I eagerly anticipate the emergence of new distribution models and strategies through social avenues. I hope for the creation of fairer environments, and perhaps the advent of web3 will facilitate this. I am aware that there is a long journey ahead of us. :)
You should probably consider the growth models in mobile vs PC as well.
In PC, games have to go trough a funnel of audience starting with the hardcore players of the genre. This is more accurate for smaller games but it holds for bigger games as well. When you publish a game in any genre, the platform shows your game to the most hardcore fans of that genre first. The game has to convince an audience who played around 20 games in that genre. This is an extremely difficult task to achieve driving games to be very innovative and more and more hardcore every year. Because if they can't convince that initial hardcore audience, the platform won't be showing the game to the mainstream.
Whereas, when making a mobile game, the audience is randomly picked by an ad network and they aren't necessarily genre players. Usually just demographically selected random people. Also it's not a death/life issue for the game to convince the first 1000 of players. They can just switch their targeting and keep up. This part is reciting what your article is about so no reason to repeat it.
PlayWay attempted a Voodoo-like approach on Steam. They created hundreds of Steam pages for "half-baked game concepts", and then kept an eye on how many wishlists each page got (Chris Zukowski, The One Thing PlayWay Gets right). A steam page can be created with nothing but some screenshots, capsule art and an optional trailer, and then Steam users will occasionally discover the page and may click "wishlist" in order to get notified when the game releases. The rate of wishlists you get per day tells about the market potential for the game. Then PlayWay would develop only the games that showed enough promise. I recall hearing that they did eventually get in trouble with Steam because they did not appreciate being spammed with Steam pages that never turned into games, however.
At least on indie level, one commonly used way of gauging interest early is also to release a prototype version on Itch.io. The sales potential is only 1% or something of steam, but it might be still enough for getting some numbers on how interested people are - and you also get early feedback from people who are more tolerant of jank then Steam users.
I think that all of this will change in the future, as mobile "gamers" are becoming more and more like other gamers. With companies like Voodoo flooding the market with casual games, you need to compete for attention that much harder. But that's just my opinion 😅
Thanks for the blog.
I eagerly anticipate the emergence of new distribution models and strategies through social avenues. I hope for the creation of fairer environments, and perhaps the advent of web3 will facilitate this. I am aware that there is a long journey ahead of us. :)
You should probably consider the growth models in mobile vs PC as well.
In PC, games have to go trough a funnel of audience starting with the hardcore players of the genre. This is more accurate for smaller games but it holds for bigger games as well. When you publish a game in any genre, the platform shows your game to the most hardcore fans of that genre first. The game has to convince an audience who played around 20 games in that genre. This is an extremely difficult task to achieve driving games to be very innovative and more and more hardcore every year. Because if they can't convince that initial hardcore audience, the platform won't be showing the game to the mainstream.
Whereas, when making a mobile game, the audience is randomly picked by an ad network and they aren't necessarily genre players. Usually just demographically selected random people. Also it's not a death/life issue for the game to convince the first 1000 of players. They can just switch their targeting and keep up. This part is reciting what your article is about so no reason to repeat it.
🔥💗🙌
Related to Martti’s comment is there an argument to say that Poki and Crazygames are the equivalent of Voodoo on PC?
I think a lot of people are missing how big web games are getting now.
PlayWay attempted a Voodoo-like approach on Steam. They created hundreds of Steam pages for "half-baked game concepts", and then kept an eye on how many wishlists each page got (Chris Zukowski, The One Thing PlayWay Gets right). A steam page can be created with nothing but some screenshots, capsule art and an optional trailer, and then Steam users will occasionally discover the page and may click "wishlist" in order to get notified when the game releases. The rate of wishlists you get per day tells about the market potential for the game. Then PlayWay would develop only the games that showed enough promise. I recall hearing that they did eventually get in trouble with Steam because they did not appreciate being spammed with Steam pages that never turned into games, however.
At least on indie level, one commonly used way of gauging interest early is also to release a prototype version on Itch.io. The sales potential is only 1% or something of steam, but it might be still enough for getting some numbers on how interested people are - and you also get early feedback from people who are more tolerant of jank then Steam users.
I think that all of this will change in the future, as mobile "gamers" are becoming more and more like other gamers. With companies like Voodoo flooding the market with casual games, you need to compete for attention that much harder. But that's just my opinion 😅