How much would it cost to market a game?

How much money one should be expected to spend on paid advertising to get good result? Also, according to your experience, what ad platform perform the best? (google, facebook, youtube,...)

 

What kind of budget do you have? Paying for ads usually has pretty much no benefit if we're only talking about small sums of money

 

Is your game good? I think that would be the first question to ask.

 

I don't have a game/budget yet. I just want to know how much I should prepare if I want to make it big.

 

A lot of money if you want to make it big. I was at a mobile game conference panel talk where this was discussed. Everyone on the panel agreed it is best to focus on a big launch marketing hit to get in the charts and then benefit from the sales boost from chart visibility. The sum several agreed on was $100,000 for launch day.

Using advertising to make it big is not really an option unless you are already big. Reinvesting your income into advertising to build over time towards a modest success is more achievable, but still difficult.

Your questions need more context. What platform are you on? Paid or free-to-play? What genre? etc. There are many variations that make decisions individual to your game.

Ad networks vary over time. I've had ads in my game where eCPM was great for a long time, then tumbled massively in a few weeks. That probably reflects a change in desirability for advertisers. In that case all the adverts started to be for the same game. The publisher of that game must have been gaming the ad network algorithms to dominate during a push.

Having said that, I have heard good things about Unity Ads, and it seems well suited to the first time advertiser.

 

As much as you can afford and not one penny more or less.

 

Unless all you can afford isn't all that much, then don't bother because it won't pay off, and you're much better off spending that money elsewhere

 

Marketing isn't just buying ad space. Marketing on a small budget just means you need to be more creative.

 

The OP specifically mentioned advertisements though, not marketing in general (different story imo)

 

True, but the title was "marketing" so they probably lump all marketing under advertising.

 

I would look towards exhibition space and events instead of ads for a first game. A booth at PAC might cost 1500, plus flights, accomodation and labour. It will probably bring more return then the same amount in ads.

There are many smaller events that will cost you less, or even have a free showcase.

Ads are very impersonal. They don't really allow you to build a community. I personally haven't found them worth the effort for low dollar amounts.

 

In addition to this, you should have a good idea from metrics in your soft launch, whether your game UA spend is greater than the average player lifetime value in your game. If not, then spending money on advertising/UA will just net you a loss.

For smaller budgets, I would go with YouTubers whose audience matches players who will want to play your game. As the bored mormon said, shows are also a great way to get eyeballs on your game.

A professional PR campaign can also go a long way, although your game will need to look polished.

At the end of the day, you need a fun game that looks good.

You can't market a turd.

 

Very successful game:



Not a single penny spent on advertisement.

Of course this all depends on your market. A game that relies heavily on Steam sales will have consumers more involved with finding out new games.

While casual games tend to need to put themselves out there more than they need to rest on the quality of their product.

That said, the effectiveness of advertisement is ridiculously overstated and all the "research" is mostly done by advertisement companies who, surprise-surprise, "find" that you can never spend too much on advertisement.

It's one of the reasons why the industry is stuck on hit chasing.

Also keep in mind the whole Lynch and Kayne 2 debacle. A guy got fired for giving a major advertiser a mediocre score.

While on the flip side of the spectrum, Nintendo fell sharply out of favor of game critics right about the same time that they moved their advertising funds from game media to more traditional media.

Point is, it's a real sleazy industry and as a little fish in a big pond I think your efforts will be better spent making more content, better content, or at least doing some clever viral stunt of your own.

 

Speaking of which, I'm still happy to do reviews/play throughs ect for Steam keys. It's certianly a cheaper way to get views then paid advertising.

 

Well, at least in the Mobile market you will find out that the amount you need to put into ads to get ANY return on investment most probably is more than you can afford.

The likes of King and similar big names in Mobile gaming got big by advertising the S*** out of their games, and are still pumping a ton of money into ads. Trying to compete with them means you either have deep pockets your own ad campaign will be a drop in the ocean.

Better to try to use different channels, and try to have word of mouth work in your favour (first thing to achieve that is, as said, a good and original game, not some cheap threes clone!)

 

I'm going to echo the sentiment that ads aren't worth it unless you have a ton of cash. I've spend $50-100 here and there on Facebook and Google ads and got no increase in sales. This was years ago, so I don't remember the numbers (or even what I was advertising), but it was definitely not worth it. I had a client who hired an actual firm to market an app I made for her. She spent thousands, and the sales results were not impressive at all.

I got a bigger boost when some random blogger decided to cover an app of mine years back. So I'd say that your best bet is to create something worthy of being talked about and try to get bloggers, review sites, or Youtube to cover it. You can also post updates on places like IndieDB, or use the #MadeWithUnity or #IndieDev hashtags on twitter to try and build some kind of following for the game as you are building it. There's also the WIP forums here and over at Tigsource as well.

You can also try Reddit, but I don't think many subreddits are okay with just popping in and advertising. There's one specifically for Unity Assets that I just posted LumenLights and Retrograde to. It doesn't seem to get much traffic though. LumenLights has had like 7 or 8 upvotes, but no sales yet. Retrograde got downvoted to 0, with the Youtube video getting around 20 views in the day or so that it's been posted. No sales on that either.

In the end, I don't think you are going to have the budget for an ad buy to be very effective. Instead you'll need to spend a whole lot of time finding places that will allow you to post about the project without getting mad at you for spamming, or post a devlog, or instead just engage in conversation and build a reputation at the various places. Unfortunately, many of us (myself included) don't take the time to do all that. There's always another project or another section of the same project to work on and marketing because something that just gets ignored. When you post anywhere, it certainly helps if you ask for feedback, preferably something specific, so the community is engaged. Not only will it help improve the product, but it will help build a sense of community around it much more so that just talking at people would.

 

This. TotalBiscuit even has a 45 minute video about how games get featured on his channel.

 

I'll have to remember to watch that one day, it may be useful information for getting others to cover a game as well. I have a 10gb a month bandwidth limit, so TotalBiscuit's long videos mean I have to wait until the unlimited time between 12am-5am to watch them. I'm usually up then, but I'm also getting caught up on TV shows, or working, or doing other things that require bandwidth.

 

10gb a month? Good lord, that must be nightmarish. I burn through that much in like... a day.

 

If I recall correctly the audio is the only relevant part of the "video" with the video being random gameplay footage. For videos like that I usually just use an online video downloader (SaveFrom) to grab the audio portion (42MB in this case).

http://en.savefrom.net/

 

Every time i've paid for ads it has been a tremendous waste of money. I recommend instead reaching out to subreddits/communities that might enjoy it. or writing a medium post and advertising it in free ways.

 

Yeah, it's pretty horrible. I use around 3-5gb during the free time every night. So at least that is available. Only because I'm grandfathered in though. There is a new satellite launching soon that is supposed to bring like 10 times the bandwidth. Depending on the new allowance, that might not be enough to match my current usage if there's no free time. Whether that is a problem or not depends on how much they slow you down for going over. Right now, if I go over, it goes so slow that https sites won't work. I have to use a VPN to connect to them, which for some reason allows them to work.

I just downloaded it to watch whenever I get up again. My schedule is completely out of whack now. I could watch it now, but an unplanned nap put me behind on my todo list for the day.

 

It's hard to set an overall budget at once, but you can look through the Clickky's CPI statistics to get a general view: https://clickky.biz/advertise/self-serve/

 

Worth reading:

The Realistic Guide to Pricing Indie Game Marketing
https://launchyourindiegame.com/fundamentals-pricing-indie-game-marketing/

Summary:

• It costs about $50,000 to market an indie game.
  
• Branding takes about 2 weeks to complete, it will cost you about $7,000 to do yourself, or about that to outsource.
  
• A trailer takes about 1 week to produce, costs you about $4,000 to do yourself, and maybe less to outsource.
  
• A website takes about 2 weeks to complete, costs you about $7,000 to do yourself, and maybe less to outsource.
  
• Social media takes the full 3 months to complete, costs you about $11,000 to do yourself, and maybe less to outsource.
  
• A devblog takes the full 3 months to complete, costs you about $9,000 to do yourself, and possibly less to outsource.
  
• PR takes the full 3 months to complete, costs about $9,000 to do yourself, and about that to outsource.

Don't just read the summary, though. There are many valuable details in the full article.

 

Your summary kinda... doesn't reflect what the article is saying, and a lot of what the article is saying is "here's what your time is worth on average multiplied by the time it'll take you" but, like... Here's the thing. If you make a trailer yourself, or make the devlog yourself, or make the website yourself, or do all the social media stuff yourself, it doesn't "literally" cost you anything but time. The only thing that has any real bearings on Actual Human Dollars™ is the outsourcing predictions.

The problem with what I've long come to dub Time As Indie Dollars is that this all assumes a lot about the returns you'll be seeing on this. Market rate values mean absolutely nothing. Allow me to explain:

1. So your game finally comes out. It took you three years to make, including designing, planning, multiple failed prototypes and all those fun things that come from indie games. You release your game on Steam for an example price of $20. Over the next 6 months, 20,000 people buy your game.
2. Whoa! You just made $280,000 in six months! Except you kinda didn't. You made $280,000 in 3.5 years. So let's make a few more assumptions. Let's assume that on this game, you only worked for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. You take Sundays off so you can watch Twin Peaks in your underwear. That's roughly 1095 days of working, or 8760 hours. All of a sudden, all that work is starting to add up.
3. So you have your $280,000 (before taxes) but your sales have started to peter out. But let's break down those sales figures into how much you actually made. Not your theoretical market rate because nobody is paying you your salary but yourself. Well all of a sudden that $89 hourly value you "should" be making drops down to $32 because that's what you actually made. It's nothing to sneeze at, but it's literally a third of what this article is putting forth.
4. Here's the other problem. This article is seemingly obsessed with salaries, but the thing about salaries is that you actually, well, get paid your salary. When you're an indie dev, it's actually entirely possible to make a game and not get paid at all. When you're an indie dev, your salary is what you have made selling your game minus expenses. No more, no less.
5. So your $185,638 salary suddenly becomes $80,000. Definitely liveable, unless you live in high expense place like Silicon Valley (don't live in the Bay Area unless you need to or you were born there and can't afford to leave, it's a bad time), but nowhere near the salary this article is pointing out.
6. So now we get into the real meat of things. We get into questions like "Okay, so how much did that trailer really cost me?" Well, here's the thing. Unless you were getting paid from a previously released game, it probably cost you, well, time. Not money, but time. That trailer you spent a week on (a good trailer will take more than a week) probably actually cost you the cost of an Adobe subscription for all their apps, since you don't want to deal with the time lost learning poorly documented free software alternatives. So we'll put that at $40. You subscribe for a month for Premiere and After Effects because you want to really make that trailer pop. So in terms of actual expenses, your trailer more cost you $40 to make. It also probably sucks because editing a good trailer is really difficult but that's not the point here.
7. What that trailer did do, however, was contribute to your overall marketing, as does PR, as does branding, as does the devlog, as does, well, everything else. The only reason your "salary" is as high as it is is because you got the game into the eyes of people willing to part ways with their $20 to play the electronic beep boop game. The only reason you made that "salary" of $80,000 a year is because of this work.

And here's the real trick of it. The number I pulled out of my behind at the beginning there? That 20,000 at $20? That's being super generous. I mostly picked those numbers because they'd cover the cost of living expenses (admittedly very late) for the three years you'd have to have worked on the game. In reality, most devs don't make anywhere near that much. A lot of indie devs have to work two, three jobs just to make do while they work on their games. It's why a lot of games go without ever being released. When you use the word "salary," there are certain expectations there. There's the expectation of a clearly indicated wage. There's the expectation that you'll get to buy food that week.

The real takeaway is that these things aren't costing you actual money, just time. And if it wasn't for that time invested, you wouldn't make any money aside from the pennies you'd get from somehow showing up in the Steam discovery queue. Your salary is also, unless you make pretty successful games with a decent degree of consistency, never as high as the article points out. The article is 100% pie in the sky thinking in its optimism. In reality, things are never that simple and clear cut.

 

It's an exact copy-paste from the article's summary headings.

I get where you're coming from, though. You're right that as a hobbyist (as I think most people here are) time is fairly cost free. But when you depend on the income to keep a roof over your head, you need to make these kinds of comparative decisions. Do you spend the hour adding a feature to your game, or spend it on marketing efforts instead and ship without that feature? Or spend it on a freelancing gig so you can pay your bills?

 

If you are running this as a business, the key thing to consider is opportunity cost. In simple terms that's the amount of money you can earn by using that same time to do something else. I know my monthly rate as a chemical engineer. If I was to quit and do my game full time my lost wages as a chemical engineer would be a very real, very quantifiable cost.

The only way your time is free is if there is no opportunity cost. This might be true for teenagers who don't have the ability to take on paid work, to stay at home parents tied to kids, to people otherwise unable to work, or during a severe economic downturn. But the 'average' game developer certainly has other very real opportunities they could pursue instead of games.

Sort of. My time in the evenings and weekends is very cost free. But its also very low quality time. I can't get much done after a full day at work. If I want high quality time, I've got to sacrifice something else to get it, which adds a cost (not always measurable in dollars).

 

If we're going to talk opportunity costs and games then you may as well just skip games altogether and get a job in retail :v

 

Pretty much. Indie game dev rewards the very good handsomely. But mediocre developers tend to barely break even. And the poor ones loose money.

If you don't want to use opportunity cost, you can use living expenses instead. The number is significantly lower. But it still adds up to a real cost you have to pay.

 

It assumes that

I think most peoples time as an indie dev isn't that valuable lets be fair

 

He shows the break down of the calculations in the article. Which part specifically do you disagree with?

 

This sounds dumb, but all of it? Hear me out
He used professional rates for everything. One could argue that an indie dev could be just as good as a professional developer earn as much, i dont dispute that. But the notion of basing the average indie devs salary off of someone who's a professional at all of these things, especially marketing and business management? I don't think most indie devs would put them selves at professional class in all these fields

 

From article:

So that's like a third of that in my country and 0 if you're unemployed (your time is worth jack ****).

 

Good marketing probably cost more than most indie developers have to spend.

 

Depends on where you are marketing. Steam and mobile are two very different worlds. Mobile is what I'm more familiar with.

For mobile, first you have to hire someone that knows how to get good rates. That's a skill all to itself, and not knowing what you are doing here can cost you a ton like 4-8 times what you would get without an expert or publisher. This is one area where publishers can be worth it for an indie.

You can test your retention with a few hundred dollars. You need a minimum here, probably around $300 or so before you have enough to get a measurement that's worth anything. Plan on spending a few thousand to figure this part out. The general assumption is if you can retain users, monetizing is a given almost. Most people investing money in mobile want to see 7 day retention at 20% or better as a general rule.

After that you will probably need to plan on spending at least mid 5 figures per month, maybe around double that the first month. The thing is you are up against people who know all the tricks and have huge banks. You get better deals with larger ad spends, and ROI goes up the more you spend to a point also. Basically if you are trying to spend just a few hundred/thousand a month, you are basically paying 3-5 times more then the competition per player. Which puts you in a really bad spot because the pro's are operating on thin profit margins anyways.

There are of course variations and exceptions to all of this. But mobile is very competitive and honestly if you are out to make money, you need a pile of it to start with or don't bother.

 

that article sucks stop talking about it lol by the figures they use, who is the article written for? those prices, i woulda paid someone to have read that article for me cause iam too rich and busy... and since when does Elon Musk dev video games? hue hue

actually that article makes me feel really good,
sounds like marketing my game costs like $1000 tops LOOL from that article

but yeah thanks though, ill have to check out getting into those expos.... in like a year or something...