Week 6: Communication

Good morning fellow mortal souls!

My name is Elliot and I am a member of the marketing team working on Spook House! I wanted to talk about some inevitable problems that will appear when marketing video games, and how you can attempt to avoid them with a mixture of consistency and communication.

Break through the clutter

One of the biggest issues about trying to market an indie game is having little or no advertising budget. The question is how is my game supposed to get noticed in the flood of developers all claiming their game is ‘the next big thing’? The answer lies in community development and relationship building.

One of the biggest mistakes we have made in marketing Spook House is pushing too much content and putting the community on the back burner. We spend a lot of our time creating content such as video campaigns, or pushing development screenies and such, but have overlooked the simple idea of connecting with your audience. There are two main parties you want to be interacting with on your social media; your audience who has expressed any interest in what you are creating, and other developers or industry professionals who are creating similar games, facing similar problems, or around the same stage in the development process.

Lack of content

While I did just argue that content can be less important than community and relationship building, it is still a critical piece of the puzzle. Our marketing team is separate from the development team for Spook House so we are constantly relying on the development team to provide us with content to fill the funnel on our marketing channels. This problem affects not only small indie devs, but is something even the most successful devs struggle with.

How to combat this is a mixture of constant communication and holding each other accountable. Explaining to your development team what you need, deciding on a schedule, and sticking to it will keep your marketers happy and the team as well. Knowing exactly what they need to give you every week will help ease their mind and they can work to provide you with quality content on terms everyone agrees to.

Deadlines

Deadlines are a necessary evil for any sort of project. Since this game is one of many different things the marketing team is involved in, it’s hard to gauge how long certain tasks will take to complete due to things popping up in our schedules. The one piece of advice I have for this is to negotiate upfront.

Negotiating upfront means to be communicative about your schedule and ETA on completing certain tasks, and it is extremely relevant to game design. For example, you are in a departmental meeting and your project manager asks you to take on a certain task that they need done by the end of the week. You know you are pretty busy this week but you really want to help the team and you think you can squeeze it in. You take the task and just hope that your schedule will work itself out. This can be more hurtful to your team than passing up the task to begin with. You may be fairly certain you can finish the task this week, but making games is so unpredictable in nature, you never really know. Rather than guess you can finish a task, you need to be certain about your schedule to keep the teams schedule. Be conservative in your estimation and be sure to communicate the exact date you will be able to have the task 100% completed. This will save you from having to scramble the day something is due that you said you could complete but had to prioritize differently, bumping it back.

While problems are certain while making & marketing games, the two things I wished we had prioritized when we started this project was communication and consistency. Having a constant flow of communication will keep everyone on the same page and limit blocking. Being consistent can help your teammates know what they will be getting from you, and help keep them accountable for their work.

Thanks for reading!