Making and Marketing Your Game

Part 2

by Steve Peek

Do I Really Want to Do This?

Before making the final decision there are still several questions which need answering.

Is the game similar to others already on the market? People in the gaming industry are deluged with new games every day, but very few are truly unique. Search hard enough and you'll be able to find games which are similar to yours. Hopefully, you won't find any which are too similar. Once you discover the games find out how they did. This can usually be done by becoming friendly with merchants who have sold games for a number of years. Find one with a good memory and he or she can prove to be a gold mine of information. In most cases, retailers only remember two types of games- those that sold extremely well and those that didn't sell at all.

You may find games similar to your own which are still being sold. The simplest way to do this is to go into every store which has a decent supply of board games and spend some time examining the stock, making sure to read the backs of the boxes. Once several games have been identified as being similar, though obviously inferior to your own design, try to obtain copies. Find out who made them, check the copyright date, then look to see what edition or printing the latest copy is. Find out how well they did, or are doing. Try to find advertisements for the game. Ask friends, family and neighbors if they've ever heard of or played it. Remember, if it~ similar, this will say a good bit about how your game is going to be received.

Having studied some of these similar games, get some people to play them. Not family-captive audiences simply won't net any real insight. if the game is similar in subject matter, you'll be suprised about how much information can be picked-up just paying attention to the attitudes of those asked to play. If there is much resistance, the theme of the game is not going to be popular enough to make it worthwhile. When playing, relax, enjoy the game, and make it enjoyable for others. Don't keep telling everyone how much better your own game is. After playing the games which somehow anticipated your brilliant ideas, compare them to your design. Determine how your game is better and what can be done to improve general appeal and playability.

The next step is to study the market, which requires more research. First define the theme or subject matter of your game. For instance, Monopoly has real-estate as its theme, Risk offers an abstract world war background, Scrabble is a crossword puzzle type game. Once the underlying theme has been identified, determine what and where its markets are going to be. The lady with the dog breeding game had a limited market but one which was easily and inexpensively reached. Subjects which appeal to limited markets offer the advantage of being able to reach for a reasonable cost a small group of people who are likely to be interested in a product. Mass market appeal items have a much wider population spread on which to base sales, but it is very expensive to reach so diverse an audience.

Once tagged with a theme and identified with a market, your game should be put under a mathematical microscope to determine potential sales and the best avenues of marketing. Determine the following information. How many people are in the potential market? Are they mostly men, women, children, or a combination? What magazines to they read? What television shows do they watch?

An example will make the process plain. Let's say we are doing research for a game which is based on the American Civil War, representing a limited market. The more limited the market, the easier it is to define, but fewer games can be sold than in the general market. A quick trip to the local library reveals a dozen magazines devoted exclusively to the theme. A few letters or phone calls, a couple of weeks waiting, and we get some advertising information from those magazines.

We discover the largest, for circulation, is the Civil War Illustrated. We find it has over 100,000 readers, a large enough base to made analysis meaningful. The circulation of all the Civil War magazines, after allowing for duplication, is around 300,000 people interested enough in the American Civil War to subscribe to a magazine about it.

The demographics of the magazines indicate the average reader is a male, age 33 with an annual income of $22,000. So far so good, right? Maybe! A thirty-three year old male doesn't sound like a person who plays a lot of games. But don't worry yet, there's more to come. the demographics also say our man is married, has 1.7 children, and spends a great deal of time reading, writing, participating in other indoor activites and, if we're lucky, the demographics might even mention how many play boardgames (A few magazines ask on their survey forms).

So, we know the ads need to appeal to this profile. Thumbing through back issues of the magazine in the library, keeping notes on the kinds of ads appearing, especially those appearing issue after issue, we are determining what kind of ad appeals to the readers. Then, suddenly, there it is, an ad for another game about the Civil War.

Don't panic: I said very few games are truly unique. Instead, write down the name and address of the company. After cataloging the advertisements in the magazines, contact the company, and order the game or look for it in a store. if no store within a hundred mile radius has ever heard of it, there's a good chance it is being produced by someone just like you.

Which may be a break. People who publish their own games like to talk about them. Ask questions about the play and design. When the designer starts talking, tell him where you saw the ad and ask where else he placed other ads and how they did. It's amazing how much information people will share.

So, we found the ad, ordered the game, and called the person producing it. He tells us, "Yeah, my CWT ad pulls ok, but the wargamers are really eating it up. "

"What," we ask, " are wargamers?"

He explains wargamers are a group of people who play games about wars, fairly obvious. Prodding him for more information, we finally get the names of six "war game 11 magazines. A quick trip back to the librarys guide to periodicals shows a whole other market for your game.

Repeating the procedure of contacting the magazine publishers, we receive information about their particular journals. We estimate this other market contains a further 200,000 devotees, giving us a total market of 500,000 potential customers who are already interested in the subject of our game.

Now we're getting somewhere: half a million people who are interested in the American Civil War, and two hundred thousand of them are known gamers. Yes indeed, it looks like we've struck pay dirt! But lets apply some rules of thumb and see where we really are.

Nearly every marketing or advertising book will present a set of formulae which will supposedly tell how to determine advertising response. None of them guarantee anything of course, but they all pretty much ~laim to be fairly accurate. The only problem is, most of these formulae produce different results. Not to be outdone, here is my own formula for results obtained from placing ads in specialized magazines.

I've found it to be fairly accurate but, of course, there's no guarantee. Approximately ten percent of the readers of the magazine will read a full page black and white ad. If the ad is in color the percentage will go up; if the ad is not a full page the percent will go down. Of the ten percent which spend thirty to sixty seconds reading the ad, one percent will potentially order the item-assuming it is competitively priced and looks like quality merchandise. Now, where does that put us?

Ten percent of 500,000 is 50,000. One percent of 50,000 is 5,000. So using my rule of thumb, if you have a good ad, a good product, and a decent price, you could expect to sell 500 copies of the Civil War game by placing a full page ad in each of the magazines you've discovered. If most of these are mail order sales at full retail price, you'll come out all right. It used to be only about one out of ten Americans ordered anything direct mail but that's been getting higher as the price of fuel increases and more and more two-income households keep both partners working all day.

All of this has been a lot of work and you deserve a break. While drinking a glass of your favorite beverage, flip through the war game magazines looking at the kind of ads which keep recurring. Suddenly, there it is again, another ad for another Civil War game. But it's too late-by now you're ready for anything ... well almost. You come to the classified ads. Wondering what in the world the wargamers would be advertising here, you scan the page and see an interesting little ad in the corner. it's about Civil War Reenactment Groups (people who dress like Civil War soldiers from a particular regiment and go on camping trips) and suddenly you realize another potential market! (Starting to get the idea?)

Read those magazines! From cover to cover, inside and out, study them. They can not only identify new markets it might have taken years to find, but also lead to other magazines in those markets.

If you're saying your game is not a special interest item and you don't need to go through this, you're missing a bet. Besides, unless you have enough money to remake The Ten Commandments, you don't have enough money to advertise on television or in Time, People, Playboy or even Games, magazines which are considered general interest markets. In short, you've got to start getting the game on the market someplace and you've got to create enough sales to at least begin to generate word of mouth advertising for the product. Lets take another approach, with a game more general in nature.

This time we've got a game similar to Scrabble or Boggle. it's a word game, about as general as they come. our task is to find relatively inexpensive places to advertise which will reach a potentially high interest market. The first and most obvious places to investigate are the crossword and word puzzle magazines. Poring over these generates additional avenues. But, in addition to the obvious, who else is interested in words? There's MENSA, the organization for the very bright: say, don't they have a mailing list of all their members, and I think someone once told me they run a wholesale operation and have a monthly newsletter! What about writers and wouldbe writers: they have an intense interest in words and there are several writers' magazines. I'll bet a special ad could be slanted for that market and then there's....

The point is, no matter what a game's theme, you'll be able to identify, locate, and analyze potential markets. All it takes is a little imagination, intelligence, and a lot of work and research.

If you don't seem to be making headway at first, or if you begin to get bored, just remember: this information is vital. Without it as a starting reference, you're lost before beginning.

Steve Peek is the president of Yaquinto Publications, Dallas, Texas. He has designed, developed or produced over 100 games.

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