Mel Reams

At LevelUp’s last Main Event meetup on June 2nd 2014, Clive Gorman came to talk to us about marketing for start-ups. Clive is a very experienced multi-disciplined video-games marketing and product management professional with more than 17 years working in the technology and video-games industry. He is currently the product marketing manager responsible for marketing strategy, implementation and product management at TinyMob Games.

Based on Clive’s talk, we’ve compiled these handy tips to assist with marketing your own games both before and after launch.

Core Metrics

The core metrics for any release are:

• Acquisition – how many users are you acquiring  and how quickly?
• Retention – how long do those users stick around?
• Monetization – how much money are you making per user?

To achieve your goals in each of those metrics, research is key. Know your audience, know your competitors. Appeal to your audience and differentiate your game & company from your competitors. There are many free sources of data that can help you out, for example NewZoo and Quora.

The next step is to apply your research to your branding.

Branding

• Discovery and differentiation – how do people find out about you, and what makes you different?
• Brand interrogation – ask yourself the tough questions about your brand – does it express what you want it to?
• Positioning – where does your company fit?
• Vision, mission, values – how does your brand show these off?
• Logo and identity – your logo needs to fit with what your brand is trying to express
• Sound – an often underrated part of branding
• Personality – all the parts of your brand need to express a coherent personality.

Part of what your branding needs to do is give journalists a reason to talk about your game.

App Store

• Test your game name and icon. These need to grab attention as soon as you see them in the app store.
• Crowd-source options for metric based optimization, include AdMob and CrowdPicker.
• Optimize text length for a very small space. App Store description shown ‘above the fold’ is very short, you need to use it effectively.
• Have screenshots with a consumer proposition.
• First screenshot is key feature – on the iPhone you only see one by default so it *must* be good.

Website

• Needs to be responsive on mobile – lots of traffic comes in that way
• Talk about features in-depth – for example, TinyMob uses the website to explain their Warbands feature in-depth
• Optimize loading times – don’t frustrate potential users
• Gifs! Use sparingly but use them if motion will help explain a concept
• Have a press page with assets – don’t make busy journalists hunt for these
• Search engine optimization
• If you can, hire an expert
• Use your keywords in your website copy in a narrative way

PR

• Do press-releases/announcements for milestones in your project – beginning of project, alpha, beta, full release, etc.
• Focus on key media – If your game is a Pocket Gamer style game, don’t go to Engadget for coverage.
• Use Twitter to generate leads – get to know people on Twitter in an organic way long before you have something to sell them. Then when you have a game to tell them about, you already have a relationship that gives them a reason to care about your game.
• Leverage new media: YouTube, Twitch
• Direct submission or games PR news-wire – many websites let you submit news directly.
• Games Press – you can use the service for free but with no guarantee of getting on the page, or for around £90 a month (depending on this size of your company and the number of assets you want to submit) you can add your assets directly to their site and have a link to them in the daily digest email
• Create a press kit – use Dropbox or Google Drive

Social media

• Use Hootsuite or similar service to schedule tweets, g+ posts, Facebook posts.
• Tweet every 20 minutes or so at most.
• No more than 3 Facebook posts a day.
• Images work better than text or video.
• Use hash-tags to help people discover you – if you’re tweeting about Clash of Clans, use their hash-tag!
• Blog on tumblr too

Email

• Free marketing – MailChimp is free for up to 2000 subscribers.
• Great way to build a community.
• Monetizes really well – if someone has bothered to give you their email address, they’re really interested in your game.

Pricing

F2P vs premium

• For small projects, premium is probably better. Many journalists and publications are turned off by free-to-play. Have a small upfront cost and potentially some DLC later.

Merchandising

• Virtual product still needs to be appealing even it’s not a physical product. Think about how you’d present your game or service as if it were in a store.

Sales and promotions

• More value for same price does better than discounts
• Tie sales to your game’s theme – for example, tell players the trade caravans arrived early instead of a bland ‘bonus 50 widgets’ message.

Q & A

Q: Are trade shows worth it?

A: They can be pricey, be careful about how many you go to and how much you spend to get there.

Q: Do gifs or embedded YouTube videos perform better on a website?

A: Haven’t analyzed that, but it is hard to get views on your own video. If possible, get on a YouTube show that’s already popular.

Q: Is there anything similar to NewZoo that you recommend?

A: Google caches lots of research studies and papers, Gamasutra can also be helpful. Take any ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user) and ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) numbers you find online and in news stories with a grain of salt. Clive has never worked for a company that gave away that data.

Q: What should you budget for marketing?

A: At EA, marketing was about 12% of the total production cost for a small project. You should really set aside 25%, but you need to spend that in a very targeted way to be efficient.

Q: How can you advertise a game for kids?

A: Can’t track people who are under 13 – you can advertise to them ‘above the line’ with things like online banner ads or TV media, but you can’t collect data on children for ‘below the line’ marketing such as emails. Try to partner with educational game publications. Kids TV is a great Trojan horse to get around restrictions on advertising to kids. Kids Google a lot – parents will say not to click a banner so they’ll Google it instead.

Q: Should we suck it up and spend 20% of our time doing our own marketing or just pay a reputable firm?

A: I wouldn’t recommend spending unless you have investors or significant revenue coming in. A lot of the time you can manage campaigns using automation.

Q: What are your thoughts on Vine?

A: Vine is a great way to limit how much you show if you’re early in development. TinyMob used it to show off their Warpath feature. Instagram videos may be too long depending on how much you have to show.

Thanks again to Clive for coming to speak with us. If you have any followup questions, Clive can be reached at contactme@clivegorman.com.

Photo: Jacob Schwartz

LevelUp/IGDA Victoria’s last speaker was Alex Mendelev, who was kind enough to step in when Eric Jordan of DJ Arts was unable to make it. He joined us for a fireside chat about the business of video games.

Who is Alex Mendelev?

He is currently CEO of TinyMob, was previously GM of GameHouse, and before that he worked at Airborne Mobile (a content distribution company) in Montreal. At Airborne he was promoted to head of technology, decided that at age 26 he probably should not be in that position, and switched to a business role.

Alex moved to Victoria because he was looking for an excuse to move back west (his wife’s family is here), got connected with Russ Ovans, one of the founders of Backstage Games, and joined Backstage in 2009.

Why should we care about free to play?

Because 90% of the revenue on the iTunes appstore is from free to play games.

How do you make money on free to play games?

There was a talk by a Chinese developer called 7 deadly sins of social games that described how to make money by eliciting emotions in the player. Some emotions monetize better than others – for example competition/revenge can work particularly well, but depend on a close relationship between the players in competition.

The drive to complete a collection works well too. Vanity can work, but you need to offer players a compelling reason to care about having the coolest looking avatar, for example.

How ethical are free to play games? Is it douchey to let people play a little bit, then start hitting them up for cash?

The pre-pay model seems much less fair. $50-$60 is a lot to pay for a game that you can only judge by reviews, pictures, and videos when you can’t get a refund if you end up not liking the game.

Has the model changed since you started working in games? Is free to play still a good strategy for a small company?

Consumers are more aware now and more sensitive to companies dipping into their pockets early in the game.

It’s also harder to get users into your game. Average cost of user acquisition on mobile is around $2. To make money, you need to be sure you can make more than $2 per user over the lifetime of your game.

Players expect games to be extremely polished now and it’s important to handle launches carefully. If your game doesn’t grab users right away, they’ll just do something else.

What is TinyMob’s user acquisition plan?

TinyMob is planning to launch Tiny Realms in Spring 2014. They’re working very hard to create a community around the game so that players who are already engaged will help spread the word. TinyMob Games plans to augment organic growth with paid user acquisition campaigns.

What has your experience as a founder at TinyMob been like?

Much more stressful than just being an employee. Also very interesting and positive. At TinyMob, Alex does business development and marketing, Chris Hoefgen does tech, and Jamie Toghill does project management.

Will TinyMob do another round of funding post launch?

It is a possibility, they’ve had a lot of interest.

What was it like raising the first round of funding and how did you do it?

Alex showed off the art they had so far and told the story of the game, starting with local investors. It helped to have a previous exit (Backstage was bought by Real Networks for their GameHouse division).

Getting funding was mostly about telling the story of TinyMob and what they planned to do. Over 90% of their funding was local, and it all came from angel investors.

Games are hard to pitch to investors, some of them just don’t invest in games at all due to prior bad experiences.

Alex has been getting to know investors for the last 4 ½ years because his long term plan was always to start a company. Victoria is a small city and you should know all the movers and shakers.

The Victoria BC Startups meetup is a great place to meet business minded people/entrepreneurs. Trade commissioners are also very useful for introducing you to people.

Why did Alex decide to go business school after getting his comp. sci. degree?

After attempting to cofound a company with a friend who was also technical, he realized that at least one of them needed to have some business sense and it wasn’t going to be the other founder.

If we should know all the movers and shakers in Victoria, how do we find and get to know them?

If you have a compelling reason to meet with someone and ask them questions, most people will meet you at least for a coffee. Everyone goes for coffee, everyone needs to eat lunch. Linkedin is also a fantastic resource.

How useful was your business degree?

Alex’s first degree was in comp. sci and his original career goal was to become CTO of a large company. He ended up deciding he didn’t want to have to compete with brilliant recent grads when he was 50 and getting a business degree was his way to diversify, as well as allowing him to work in the part of the product lifecycle that he preferred.

Developers can get squeezed because they work in the middle of the lifecycle between inception and QA. QA is always under time pressure because they work at the end of the lifecycle, but business development people at the very beginning of the product lifecycle have the most freedom from time constraints because development doesn’t even start until their part is done.

With a major in comp. sci. and a minor in business, where should I focus?

Negotiation is especially useful, as well as being something Alex particularly enjoys, but basically any business course is useful because it’s such a different field from comp. sci.

People tend to think MBA programs are really intimidating and full of total geniuses, but they’re actually like any other program – there are a few brilliant people but most of the class is going to be people just like you.

Regarding monetization, western people seem to lean toward aesthetics and away from pay to win. Is this changing?

People do dislike pay to win because that forces them to pay to be able to compete, but people also prefer paying for items that affect their gameplay experience. About 90% of revenue will come from utility items vs items that just look cool.

What should you look for when hiring a business person?

Can you get along with them for a long time? What kind of track record do they have? Give them a test – for example, if you need someone to pitch to publishers, get them to pitch to you. If you don’t find their pitch compelling, don’t hire them.

How did you hire the first few employees at TinyMob before your funding came in?

TinyMob hired three people before they got funding. They found people who were passionate about games and were very upfront about what TinyMob could offer them.

When hiring people without necessarily having a lot of money to throw at them, think about what else you can offer them – equity, bonuses, full time, part time, being paid to develop a game by a third party.

Alex also had a question for the audience: how much interest is there in the Video Game Startup Bootcamp?

Most of the room raised their hands, which prompted a followup question:

What might stop someone from wanting to go into business making games?

Fear of losing the core of making games that people actually enjoy – having to compromise their vision to make money.

Worries about balancing making money with getting to build what you like.

A member of the audience had an especially good point about the business of games – actually shipping games is a huge pain point for developers. Taking 10 years to finish a game because you’re working at subway to barely pay your rent naturally makes people give up long before they ship. If you’re serious about people ever seeing your game, you need money.

At TinyMob Alex and his coworkers discussed whether seeing how difficult business really is would scare off potential entrepreneurs, and decided that it’s still best for people to know what they’re getting into. If you’d like to know what you’re getting into, don’t forget to sign up for the Video Game Startup Bootcamp – it’s only a couple of weeks away and it’s completely free!

Thanks again to Alex for coming to talk with us and to Chris Tihor for leading the discussion.