From the time we went to greenlight, I suddenly had absolutely no time. If I’m not developing, then I’m marketing Football Tactics. I want to spend every free time interval either working or reading some marketing materials.

Only now, six months after receiving the green light, I will write about how we received this light. I’ll show you the numbers at the same time.

I am writing this article for the same “dense” developers as I was. Who have never sold their own games. I was able to make interesting games, I was able to lead the development, I was able to organize people. But the process of promoting and selling my game opened my eyes to the real world.

Preparation

I read everything I could find online about greenlight and started preparing.

To begin with, I began to prepare materials for the page on greenlight. We have prepared screenshots and gameplay videos. There was no money or skills for a full-fledged video.

Game Icon

Some developers who passed the greenlight advised using animated icons. But most of the articles were against animations. I agreed with the majority. Static icons look more solid, or something.

I made 4 versions of the icon. The majority of the company voted for this:

I used it, even though I liked the other one. This icon would suit any football game. She says only one thing – we have a football game. It’s good if our audience consists only of football fans. But such an icon will not attract those who like, for example, turn-based games.

I must say right away that in the end I replaced the icon (there will be a screenshot below). By the way, now I think that animated icons are no worse than static ones. It all depends on how well the animation is done.

Social network

When preparing a Facebook page and a Twitter profile, I was worried about the question: create pages specifically for the game or for the company as a whole. Football Tactics is not our first game. And hopefully not the last one. On the other hand, all this year we planned to post news only about Football Tactics.

As a result, we decided to make profiles of the company as a whole. You never know, suddenly there will be some news on the Collapse or on our new project.

I can’t say if this decision was right. But after the announcement of our new project (which is still in passive background development) I did create a separate Facebook page for Football Tactics.

When to go out?

We were worried about one question: to go out on weekends or on weekdays? There was no evidence that the greenlight audience was larger on weekends, although logic suggested that people stayed at home on weekends and were more inclined to visit the greenlight page.

But we didn’t have time to prepare the website and social networks for the weekend, so we had to postpone the output to weekdays. It seemed pointless to wait until next weekend. It seems to me that this was the right decision. Because plus or minus twenty votes wouldn’t have saved us. The dynamics and the speed of voice recruitment in general are important.

Promotion

Now, six months after passing the greenlight and several months of selling the game on Steam, I understand that the history of Football Tactics is the history of finding your target audience. It seems that most independent developers who are selling their game for the first time are doing the same.

Early days

On Monday, April 6th, 2015, we posted the game on greenlight. In the first three days, ~ 600 people visited the page every day, and everything went more or less well:

But then the traffic from the main page of greenlight and the voices of our friends ended, and difficult working days began.

Press

Together with the release, we began actively sending out a press release to Russian and foreign publications. The titles and texts were taken seriously.

It was necessary to tell the story right in the title of the letter. For Russian publications, we have chosen the theme “Kreoti returns”. For English speakers: “The developers of the bloody shooter made a football manager.”

As a result, the story turned out to be more interesting for Russian-speaking journalists than for English-speaking ones. This is understandable: everyone has heard about the Cream and Collapse, so it made sense to publish the news. It’s more difficult with foreign ones, but we have received some publications. Gamasutra even wrote that they would like to interview us. “From shooters to football managers” is an interesting story. But they never took it.

Publications in the press actually did not give any results. Only a few sites were significant, which gave noticeable peaks in the schedule of visits and votes.

Vkontakte groups

First of all, I decided to look for forums, vkontakte groups and Facebook pages dedicated to football managers. It seemed that if you post information about us on these forums or in groups, we would get a lot of visits and votes.

It turned out that the forums are mostly half-dead or discuss only a pirate. I found the most active VKontakte groups, and invited the administrators to write news about us. For this, I promised them two keys of the game when it comes out. Some agreed and published the news.

There were transitions, but it didn’t give much results. It became obvious that the players (at least the Russians) could not accept the idea of step-by-step football. What right does anyone have to make football step-by-step? The number of those who wrote “Oh my God! step-by-step football! 10/10!”it’s quite small, and mostly it’s English-speaking players.

The second problem that I realized later is the link to the Steam web version. Many players once entered the steam client and use it only. To access the web page and vote, you need to enter a password, and then also confirm the login with a special code. This is a huge hindrance. Later I solved the problem with the help of a second link that opens the greenlight page in the steam client:

• Browser:http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=420603026
• Client: steam://url/CommunityFilePage/420603026

Reddit

I had no idea what it was. If a newbie goes to reddit, he will be horrified: some kind of porridge on the screen. What it is, how to promote it here is unclear.

Sumoman developers wrote that they began to publish screenshots in /r/gamedev/ in the Screenshot Saturday theme. It is now clear to me all these designations, and then I took up my head – it is not clear what. But after making several publications, I figured out how everything works here.

On April 11th, I posted screenshots in Screenshot Saturday, and in another place – information about the game. A small peak on the 12th in the chart above is from reddit. Later we realized that this was not a “small” peak, but a rather noticeable one :)

Publication tables

Gradually, I got involved in continuous marketing. Every site on which we published something was listed in a sign:

And globally, the publication history was tracked in the general table:

The columns “Last publication” and “Days have passed” are automatic.

At the same time, press signs were set up: to whom, what and when were sent, which publications were received.

Keeping tables is a fairly routine job. It would be nice if they were led by someone else. And it would be even better if there was some kind of program for this.

Article about the influence of Persona on our game

In order to attract the attention of the players, I decided to use interesting stories about our game. I once wrote one of them in my blog: how I was inspired by Persona 3 when creating Football Tactics.

Having slightly changed the structure of the article, I began to publish it wherever I could. First 16.04 – on IndieDB. It didn’t give much result. A few days later I tried to distribute the article wherever I could: in all our social networks, Gamasutra, reddit, Kanobu. On Gamasutra, I even got into the features, even though it doesn’t mean anything.

Gambling addiction

Along with the publication of posts on reddit, the news about us on Gambling came out. I don’t know if both of these factors played a role or one of some kind, but we got a fairly noticeable peak of activity:

My blog

I wrote a post asking you to vote for our game on my blog. In all such publications (on my blog, on reddit, etc.), I tried to proceed from the fact that I would benefit readers.

After that, I also wrote in the GameDevelopersUA group on Facebook. In general, I think each of my such activity gave from two to five votes. This is very little.

In any case, I want to thank everyone who took the time and voted. On other days, even single voices brought joy.

Bundles

In fact, from the first day of our appearance on the greenlight, we began to receive offers to sell the game in bundles. Technically, it was convenient to release the game in the Desura online store, where it was very easy to get into, and then give keys for bundles.

At first I was interested in this idea. A couple of years ago, bundles brought a lot of money.

But then we sat in the company, counted, and decided that this was not a very good way to promote the game. For the money that we “lose” by selling the game in bundles, we could buy better advertising somewhere.

Plus, I was worried about the fact that either games that have no chance of attracting attention at all (“losers”), or outdated games that are trying to squeeze something else out of the bundles. Since we haven’t even come out yet, I didn’t want to immediately “write down” myself as “losers”.

Desura

Regarding Desura, it turned out to be interesting. I don’t read my Twitter feed very often. But one day I accidentally saw a tweet from Sergey Galenkin that some developers complain about the lack of payments from Desura. This alerted me. I started looking for some more reviews on the Internet – I didn’t find them. I asked several indie developers on Facebook – they were very rosy about Desura, they didn’t hear any rumors.

But I decided to wait. Going to Desura looked like a good additional way to draw attention to our game. But certainly not at the expense of money that could hang somewhere.

Already after we passed the greenlight, a huge noise arose around Desura. It turned out that they really didn’t pay. They have big problems there. And the developers, unfortunately, too.

Other sites

Additional attractive exit sites were itch.io and gog.com . The first one has a rather small audience and media attention. And the second audience did not seem suitable. Although now that I have some more detailed understanding of our audience, gog seems to be quite a suitable store for us.

Pictures and gifs

I knew that it was necessary to attract the attention of the players with pictures. But I didn’t realize how big a role they play. So: pictures, *****, are critically important!

Even at the stage of game development, you need to think about what pictures, gifs and videos can be shown to players. And on the greenlight and the release, you can’t do without them at all. If you are developing a text bagel and think that you don’t need pictures, remember the emotional tone with which I ended the previous paragraph.

We started making Football Tactics precisely because we didn’t have an artist. There was an idea to make a game that can be developed by three people: a game designer, a programmer and an animator.

Therefore, we had almost no graphics that could be used for promotion. I had to come up with something.

Now I spend quite a lot of time preparing every significant news about Football Tactics. I’m preparing pictures and GIFs.

Demo version

Expectations

Initially, we planned to “refine” the version before the release on Desura. But when I read that they probably had problems, they decided to just release a demo.

We didn’t expect anything from the demo version, but during the first two weeks of the greenlight promotion, we realized that we needed to use every noticeable movement we made to attract attention to the game. Therefore, the demo was perceived as an additional news occasion. In the modern world of appstores, you somehow don’t expect anyone to bother installing demo versions. But as another piece of news – why not.

Preparation

After gaining experience and seeing how players react to beautiful pictures, I made some beautiful art of football players, redesigned the page design on greenlight, changed the game icon to a more informative one:

The text of the description was supplemented with beautiful pictures:

Demo release on IndieDB

This time we prepared in advance and put together a demo with promotional materials for the weekend. Initially, I posted the demo and the news about the demo on IndieDB on Saturday, April 25. Naturally, I supported the news by publishing it on our social networks and on the greenlight page.

The result was scanty. We had something to compare it with – the effect of “Gambling Addiction/reddit” had just ended. Over the weekend, about 10 people downloaded the demo.

It’s good that one of the steam players informed me that he couldn’t download the demo from IndieDB. It turned out that unregistered players there have problems with downloading.

Demo effect

On Monday, I posted a demo on our website, connected the counter, and began to write news about the demo for Russian publications. Posted the news on Kanobu and several other sites.

Suddenly we noticed an abnormal activity of voices. They began to investigate, and it turned out that players are actively switching from games.d3.ru (the Russian equivalent of reddit). There was an active discussion. The demo began to be downloaded from our site very actively. More than a hundred times a day. Here we have already got to the blessed spring:

The demo turned out to be quite useful. After its release, it became possible to write to various publications and YouTubers, offering to make a review. Not that everyone rushed to write reviews, but we received several publications.

Further promotion

Kanobu

I learned from one of Sergey Galenkin’s podcasts that Kanobu is ready to support indie developers. They can allocate advertising space. In addition, you can write to the Pub section on the site.

We jumped at every opportunity. I immediately wrote to the Pub about the demo version, and then I started translating an article about the influence of Persona into Russian. So that before the start of scrolling the banner (if it really will be shown), the players have already seen information about the game on the site, had time to learn something interesting about Football Tactics.

The article about Persona gave an insignificant result: 19 visits to the page. Despite the fact that on average we received about 13 visits a day. At this point, we had scored somewhere 55% in order to get into the top 100. Most of which we scored in the first three days.

The banner of our game on Kanobu came out on the 8th. About him – later.

Rock Paper Shotgun

From day to day we expected the banner to appear on Kanobu. In parallel, we worked on the preparation of other publications.

But on the seventh, we saw not just a lot of activity, but abnormal activity. The banner hasn’t started yet. Google Analytics pointed out that people come with Rock Paper Shotgun.

If there was no demo, there would not be this publication. So again, the demo played an important role.

Several publishers immediately wrote to me, offering to publish the game (and thus pass the greenlight). With Football Tactics, we aimed to go out on our own, to finally learn how to work directly with the promotion of the game. And even though the greenlight was hard, and some of the offers were pretty good, taking risks off us, in the end we decided to publish on our own.

The next day, although the activity dropped, it was still higher than during any other player activity. Plus, the banner on Kanobu turned on.

We experimented with different messages. One of the ways we tried to attract attention was the phrase “A mixture of Heroes and football.” That’s what the fans said at Euro 2012, to whom we showed the prototype of the game. We decided that the Kanobu audience would be interested in the word “Heroes”:

Later, with the help of Google Analytics, it turned out that the banner actually gave us nothing. But I am still very grateful to those people who decided to support the developers. It didn’t work for us, but it might work for someone else – all games are different, audiences are different.

The final

We already had more than a thousand votes. And thanks to RPS, we received an endless stream of new visits and votes. But it was only 61% needed to get into the top 100. I understood that now I had to look for sources similar to RPS, and I was sitting, preparing some new promo graphics for the game, until a letter arrived in the evening of the same day:

How? Why? We’re not in the top 100 yet!!

…

It remains to be guessed how this happened. A steam employee saw a surge in the activity of the game, decided to check it and at the same time accepted it? A steam employee saw an article on RPS, played a demo and decided that the game could be skipped? The steam employee was secretly told about the start of the development of Hal-Life 3, and he sat down in surprise on a huge green button for accepting a random game? How else can this be explained?

It turns out that it wasn’t necessary to get into the top 100 to get the green light.

Final schedule, including votes with RPS:

 

Conclusions

The concept of greenlight is a bit strange

Valve probably understands this themselves.

What should greenlight show? His main idea is to separate the games that players need from those that are not needed. How to separate them? Based on what?

The number of votes is often an indicator of the marketing efforts of the game. If games are accepted depending on the votes received, then games with good marketing or currently trending will be greenlit.

In this screenshot, you can look at the ratio for / against us and the average game from the top 50. It can be seen that there is a ratio of 29/71.

What does it mean? This means that if you “pour traffic” of 10 thousand users to the page of such a game, then 2900 players will put a plus. If the developers are smart enough and well-versed in promotion, they will attract a large number of users and get the right votes.

Developers like us can’t attract as many users to their page. But if we could, then with 10 thousand we would get 4800 plus points. I exaggerate because, obviously, the “quality of traffic” is important, i.e. the interests of the players who came to the page are important.

Which game do players want to see more on steam?

• a) which page received 5k players in two days, but the ratio of 30/70 gave 1.5k votes?
• b) which page received 2k players in a week, but the ratio of 70/30 gave 1.2k votes?

In fact, the difference between games is: how easy it is to attract users to the game page, and what is the ratio for / against.

I think this is the reason for Valve’s statements that they want to replace Greenlight with something else. The fact that the statements were made at the beginning of 2014, and the system has not been changed yet, probably means that it is quite difficult technically to bring the system to a good working condition.

Greenlight (Kickstarter , etc.) is taken away all the time

Ideally, to convey information about your game to the world in advance. Ideally, to have a good marketer in the team. Ideally, you should have experience in promoting the game. Ideally, the game should have a “viral” potential. But if all this is not there, then you need to dig your head into marketing and look for ways to convey information about the game to people.

During campaigns to attract votes/money, you need to constantly work to attract a new audience. It is never enough. The time spent on development or on vacation could be spent on attracting new voices or backers.

I remember many times we were advised to go on a Kickstarter with a Collapse. After all, they say, it’s simple – you put the game on Kickstarter and wait for the money to gather. I knew from the post-mortems that this was not the case, but I did not realize how exhausting this process really was. Now I have seen from my own experience how far such advice is from life.

Key features of the game: Genre + Setting + !!! Stylistics

We have combined turn-based games and football. Despite the fact that many players cannot perceive football step-by-step, this is normal, we were ready for this. But our target audience has also greatly decreased due to the style, which looks like the game was developed for mobile platforms.

We underestimated the influence of stylistics on the perception of the game by our audience.

If we have the opportunity to refine the game or make a new version, we will need to stylize the graphics either for reality, or for a specific interesting style.

The average ratio of votes for/against was somewhere 45/55%. Moreover, when traffic came from Russian sites, the ratio fell to 40/60. The main negative comments: “The mobile game has no place on the PC.” By the way, the players who came with RPS mostly put pluses. It seems that this is a hardcore PC audience, why they didn’t jam is not clear. Thanks to them, the ratio became 48/51. I am sure that many disadvantages are due to the style. Now that we are already selling the game, this assumption has been confirmed by feedback from the players.

Marketing and traffic are an integral part of game development

The success of a good game rests on the presence of traffic, no matter how rude it may sound.

It’s one thing to know it, another to feel it. When you have made a very interesting game that no one wants to play, when you count from which site how many visits /votes / purchases have come, suddenly you start to feel it.

Abruptly you start looking at a lot of things as news reasons. Look at the features from the point of view of what cool screenshots or GIFs can be made to interest players.

We made a great game (although there is still a lot to improve in it). In reviews on iOS and later on the Steam Store, players wrote that they could not tear themselves away from the game, that all football fans should definitely buy the game, that they loved football because of our game, that it was a hidden diamond, etc. We have 144 reviews on Steam, and 93% of them are positive.

But, firstly, no one knows about the game. Secondly, graphics and stylistics repel the target audience. And thirdly, do we really understand who our target audience is? Recently, with the help of SteamSpy, I found out that 80% of our players have Civilization 5, and only 40% have Football Manager 15. Initially, it seemed to us that it should have been the other way around. Therefore, in the description and pictures, they aimed at fans of football managers.

Traffic was driving through traffic

We are experiencing the best time for game development. Lots of great free tools. Lots of dresses. A lot of training materials. But this is not the best time to sell games. Today anyone can make a game and put it in the store. But the screen space of online stores is very limited. 5-10 games are placed on them. And, usually, these are games with high budgets. Don’t look at the indie projects that have been shot. They are still a few out of thousands or even tens of thousands.

While I was promoting Football Tactics, in parallel I saw a huge number of other developers who tried to use the same channels to promote their games as I did. There are incredibly many such games. And you have to break through them, attract attention to yourself, become noticeable. Moreover, you don’t just need to stand out from thousands of other developers. You need to attract more attention to yourself than successful studios attract.

Each fact of attracting attention is a certain number of players who have learned about you. A certain amount of traffic. We respect our players, we love them, but in the end, they are expressed in traffic and conversion figures in the admin panel.

Therefore, in parallel with the creation of your wonderful exciting games, promote them. Learn to do it, try it, experiment. Grow your audience from three unhappy relatives, whom you torment with early prototypes, to millions of enthusiastic fans. Let it be as in the gif below:

A source: http://k–o–s.blogspot.ru