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There's no reason you can't do both. But assuming you want to choose one...

Consider that any given game is only a new pre-release title for one, usually short part of its project life cycle. Opportunities to gain experience at this part of a game project is comparatively rare. On the flip side, as long as your team sticks together you can get experience making new projects together literally whenever you want.

I would not be in a rush to turn away from a rare opportunity to go chasing a common one.

Of course, I'm biased. I tell people to make small projects in part so that they can reach this phase of the project as quickly and as often as possible. Anyone with some technical skills can make a game, but there are relatively few people who can also sell them effectively.

 

In my opinion this is the best way to do it. I often see people spending ages on making improvements that they think are important without testing with their audience. Much better, I think, to get something out there sooner rather than later*, get real feedback from non-developers, and then make your improvements when you know what the real issues are.

* As long as it's not so bad it'll be damaging, of course!

 

Yeah, the times when you can collect real data and try different marketing ideas on a near-completed product are few and far between! I think this is an opportunity too good to let slip. The success of the next game completely depends on how much you learn from this too.

 

Tru dat.

This is the time we don't have much on the line so its good to experiment.

 

Something to think about: This may be true if playing the game, but I would never buy the game because with my old eyes I simply cannot tell the units apart in your screen shot. I would assume that the game is just as likely to give me a headache and would hit the Ignore button.

If in the game it is easier to tell the units apart, the screen shots must reflect that or you are going to lose sales.

 

@Socrates , I'm reworking the lighting on a couple of the maps.

 

It needs a video, you really cant have a game release without a video and expect people to buy it these days.

Also, I notice it says releasing this month, but personally I would push that back 2-3 months and take some time to build hype and market + do as much PR as possible, posting on reddit, facebook, twitter regularly as well as indieDB, any forums you can find such as this one, and then contacting youtubers and magazine + website/blog writers about the game with a press kit (possible the most important piece of a game release).

 

I pulled down the video yesterday to test the difference in wishlist rate. In terms of wishlist per visit, at this point, it does not appear that there is a significant difference (although its only one data point). On the flip side our traffic overall dropped pretty significantly (perhaps steam is less likely to push your game if it doesn't have a trailer?)

I would personally never buy a game that didn't have a trailer on its steam page, but perhaps the psychology for 'coming soon' pages is different. Or at least, the negative of not having a trailer while in pre-release is far less.

 

A word of advice, I definately would not use wishlists as a metric for determining how many people will convert to sales. I can guarantee you will see more sales with a video than without. The psychology surrounding how people buy things with money is not comparable to the psychology of bookmarking a video game in a wishlist.

Certainly I would say get a trailer up as soon as possible, not just a trailer but one that does all the right stuff a trailer should do (there is talk here on unity learn about $0 budget marketing by indiegamegirl I believe that explains perfect marketing trailer and the 7 things required for one), otherwise you cant really tell if its the video making a lack of impact or the fact that the video itself is lacking in some regard.


EDIT: @frosted Here is the video for you :

enjoy! Really good tips in there, follow them all!

 

Okay this is just screaming for an AR release as well. If you add that before release you got something they might talk about If you could also play with your tablets or whatever. It would probably get featured on apple because all the ar content sucks right now.

 

@GameDevCouple_I, appreciate the link.

Right now we're really focusing our efforts elsewhere, and although stuff like presskit can't hurt, I see it as a distraction from more important marketing efforts (that we still aren't putting enough effort into). The industry has shifted a tremendous amount since 2013, and really the market place looks nothing like it did even a few years ago. Especially at the small indie level.

Again, stuff like a presskit site wouldn't hurt, but its still time and effort that we could be putting toward other things, like scouring youtube for appropriate content creators, etc.

I uploaded the trailer again when I woke up this morning, but valve's trailer upload is broken and a "128 trailers ahead in queue" message hasn't changed in at least 3 hours. So I can't get the f'n trailer back up on the page.

@Aiursrage2k that's a pretty interesting idea. AR really would be kinda perfect.

 

If you do go the AR route, make sure to do it using the AR foundation package so that you dont have to do a lot of work to get it to run on all mobile AR platforms. Although obviously if you do go AR route you will need to add extra time for testing on each platform and testing for mobile can be a bit of a pain, but yeah it does look interesting!