Of the three arenas of starting your own games studio (see my past articles for the creative and business sides), marketing is the area where I'm most out of my comfort zone. I've been working in the games industry for a fairly long time, and for most of that time us developers had very little to do with the public facing side of games. We made the games and the publisher handled the marketing side of things. As the reach of the Internet grew and the cost of communication dropped to almost zero, that situation began to change. As a developer we started to get players by-passing the publisher to contact us directly. This trend accelerated as new publishing platforms such as iPhone and Facebook opened up gaming even further.
My last blog article looked at the creative side and if you've not read it yet, I'd suggest starting there. Now let's look at the business side of starting a games studio. Again note; neither is an exhaustive list of all the issues nor a fool-proof guide to making games. Making games requires lots of hard work, but the pay-off of seeing people having fun with your creation is often worth it.
Over the last few years a combination of the connectivity offered by the Internet, easily available development tools such as Flash or UDK, and a proliferation of new platforms such as iPhone and Android has meant that making and publishing games has never been easier. Stories abound of a handful of people who have made their fortunes from simple yet popular games ideas such as Angry Birds or Minecraft. It has been said that we all have at least one novel inside us - does that translate to games too? I am going to take a look at how we might extract those games ideas from your head into playable experiences you can share or sell.