Week 2 - Marketing Research

This week tasked us with doing research on marketing strategies and finding games similar to ones we have worked on, in doing so we would have to find 5 competitors and see how and why they reached their target audiences.

The first article i read was about Gabriel Koenig’s game Jettomero. After the first paragraph it's immediately clear from all the other research and in class discussion we have had why his game didn’t live up to its potential. Koenig is quoted saying “It's been tricky figuring out who the game is for, and it's kind of a range of people, so it's difficult to lock down what audience I should be trying to communicate the game to.” The core concept we have been instilled with is the importance of finding one's audience no matter how niche it is and marketing towards those specific people. It didn’t matter about the quality of Koenig’s game because the people who would have enjoyed it probably didn’t even hear about it.

However it wasn’t only negatives which came from his experience releasing a game. After posting a gif of his game online Koenig was invited to present the game at Double Fine’s day of the Devs event which lead him into talks with Microsoft and eventually got his game published on the Xbox one marketplace. Although it has already been a fact instilled in students at SAE about how important it is to maintain a strong social media presence, this along with the story of the Downwell developer who got his game published just by posting gifs on twitter really solidifies this in my mind and has given me great motivation to improve my social media appearance.

One another of the fascinating articles referred to utilising influencers such as youtubers and streamers to reach wider demographics other than specifically games which would be interested in your product. I found this to be incredibly accurate when I was researching the audience of Flippy Knife which was one of the similar games to the one I am pitching. I found a website which was actually dedicated to people who were knife enthusiasts and they had written quite an in depth review, not focusing on the gameplay so much but actually talking about the accuracy of the different knives in the game.

This research and subsequent information has been pivotal in shaping the way I plan and will market my games in the future and I greatly look forward to using some of these strategies in this upcoming project.