Online game with amateur hands. Part 2: The Tale of PR

In the last part of my story, I told you about how I went from the idea to the game implemented in the code. I recommend to the reader who is not familiar with the preamble to familiarize yourself with it first. In this part, I will tell you an instructive story about how I am amateurishly promoting it. I tried to minimize nudistics such as graphs and diagrams, leaving the essence of the essence.

So, the game is created, the server is open and I am its only inhabitant. The game seemed so good to me that I was sure that I would go to bed, and I would wake up among hundreds of thousands of run-up players who would fight in ecstasy of delight and call the children in my honor. Well, or in honor of the game, at the very least. However, as the inquisitive reader guessed, I was the only inhabitant of the server the next day, and the next, and the next ...
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Okay, I'm not a timid one, and rolling up my sleeves, I rushed to carry knowledge of my magnificent creation into the world. I decided to start with search promotion. After all, the search engines in the modern world solve all the problems of an ordinary user. Starting with the search for pictures of cute seals and ending with the solution of differential equations.

Search. It's like magic, only harder.

Having driven the name of the game into the search engines, and all the related queries that came to my head, I discovered that there is a game in the search, but there is one small “BUT” Since you need to register and authorize to enter the game, search robots cannot index further than the first page. And even if they can, then what will they index? Ship names, game chat and battle logs?

It has come to the realization that the browser game is not only game content, but also a bunch of related, about game, content. Without it, the game is doomed to wander around the back of a natural search results, or, at most, organically climb into the top only by explicit instructions in the name of your game. The situation will be worse if the name of the game is not super-unique, as it was in my case. For the first six months, my game fought for a place under the sun with the same name: an intimate epilation clinic, an integrator of video surveillance systems and an online urinal store. Of course, I was pleased with the influx into the game of players whose intimate zone was shaved smoothly, and the bladder was emptied into an elite faience, which was shaped by a Tibetan monk on the side of Mount Fuji until all this was taken off by an all-weather angled infrared camera, but this was not exactly the target audience I was counting on.

A forum, a promo page, a wiki, perhaps a couple of landing pages or simply discussion topics about inside game events on third-party large sites. These whales will keep your game afloat of the informational Internet space until the name of the game turns into a brand, the mere mention of which makes the search giants tremble and give out your game at the very top of the search results Above the birds, above the stars, above the flight your dreams.

But not higher than the vile competitors who carried two bags of dough into advords and Yandex direct. They, as if laughing, immediately hint to you about your place in the hierarchy of gamedev. Young and ambitious projects without money - a place just under the cover of the search results. Yes, and no issue, too.



Well, we will fight for a place in the sun. We begin to sharpen an aluminum spoon to the soul of frakorov!

Yandex.Direct, AdWords and Company

After selling my kidney, sending my neighbor's children to the uranium mines of Mordor and laying my own October badge at the pawnshop I had a small amount in my hands, which I decided to put search advertising into the panties of a seductive Guria. A couple of weeks I picked up target requests, compiled texts of selling advertisements, calculated the possible CTR, CPR and other xxR, read hundreds of pages of text from the gurus of the advertising business. And so, the day came when I pressed the launch buttons of advertising campaigns, preparing for the influx of players. Finally, I will be able to get to Shambhala the flow of the target audience promised to me by the giants of the advertising market. Gain nirvana on top of the search results.

There was enough money for exactly 2 days. From over a million hits, I received a thousand clicks. There were 44 people in the game.
Years later, I understand that the system worked as it should. I just made a lot of mistakes that made the company ineffective. I simply did not have time to comprehend the whole range of millions of nuances, some of which, moreover, can be known only by long work on several projects. I wanted players "here and now", and advertising systems, like sweet-sirens, promised me them quickly, efficiently , inexpensively . Unfortunately, as always in life, at the exit you get any TWO options , from the above indicated three.

A young project with a low advertising budget, without a person familiar with the nuances of search advertising, without a lot of experience in setting up and maintaining advertising companies, has absolutely nothing to do in advertising systems.

Here as with eye surgery. If you have no money or connections to conduct it by an experienced surgeon, do not try to do it yourself by reading a couple of books about emergency medicine. You can’t lose your eyes and other books.

And yes, there will always be the one who throws more money. If you are a fan of fair play, then you have nothing to do at this casino.

SEO promotion

Perhaps this will be the shortest section of my story. Friend, remember, any SEO promotion is like selling cancer drugs. The only one who has profit here is the seller of the medicine and the circle of persons affiliated with it. You will be singing about the delights of buying quality links from trust sites on ultra-convenient sites, and then, when you put a dough into this business, your site will fly off to the ban after changing the search results mechanism. You will buy hundreds of purchased articles and post them on sites with unrealistically steep indicators of the target audience, but you will receive 0 transitions. You optimize the code of your site with the help of a guru for micro markup, tagging and keywords, but the only thing you will end up with is a hole in your budget. You will overthrow thousands of people in your public Vkontakte, and even if they do not turn into a "dog" the next day, then none of them will ever like and repost your record.

I wish all SEO promoters to have an epitaph stamped on their graves, “Here lies an excellent specialist, buying real estate in Moscow at a low price, a true professional in his field, selling roofing from a warehouse. Let the earth be his downy shawls from Orenburg from the manufacturer. ” At the same time, the epitaph will be stamped on a fantastically beautifully decorated slab of splendid marble, but when you try to read the date of death or the name of the SEO lying under it, a specially trained pop-up window could pop up with the data of the beholder to tell about the death of the SEO This specialist from the department of implementation of noodles.

Google Play / Yandex.Store

After analyzing the series of failures with paid advertising options, I decided to use the strengths of the implementation of my game project. What is good browser game? That's right, the fact that almost all mobile and non-mobile devices have the function of an integrated browser in modern realities. So the game is easily portable to any platform. After reviewing the analytical information about mobile OSes, it was decided to go to Google.Play. However, where to get the app? The answer was simple. There are many design services android applications. They ask only a little - your soul. You give them content - they give you an application with their advertising inside the application. For a startup implemented with the help of one and a half diggers and without the presence of an android programmer in the staff, this is in my opinion an ideal option.

I sold the second kidney, part of the lung and a little conscience. Read all the articles on mobile promotion, to which he could reach. I bought a developer account from Google, I ordered a review on w3bsit3-dns.com/w3bsit3-dns.com/2012/07/08/166219/, some other marketing, drove the game to the top and got almost 50 thousand installations in a month. The project began to gain momentum, acquired a monetization system, connections with payment aggregators and an understanding of the target niche. The game finally began to bring money to the hosting and chocolates. However, this is too broad a topic worthy of a separate article. Write in kammentah how much it would be interesting to you.

Pitfalls were only 2.

1) Most of those who downloaded the application and entered the game were not our target audience. The game is incredibly complex, consists entirely of text, and the modern audience is a little more than full. So the rating of the application has gone into a minus due to the negative assessments of illiterate schoolchildren who want to get 3D pysch-pysch and not ready for hardcore old school games.



For a long time remained in the game a very small percentage of the number of downloads. This was due to the absence of a tutorial that was clearly displayed to the player, and the complexity of the game itself.

2) The free creation of the client’s APK has been sidelined due to the abundance of annoying ads



and there was no way to turn it off. As well as replace the APC with your version in the future, or add a new desired functionality like authorization via Google account or Google payments. So I got the audience through non-sour reputational costs, and also would have gotten into eternal slavery to the application designer if I decided to develop the game further.

However, there were also joyful moments. Not being afraid to touch a new platform for us with the help of an unknown to us, but easy to implement, and not demanding from us huge financial investments, the tool we got a gaming audience. I heard real reviews about the game firsthand, revealed the weaknesses of the game itself, its promotion and optimization.
Later we released a self-written, high-quality application, eliminated all the shortcomings identified at that time, were highlighted in other application directories, such as Yandex.Store, Samsung Store, Amazon and comprehended Zen. I'm lying. Not grasped. But we are going to this.

All in openwork

Inspired by the success in the market for android applications, I immediately decided to land my cunning game developer ass on some more adjacent mobile platforms. He began to analyze what kind of chair is more attractive, where apples are pounded or winded. At that moment, the Windows 8.1 market was just coming out and the excitement around universal metro applications was quite large. So it was decided to jump on the train of the trend that was popular at the time. For a small fee, the freelancer made a client for our game for a win.mobile and I placed it in a Windows application store. But the quality of the product was simply terrible, and he did not gain success. Yes, and where to get success from the application, which started 1 time out of 10?

Once, during everyday lunchtime scrolling through a tape of materials in a habrahabr, I came across a Microsoft inviting banner promising support for start-ups.

“Well, for the sake of promoting my game creation, I am ready to go under anybody,” I thought, and sent a letter to the address indicated on the promotion page. I expected the letter to go nowhere, well, or in the best case, after a couple of weeks I will receive a response from the robot, where I will be required to request some documents on a legal person who is not there, a feces analysis and a certificate from the clinic about the absence of ectopic pregnancy . And all will end by being asked to sign the contract in blood during the full moon. And do it only in order to submit an application.

However, a giant fortochnaya corporation in the face of a cute girl answered me in a couple of hours, and asked me to describe to her why we should stick to Uncle Gates' boobs. Since I am an adherent of the zealous keeping of the secret of correspondence, I will give below only what I answered in an email that I wrote on the bus on Nokia 6230i.



Now, re-reading this letter, the answer seems to me silly and naive, but nevertheless, I share it with the reader, albeit with a bit of shame, to show that naivety and stupidity are also working. The main thing, probably, is the fire of love for the game, which burned in my chest and does not cool to this day.
A day later, the game got access to BizSpark, Azure cloud hosting and access to all Microsoft software. The huge software giant was not a soulless bureaucratic machine, but, suddenly,
I thank all the gods from Shiva to Odin that I basically turn off AdBlock on those sites that I like, but which I can't, or don’t want to support financially. This banner gave our game access to the resource base for hundreds of thousands of rubles. Without demanding anything in return.

So do not be afraid to ask for help from the giants.

PS: I'll just leave it here: http://special.habrahabr.ru/hello_startup/bizspark/

Apple trees in the snow

Android, Windows and Win. Mobile fell before the ultimate brilliance of the superstrong awesome modesty of our game. And I rushed to the apple. I bought a used Mac-mini on ibei to make an application in Xcode, I bought a developer’s subscription for appstore (a separate warm hello to the security staff of the Yabloko people who need to send them duplicate documents by fax (FAX, CARL !!!!)) But not took off. From the word "absolutely." The material is also typed in a separate story, but if it is short, then an epic Fail.
Look! But this part came out even less than about SEOs =)

At full speed

Having tested my strength in mobile platforms, I, during the next Steam sale, thought that it would be nice to get into STEAM. In theory, a better option is even difficult to come up with. First, Steam is a Mecca for indie projects that make it difficult to find a publisher because of its focus on the narrow niche of the consumer (almost our case). It allows you to play almost equal with large projects of the AAA class, money does not play a decisive role in this platform. Secondly, Steam allows you to present the product in various language markets. It was a small matter to add 3,500 wooden rubles to the old Gabe and get approval of the prototype of the game from the Steam Community in a special game sandbox of projects called Steam Greenlight, after passing which is already allowed directly into the Steam itself. At the same time, Steam understands that there are games that may not meet the casual tastes of the majority, and therefore do not take into account the negative feedback from the gaming community when deciding whether or not to launch the game project into an “adult” store. Only approving voices of gourmets have weight here =)
I approached the matter thoroughly, read three more tons of literature and articles about the experience of the passage of the greenlight by other projects. I spent about a week in paint.nete, drawing promotional art and concepts with my crooked hands. By the way, surprisingly, in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet there are very few full-fledged tutorials, so I intend to devote my third article to this topic.

In general, after 2 months we passed the greenlight http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=545320310

At the same time, I did not specifically use the existing gaming audience in the voting. I wanted to get the experience of passing from scratch. That is, to find out whether it is possible to get into Steam with a product from which the entire current audience is limited only by the author of the game and a couple of his friends.
As you can see, it is quite real.

But the joy was overshadowed by several fatal flaws, which were pointed out to us by potential players in the greenlight cells. It will take a lot of time and finances to eliminate them. And this will greatly delay the release date of the game on this platform. Well, every cloud has a silver lining. The game will be even better and more beautiful, and I will get an idea of ​​another gededev pitfall.
In general, I can recommend the Steam platform to all game developers, without exception. More developer-friendly platform you will not find. And the predatory commission of the service of 30% from each sale will not stop a truly fanatical author from presenting his creation to the world. After all, money is not the main thing?

Youtube swag

Besides the coverage of new platforms, I still wanted to popularize the game with the help of widespread mass media. Twitch was dropped for the reason that nowadays flats with streamer Karina (c) are demanding some kind of drive on the screen from the game. And our project is basically text. Each game step can stretch for a day.

But there are various channels for reviewing games on YouTube! Potential target audience, as on a plate!

I urgently send to all the top 100 game review channels requests for the timing, cost, and volume of material needed to provide. And you know what? 70% of the channels did not deign me with an answer, even after duplicating the request from other email boxes. Another 25% sent me prices, after reading which I honestly used to compare them with the promotional prices of the First Channel, NTV and TNT. They were not very different. For myself, in my head, I drew something like this portrait of the average owner of a popular YouTube channel.



Alas, the modern Internet media space has long been aligned with television, not only in the abundance and quality of content, but also in advertising prices. Platforms with a large and high-quality audience are asking for fabulous money. And no one knows the inexpensive sites, most likely, will not give your project a drop of popularity. BUT! The remaining 5 percent of channels offered adequate prices, timelines, and video review formats. Efficiency was different. The video from the gameplay channel was the highest quality review and the largest in number of responses. I found this channel according to recommendations in two articles on Habré and I can safely recommend it myself.

What is the result of PR project in YouTube media environment? Novice gamedeveloper will have to work hard. Send a hundred letters, get a hundred answers, make a qualitative, quantitative and financial analysis of sites. Wash hundreds of tons of rock to find a couple of golden bits. By and large, this will not make your project more popular, will not force it to discuss grandmothers at the entrance, but this is where your game project will be able to get media content that you can use in the future to promote games in the same incentive, app store, game promotion. site, and other places that need to move around.

Social networks

In the process. It is necessary to transfer the game under the social networks API in terms of authorization, get a pair / three SSL certificates and you can go into battle. Most likely, nothing extraordinary, in terms of the difficulties of exit, our game is not waiting there.

About the poor team I put in a word

The attentive reader, who read the first part, is aware that 2 people are currently engaged in the development of the game, but in the article I’m more “like” than “we are talking”. The fact is that I am extremely far from the foundation of any game - code. The hobby of creating our game project is shared with me by my comrade https://habrahabr.ru/users/supernovaws/topics/ . I do not in any way detract from his huge contribution to our common child, just talking about my part of the project with my bell tower.
It is in the materials of my colleague that you can learn all the subtleties of the magic of code. And I, for my part, appeal to our warm and cozy company to all whom this project may seem interesting.

Until new meetings, FRIENDS !

If you are interested in the background of this article, then read Online game-hands of amateur. History