buy your game instead of Activision’s latest?
Because you offer something that they don’t.
You don’t have much budget, so awesome graphics are probably out. This means you offer some part of the experience that is better or at least different than what the most popular titles in your genre do.
Sure, you might be making an RPG – but your RPG is funny as hell. Sure you might be making an RTS, but your RTS is more customizable than anything with ‘craft’ in the title… Or maybe you just offer an entirely new way of melding mechanics to create a unique play experience.
Try to get the words “first ever” somewhere in your game description – that will go a long, long way. But, no matter how you do it, you need to answer the question “why should someone buy our game instead of the most popular titles out there?”
If you can’t explain it in one or two sentences, then you’ll never be able to explain it to your customers… And the dragons will eat you alive.
-Dan Felder
P.S. Naturally, this is a huge topic and this entry has barely scratched the first scale of the beast we all seek to tackle. I’ll be delving into it much further in future articles. In the meantime, what are the reasons your games are worth buying over your competitors? Leave a comment below with the name of your game and the reason it is special.
Originally published on Gamestreamer.net
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The value proposition between tiers may be different, but their aim to entertain and bring the player to a different world is the same.
Secondly, limitations are truly a blessing, you really have to love the dragon. We as game developers can perpetually engineer beyond any business sense. Everyone in the development team is bound by time/money/technology/cycles/memory etc... Without those limitations we would not have a framework from which to begin with or to work towards.
I think its important to note that not everyone, especially in a creative industry, is motivated to fight. The primary reason we are in this industry is because they want to create. We could get much further by embracing the limitations rather than fighting them.
Besides, I dream of creating best sellers so that I can touch as many people as possible with my titles - not so I can make as much money as possible. It's just nice that they happen to go hand in hand.
However, I believe fighting the dragon on your first game release is a very tough fight for most indie (but it’s possible), but you can also lean from the dragon by allowing it to eat you, go to toilet and defecate your loss seed, then you germinate and come back with the second time to fight having learnt all the mistakes you did that allow the dragoon to eat you.
Suggestions:
(1) I will suggest patience to come out with polished games can kill any big dragon, because gamers will dictate the sales, but gamers will not want to buy any game with poor graphics.
(2) No copycat. Avoid any game design that look similar to the big dragon, unless you can surpass the design extremely.
(3) Some of the formidable marketing strategies and huge budget to mass produce CDs that the big companies used in the past are being cheap to do for indie now because of online downloads and direct or indirect social advertising. For example we have not released our game (Elewenjewe) yet, but Goggle blog and Facebook site for our game is active more than two months.
(4) Some indie’s graphic innovation is even at per with the big companies, and you may be surprise to learn that the big companies sometimes get inspirations from a poor indie game to release a polish game and sale AAA.
(5) Indie must remember that it’s not only the dragon we are fighting with, there are (pests, parasites, viruses etc.) popularly called pirate, must be taken into account immediately the game started to look promising during first level testing.
(6) Making your game cheap may not help, pirate attack the dragon and indie alike.
Lastly we should not be afraid to fight the big companies to get our share of the market (for those that can)); Invent, Create & Evolve (ICE) must come to play.
Luckily, this is just the first installment in a series of posts - the next should be posted on Gamestreamer.net shortly, and then co-posted to gamasutra later on. Tune in next time for how to choose your weapons for the battle, and how you swing the battle to your favor.