"You Should Advertise More" #3

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This is something that we frequently hear from players and fans of the game.  And although I would love to engage with players on this subject, I think it's something that is likely not going to make immediate sense.  So it's unlikely that anyone will walk away happy.

Which is unfortunate!  Because, in truth, players do want to help developers out.  Often, when I see this suggestion, it seems to stem from the idea that the developers/publishers just haven't thought about advertising the game.  And the fan is just letting the devs know that they should "advertise their game more, so they get more players."  But since we have pages and pages of available space, let's talk about it!

(With a listicle!  This blog is evolving!  Who knows?  Maybe someday we'll have graphs and charts and images!)

1. It's actually not that easy.

The mobile ad market is a behemoth.  Not only are there dozens of ad networks to use (some of which target game genres better than others), ad mediation platforms (some of which are better and more responsive than others, while others are prohibitively expensive for some machine-learning algorithm that doesn't seem to have much value), and SDKs to integrate into the game and then test to make sure you can actually verify that the marketing is having any impact (fraud is rampant!), there also has to be someone or several someone's to design ad creatives.  The trailers, banners, and ad text all have to come from somewhere!

In addition to that workload, which seems to touch every person on the dev team, there are brand new challenges related to user privacy that make finding the right user to play the game even more difficult.  But that's related to the next issue.

2. It's expensive!

For smaller games, ads are a huge chunk of the launching budget, especially on mobile.  Every new game that comes out has to compete with all of the stalwarts in the App Store and Google Play.  There are thousands of available games in the market, and they've had years with dedicated teams to test and optimize their game and their ad creatives.  Each step into the wild mobile stores with a new game is a challenge.  

New games need to test both that the game is functioning properly (does it even run without exploding?) and that the creative they've designed for future ads is effective (do people like looking at the ad... enough to click on the ad and install it?)

3. The game might not be ready/buggy.

Most of the time when players are making this suggestion, there's a perception that the game would be better if it had more players.  This might be because there's some social component or competition in the game that is lackluster without more players. 

But the truth is a lot of games don't start advertising until they've fixed a large portion of the bugs.  It makes sense that devs don't want to advertise a game that loses player data or is forced into a 6-hour maintenance every couple of days or crashes on launch.  The social component is going to have to take a hit while the rest of the kinks are worked out. 

And this might be a silent decision, even the bravest of devs aren't going to say, "We're not going to advertise while the game is a buggy mess.  Thanks for the suggestion though."

4. The suggestion comes from an already active player.

This is the hardest hurdle for the player to understand.  Mostly the player who is saying this believes that because they haven't seen an ad for the game in a while is an indicator that no ads are running.  This usually isn't the case and actually means that the advertising is working!  If an already active player was seeing ads to download a game they already downloaded, then each marketing dollar spent is being thrown away. 

You don't want to constantly spend money reminding a player who is already playing the game to play the game.  What if this was paired with #3?  What if you advertised the game constantly to a player who already downloaded the game and quit because it was full of bugs?  Not only are you wasting your time and money, but you're also pushing a future fan away by suggesting, "Bugs aren't important to us!  Just download the game and start buying things!"

5. YouTubers are busy people. For many, this is their job.

There are dozens of sites dedicated to the management of YouTubers now.  Even relatively small streamers with a modest following might fall under the umbrella of a management team or company.  You might find some streamers who, out of the kindness of their hearts or because they love to experiment (they are brave souls) will play an indie game on their channel.  But truthfully, unless they have a channel dedicated to mobile games, it's more than likely going to be a PC indie game.  

So when do you see mobile indie games appear on streams? 
- Usually, if it's a sponsored video, and then the players have the tendency to jump in and out as soon as the video ends.  This is usually why you see one streamer dedicated to the game with a month or longer of content paid for and created.  Remember Lineage 2: Revolution's North America mobile launch?  I remember fans up in arms that their favorite streamers "threw out their PCs" to play a mobile game exclusively!
- It's a Top 10 Upcoming/<Genre>/<Top Game> Killer mash up of trailers.  It is partly a fault in the market that dozens of YouTube channels can exist that function solely to release weekly Top 10 Upcoming Battle Royale Fortnite Killer videos.  How helpful is this to the game's player base?  Great, if they were able to solve Problem #1 in this article!

As I finish writing this, I think each section can be further expanded on, and it's likely that we will in the future.  Thanks for reading!

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