How to Make and Market Your Game

Read Time: 5 minutes

Hey All!

I’m going to do something a little different today. 

With all the content being created, I’ve found myself on a bit of a content treadmill, just keeping my head above water with posts and podcasts and newsletters, but not having much spare creative capacity.

I aim to keep giving you something useful every two weeks, so my plan for the moment is to take every other newsletter and point to other content related to leadership in game dev.

It could be our own podcasts, posts from others, cool articles, whatever else.

I’ll give you my brief take/review on whatever it is plus a link to check it out yourself. And if you have some things in mind you want me to review and share to everyone, let me know!

The other podcasts (every 4 weeks) will continue to be written by me as I’ve been doing these last few months. Feel free to send me topics you’d like me to cover, as topic generation is one of the hardest parts of this whole process!

My goal is to keep giving you all useful tips to lead better in game dev, while perhaps also pointing you towards other great resources.

This is all experimental, so as the readers of my newsletter, I want to know what you think, and if you’ve got other ideas that could work, OR if you think I’m nuts and this is a bad idea. I’m open to any and all feedback and suggestions!

With that said, I’ll be kicking things off with a quick review of the last two episodes we released in the Building Better Games podcast:

How to Market Your Game w/ Ignition Facility

Link: How to Market Your Game with Chris and Joe from Ignition Facility | #76 - YouTube

One of my favorite parts of this episode was when (I think it was) Chris said something like, “You’re smaller than you think you are.”

Whenever we’re building games in whatever studio we are in, it’s easy to think our game is much more likely to succeed and bigger than it is. After all, we’re pretty smart, the people we work with are exceptional (I’ve never met a studio that didn’t tell me they had the best people working there), and our idea is amazing. Otherwise we wouldn’t be working on it, right?

It’s a trap. That whole line of thinking is flawed. We tend to place higher value on the things we feel ownership of and the things we’ve invested in. Both of those apply to the games we’re working on. We become biased in our thinking and it clouds our ability to be objective about the reality our game may launch into. 

A small startup occasionally breaks into the stratosphere. But more often, it struggles to sell anything at all. Even large, AAA products with massive budgets are hitting a wall in recent years. The IP, the reputation, the dollars, the talent, the confidence, none of it mattered.

I’m not saying to think of yourself as tiny and pathetic. I’m just saying be aware that you may not be as big a deal as you’re telling yourself. And if you realize that, you can adjust your marketing, you can take chances that only smaller studios get to take, you can play with fire and survive. And you can be grounded in reality while you do it.

There were a ton of good points in this episode, including aligning incentives between marketing and dev, and not taking the “build it all then market it right before ship” approach to launching your game. Check it out, Chris and Joe know what they’re doing, and if you need their help, reach out. They love helping studios think about marketing in a better, more modern way. 

The old ways are failing. Time to adapt!

Which Game Should You Make? w/ Omar Kendall

Link: How You Know Which Game To Make, with Omar Kendall | #E77

This just popped last week. I loved this conversation with Omar. He’s insanely thoughtful and measured while still being a bona fide expert in multiple spaces of game dev, and especially thinking about product and innovation in games. 

He said something that I heartily support: keeping an effective team together to continue to tackle problems they have become proficient at solving dramatically increases the chance you succeed, but is RARELY DONE in our industry.

I’ll go further: I think that if you have an amazing team, whether it’s one of many teams at the studio or it is the entire studio, keeping that group working together is one of the best ways to get insane outcomes, while breaking them up is one of the best ways to flush money down the drain.

I would take a team that has spent years learning how to interact, overcome challenges, and lead and follow each other as appropriate over any big studio or publisher’s hand-picked team of top talent that has never worked together before EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK.

The best teams are far better than the sum of their parts. You see this across esports, regular sports, musical groups… pretty much anywhere collaborative teams need to solve problems together.

Too often, I’ve seen organizations break up highly effective teams in order to “spread the love” around. The orgs don’t realize that while those devs may have figured out how to work together in a high performing way, they can’t just port that to any random group of people. In fact, you’re more likely to create frustration and sadness as the devs realize they are no longer in such an exceptional environment.

Building that team chemistry takes time. Some teams gel faster than others, and there are reasons we could explore as to why, but the bottom line is that if a group hasn’t worked together there are some bumps they need to work out before they will hit their stride.

Alright, that wraps it for this newsletter! Please send me your thoughts about the new direction, would love to hear from you!

Happy Holidays!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>We’ve helped many high-profile game studios save a ton of money & time through building clear vision and leveling up leadership. If you’d like to work with us, please reach out at [email protected].