Breaking The Wheel

Practical Guides

An image of a director, because they direct game advertisements
– Posted Under: Advertising, Management, Marketing, Partnerships, Practical Guides, Production, Strategy, Tips for Indies, Video Game Marketing 1 Comment

Game Advertisement Review: How To Effectively Critique Your Ads

In the corporate world, as a general rule, marketers and brand managers do not get involved in the creative aspects of advertising. Their job is to determine the strategy behind an ad campaign and then let the professional creatives do their thing. The job of the brand manager is to ensure that the ads are on strategy, but to leave the actual creation to the pros. Of course, as game developers, we are the creative pros. So that guiding principle just doesn’t sit right with me in the context of game development. Besides, I’d guess many or most indie studios probably can’t afford to hire professional creative agencies or trailer makers. So, to make the best use of the post, I’m going to walk through some of the important concepts behind ad creation. I’ll leave the decision as to who will craft the ad to you.

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A picture of a director in a chair, because we're talking about advertising strategy. Look, I'm tired, alright?
– Posted Under: Advertising, Management, Marketing, Practical Guides, Strategy, Tips for Indies, Video Game Marketing 2 Comments

Video Game Advertising Strategy: Ladders, Bridges, And Sniper Rifles

Everyone knows what advertisements are and why they are necessary to drive awareness. But making an effective ad is not as simple as just slapping some captured video into a YouTube upload and calling it a day. Your target audience is bombarded by ads all day, every-day. Your conscious mind spends much of its life practically bathing in them. So crafting a successful ad means assembling something that can cut through all of the noise and provide information that will stick. And the first step is determining a strategy for your ads.

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An image of a white space analysis diagram
– Posted Under: Design, Marketing, Practical Guides, Strategy, Tips for Indies, Video Game Marketing 2 Comments

White Space Analysis: Avoiding The Commoditization Trap

Marketing has the same basic premise as football, judo, and hacking: find the opening and exploit it. In terms of your competition, the opening is known in marketing as the “white space”: the area of the canvas without any color. How does one identify the white space? With a simple exercise called, appropriately enough, a white space analysis.

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Composite image for the covers of Mass Effect 2 and Dark Souls, two games that featured expert positioning
– Posted Under: Advertising, Management, Marketing, Practical Guides, Strategy, Tips for Indies, Video Game Marketing 3 Comments

Market Positioning: The Art of Fighting Without Fighting

Perception is reality, as the saying goes. Market positioning is the act of managing consumer perception of a product. This doesn’t mean misleading people or bending the facts. It means establishing and controlling the context in which you want your customers to consider your product. And effective positioning can make a world of difference between standing out from or getting lost in the crowd.

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An image of Facebook's ad campaign interface which can be used to estimate the upside of a market segment
– Posted Under: Management, Marketing, Practical Guides, Strategy, Tips for Indies, Video Game Marketing Leave a comment

Video Game Market Potential: How To Quantify Your Odds of Success

Once you’ve drilled down into your target segment and tested some of your assumptions, you now need to quantify whether that segment can be profitable. If you work for a major publisher, you have access to a professional marketing department that does this sort of thing for a living. But if you don’t, you’re not out of luck. You have an amazing tool at your disposal for free: Facebook.

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A picture of a question mark, because customer interviews involve questions. Get it?
– Posted Under: Management, Marketing, Practical Guides, Production, Soft Skills, Tips for Indies, Video Game Marketing 1 Comment

Customer Interviews: Conducting Effective One-On-Ones

Henry Ford once famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” More recently, Steve Jobs said “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” What these quotes are really getting at is the danger of interview-driven design. If you ask people what they want, they’ll just say “faster, better, cheaper.” And creating new products is YOUR job, not your customers’. It’s unreasonable to expect customers to tell you what products to make. Imagining completely new products is not their in their skillset.

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A picture of our hypothetical buyer persona, Rita Roleplayer
– Posted Under: Management, Marketing, Practical Guides, Tips for Indies, Video Game Marketing 3 Comments

Buyer Persona: Identifying Your Hypothetical Player

Once you have identified a target segment, your next step is to learn as much about that segment as you can. But how do you even know where to look? The first step is to imagine a person who embodies that segment, in the form of a buyer persona.

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Example diagram of video game market segmentation
– Posted Under: Management, Marketing, Practical Guides, Strategy, Tips for Indies, Video Game Marketing 5 Comments

Video Game Market Segmentation

One of Sun Tzu’s most quotable lines from The Art of War is “Know thy enemy and know thyself and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.” And while you should never think of customers as the “enemy,” it’s still crucial to understand them in order to wage a successful marketing campaign. Understanding your customer means figuring out who they are, what their needs are and how you can serve those needs. And the first step in that journey is video game market segmentation.

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– Posted Under: Guest Post, Management, Operations, Practical Guides, Production, Strategy Leave a comment

Guest Posting Like A Mofo: Volume I

I’ve been busy guest posting over the last few weeks. And rather than quickly pinch off a lackluster post for this site just for the sake of posting, I’m instead going to talk about what I’ve been up to, and where you can find it.

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A woman with so much anxiety and stress that she's trying to eat her laptop. Ouch!
– Posted Under: Practical Guides, Self-Improvement, Tips for Indies 2 Comments

Anxiety And Stress Managment For Game Developers: Some Practical Tools

The video games industry is a fertile breeding ground for anxiety and stress. Almost every game is an entrepreneurial endeavor. Expeditionary and uncertain. Uncertain schedules, uncertain results, uncertain job security. It’s not for the faint of heart. In this article, I’m going to take a break from the managerial topics I usually post about on Breaking The Wheel in order to focus on something more important than any game: your mental health.

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