If money was no object let see what you would need to promote you latest game. This is the situation. You are in a meeting presenting your latest game, tell all present why it will be the next big thing and how much money you need to make it happen. The investors in the meeting are prepared to give you the money you need to get the job done. This is your dream promotion promotion budget, the one that will get you over the top> Where would you spend the money? Over what period of time would you use the money? What type of return on investment would you be satisfied with to go back to your investors and tell them the good news?
Why stop at the moon when you can have bus stops. They're like giant mobile phones and even glow in the dark, so unlike the moon, passers by can subconsciously think "must buy Xammond's game...must buy..."...24/7. No picture required, we've all seen that FarCry4 bus stop!
Have you never planned a full blown advertising campaign and calculated the budget? Carving your name on the moon sounds good after you have a case of beer but it would not get you anywhere if you had to present that idea to investors.
Personally if I was really trying in this area I would focus on events and conferences. It would then make it easier to determine if was worth investing more in, create a fan base and give important user feedback. Obviously if you have made your game in 2-3 days this probably isn't the path you want to go, but if you have a meaningful gaming experience this would be a good path IMO.
i always calculate full blown up PR campaigns.. thats the reason we have this installed. We just can't decide on a proper company logo.
Promotion Budget I think there are 3 ways you could go. 1. Low Budget 1-5k, spread across banner ads, paid reviews, review site ads 2. Standard game budget 30-50k, spread across banner ads, paid reviews, review site ads, radio ads, sponsorships of podcasts, some site skins on popular review sites 3. Crazy Budget Up To 1 million a day. I read that Clash of the Clans spend around 1MIL a day on advertising, diving into TV advertising all over the globe. It would be nice to have this kind of cash. Realistically it is worthwhile committing the majority of the spend to the first 2 weeks, hopefully if the game has value once it is in the charts you will have a good run. Logo on the moon is also a pretty cool idea. I've always wanted my own Zeppelin as well.
I personally feel and I am saying this with first hand experience in this business that you need $30,000 to $50,000 to give a game some momentum.
Basically just throwing money at something won't make it succeed. You have got to have some goals of what you want to achieve with your budget. Unless you know that your game brings in more money per user that you are spending to get them, you can't follow the traditional marketing model. And for most games this will be the case. A game that depends on advertising for its income is going to be making probably less that $0.05 per user, and the cost to get the user will be over $1.00. This means that the only point to do advertising is to some how change the state of your game in the app store to improve its organic growth. However, you need to change the organic growth so much that it is giving you a 20 times increase on the number of downloads you received while advertising the app if you want to make your money back. For example, lets say you need to get 100,000 daily download to get into the top 10 free apps. And you are lucky enough to get your cost of acquisition to only $1.00 per user. So you spend $100,000 and get your app into the top 10. You are making $0.05 per download, so to make back your $100,000 you will need 2,000,000 downloads. Which means your app must remain in the top 10 for more than 20 days through organic downloads. And recently I have never seen one of these simple ad supported games remain in the top 10 for more than a week. So this basically shows me that with a game that only has advertising as its revenue model, it is not worth doing paid advertising for it, as it is impossible to make your money back. What you need to do is make a game that is very fun, social, and sells things, this can bring up your average revenue per user. Being a social game can reduce your cost of acquisition because people share it with their friends, so rather than getting 1 user for $1.00 you now get say 1.4, making the cost to acquire a user only $0.71. It also increases its ability to remain in the charts after your stop or reduce your advertising. So lets say you can increase your average revenue per user to $0.50, and reduce your cost of acquisition to $0.71 now it makes more sense to get into the top 10, because you only need to be there for 1.42 days to make your money back, and this is something that is much more achievable.
All good points. Spending money on advertising is no quick road to get a return on investment and should be considered carefully before stepping in that direction. If you feel you can get the right critical mass to create some buzz then you may show a profit. It is a gamble and you have to be able to lose the ad money without affecting your or your family's way of life. Don't be careless and don't buy into these give me some money for some downloads. No such company is going to give you anything of value.
