6 ms·
> if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional. This,
by exelius 12y ago
> if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional.
This, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem with the solo game/app developer. Any concept simple enough for one person to implement has been done to death by hundreds of other people already. So how do you differentiate?
Marketing.
>> 2) marketing is everything.
> no. no it's not.
Unfortunately, it is. See, it doesn't matter how novel and awesome (aka differentiated) your product is, you still have to sell it. In order to sell the product, you have to have the right product. This is why traditional marketing includes product development (look up the 5 Ps of marketing). Marketing as a function can tell you where your users are and what they're looking for. Then you design your product based on that, and find the optimal way to sell that product to your target users. The pricing/promotion piece (or what people usually think of as "marketing") comes at the end.
Promotion in and of itself is not a differentiation strategy unless you have deep pockets. But promotion is absolutely required to launch a successful product: I don't care how differentiated your product is, if your users don't know about it, it might as well not exist at all.
> 3) it's a lottery.
It pretty much is a lottery at this point. Any game with a unique concept that is doable by a single person is pretty much immediately copied 10 times over by a Chinese/Indian sweatshop. Why develop your own new game when you can copy someone else's? Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up.
App development has become a portfolio game specifically to deal with the randomness. If you view the costs for developing a product as encompassing both SW development costs AND marketing costs, the marketing costs would easily outstrip the development costs. Underperforming apps are unceremoniously killed, and more marketing dollars pumped into the ones that start succeeding.
It's hard to play that game as an indie developer, which is why we've seen so many of these posts pop up recently. People were sold on this vision of an egalitarian, meritocratic app economy and it's just not true. In a maturing market like mobile gaming, the one who shouts the loudest commands the most attention. For an indie dev with no capital, that can be really hard to do.
- JonLim 12y ago> Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up. Ugh, the dreaded re-skin. In a past life, I helped launch a game, and then push it through two re-skins when the original floundered. Turns out that broken mechanics and poor design doesn't change when you change the art on the outside. The marketing mattered, finding product-market fit mattered, but a poor game still does shit-all for you. Just wanted to throw that in there because it gave me the heebie-jeebies reading about it again.
- megablast 12y agoYour point didn't really prove that reskinning didn't work. Reskinning is not a guaranteed process, but it can and does work. Especially with the app store. Release a version, make improvements, release another version reskinned the next week.
- exelius 12y agoOh, I totally agree. But the point with re-skinning is that you can develop a decent game with fun mechanics, and someone will rip it off and release a re-skin within a month. That re-skin could easily outsell your original app.
- m3mnoch 12y ago> So how do you differentiate? > Marketing. again, no. while i feel your pain and the cognotive dissonance associated with "it can't be that i don't make decent games! it has to be someone else's fault!" -- i have hard, objective data that disagrees with you. i have assembled the funnel-and-churn data. i've put together the reports greenlighting games because the ltv has exceeded the cost of acquisition. i've used average instead of median so our whales inflated the reports. and after all of that, i've seen their 30-day retention numbers still stagnate. i lived that for two years. then, the retention bottom fell out. we burned through all of the naive and all that was left was a cadre of seasoned "me too" recognizing gamers. https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1406670481980&chddm=257278&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:ZNGA&ntsp=0&ei=hhbYU7CBJPLLiQLNuYCACg https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... complain about clash of clans' business model all you want -- it's a quality game. also please note, i'm not saying marketing isn't important, it's just not even close to "the most important" especially depending on the situation. if you have a giant budget with a ton of developers, it's pretty important. if you are a small shop where everyone has day jobs and you can endure slower, organic growth? it's not worth the money.