Place

Luckily for all of you there are not too many place decisions to make in games. Download, CD, Retail or Online Publisher… that covers all the main ones you will encounter. Place is the distribution and where people get the product to try or buy it. Each place decision has its own benefits, but lo, most are not mutually exclusive!

Download is the most common for indie developers. You can get software and do it yourself (www.accusolve.biz) or you can hire a company to do it for you.

CD can also be offered, it can be done for free via www.swiftcd.com, but they overcharge you a lot and you either have to eat that cost or pass it on to the consumer. A CD can hold a lot more data and is best used for "special editions" in addition to a downloadable platform. If you expect enough volume I would get a professional company to create your CDs, not only will it cost your consumers less, but you will make more off it.

Retail is the most expensive and most difficult. You will NEED a publisher if you want to get into a retail store. In general, putting a retail title on a shelf runs anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 dollars or more. That is just to get your title on a shelf!

Finally, a more recent innovation is Online Publishers, such as Real Arcade and BigFish games. These take a little less money than retail publishers do, you can expect to get 20% of each sale. They make up for their crappy payment in volume, the only down side, you don't get to tell your players who your company is!  That means most of the customers you get from them won't be your customers at all. This dilemma will be discussed in a future article as well.

Promotion

Last but not least, promotion. Ask 10 people on the street what a marketing person does and all 10 will probably tell you that this is what they do. The above 3 are also what we do, but it's not what people think about. Promotion is the combination of advertising, publicity, and buzz (a subset of publicity).

Buzz is the hardest to create and the hardest to control. Most firms actually avoid trying to make buzz because of the havoc it can cause. Buzz items are typically fads, and the problem most frequently it creates is demand exceeding capacity. In the download world it is not as big a deal, thankfully.

Publicity is 'free' advertising. Reviews, Interviews, and Previews are the most common forms of this. Also included are press releases, screenshots, and link exchanges. The downside of publicity is usually it takes a lot of time and work to get. Remember, if you build it they will NOT come. Reviewers will not bang down your door, and you have to do more than just submit your game to some unknown E-mail address.

Advertising is a much easier creature; it's also much more expensive. To correctly advertise you must know your target market and your conversion rate. Conversion rates are how many sales you get for 100 download. Ads must be targeted. Target refers to what group is most likely to buy your game. Lately there has been a lot of emphasis on Google Adwords from sites, and google is a good advertising source, but part of me thinks it's a copout from doing research and finding better deals. Both Advertising and Promotion will get its own article (or two) in future articles.

Well, you made it through the first day of Marketing 101. Please exit the theater on your right.

About the Author

Joseph Lieberman is the founder and owner of vgsmart.com. To receive more helpful tips via e-mail, sign up for our newsletter at www.vgsmart.com.