This post will be a bit different than my normal material. I am a part-time indie game developer and I'm getting to the stage where I need to market my game.
The Marketing Analysis Begins
I thought it would be a good opportunity to record my process in hopes that it provides some insight to those of you who are also trying to market your game (or at least provide myself with a log of what I did to look back at what did or did not work well). Hopefully I can find some ways to use Power BI to gain some additional insights. I'm targeting a launch date of February 2020, which is about 3 months away. From my research so far, 3 months is about right to begin the process of marketing your game.
My objective is to research 4 games that are similar to mine which had overall positive reviews (on Steam). For each game find out:
What marketing approaches they used.
What key elements worked for them.
High Level Analysis
The games that I thought were similar to mine are (just went to steam and filtered by appropriate genres/tags):
Insights
"Received for free" reviews were mostly positive (3 out of 23, or 13%).
Therefore, it's a safe move to give out my game for free and ask for a review.
If I can get 50 of those people to review my game, I can expect about 7 people to leave a negative review.
I should probably price my game in the $5.00 - $10.00 range.
Reviews Analysis
Next I took a look at what players are saying about the game. For each game, I took 15 positive reviews. With Power BI, I used the WordCloud visual to analyze the most used words.
Check out my blog post about the WordCloud if interested: Power BI Visual of the Week WordCloud
Insights
Across all 4 games, "story" and "art" were among the most used words.
"Puzzle" would be the next most used word. (ignoring common words like "really", "great", etc.)
It would seem that game play is not as important for games of this genre/type.
Therefore, I should probably focus on story and art elements in my marketing campaign.
I'll continue my marketing research in the next post!
Please check out the game I'm developing! Facebook.com/AntaresStudioGames
