all right, cool. Um, well, first of all, my name is Miow, and thank you so much all for coming over and checking out my talk. Um, this means a lot to me. I hope you're going to think that it's, you know, it wasn't a waste of time, that you came here and you picked up some nice good tips, uh, for your marketing, that you're going to feel like, all right, this was pretty good. And by the end of it, I hope we'll get to kick that door down and do some marketing. Um, so thanks for coming down. And well, my presentation, I want to talk to you about this one part of marketing, which is something that actually really excites me. And it's the part where you get to find out how to say the right things to the right people about your game. And the reason why I love it is the fact that once you do that, it's going to make your life so much easier when it comes to marketing, uh, coming up the rest of your marketing plan. Um, so one of the best ways to help

you sell your game is through marketing and promotion. And I know you're probably thinking to yourself right now, Wow, I would never figure that part out. But the thing is, it gets even better. There's actually thousands of other developers also marketing their game at the same time. So you're not only competing with games that are coming out, you're also competing with games that are already out, trying to get more sales. But before you go out there and you start, you know, yelling out into the void and trying to get people's attention, first try to figure out what it is that you should be saying and to whom you should be saying. That's going to help you make your messages stick out a little bit more. Now for me, when I do my marketing plans and my, I guess, my marketing presentation, try to figure out, you know, how to sell this game. I like to ask myself these questions. The what to say, where to say it, when to say it, how to say it, and to whom to say it.

there's also this like one niggling question of how much is all this going to cost but that's something we can talk about later. And the good part is you can still do these things for free. And today I want to talk about the what to say and the whom to say it part. So today I'm going to talk to you a little bit my about your game key pillars, how to try to how to find them out. Uh, I love key pillars. It's something that I'm. I love that exercise. Just half of your work is done once you figure out your key pillars. Uh, so it's pretty exciting. Uh, second as exciting, maybe even more, is the Quantic Foundry personas, which I'll tell you a little bit out about as well. And then finally, I'm going to tell you how all those two can work in unison in creating your marketing plan. Now you're probably thinking to yourself, well, that's all cool, but you know who is this person. And that's a really good question.

so my name is Miel, and I'm a video games marketer and owner of a video games marketing agency called 3233. Um, I've been marketing games for just under 10 years, uh, all the way from triaa to premium Indies. Uh, I started my career back in 2013 for a studio called Techland, and I was the social media and Community manager for Dying Light. Um, and for two years, I worked on Dying Light, Dying Light: The Following, and also Torment: Tides of Numenera. Um, it was a really cool time for me 'cause I got to move to Poland, uh, but I kind of miss home a lot as well. And after doing for two years of Techland, I decided, you know what, I'm going to try do something of my own, and that's how 3233 came to be. And during this time, I got to work on games like The Medium, The Sinking City, uh, Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, and the whole franchise, uh, Blair Witch on Switch, and heaps, heaps

more and also recently, I got to work on my first Aussie game, which was sick. Uh, it was like a dream of mine, and it was Dinkum, and it was like the most Aussie game I could ever ask for, and it was sick, like, oh, I love it to bits, you know, game of one bat, it's, it's what I was after, um, so yeah, so I love doing what I'm doing every game that I work, and always learn something new, so there's new things you pick up, there's some things that don't change, though, and this is, I guess, one of those things, uh, so before I go any further, I just want to give, like, a little disclaimer, these are all my opinions, uh, I could be right, or I could be wrong, it's up to you to kind of figure out and go, okay, I resonate with what he's saying, and if you're thinking that way, like, that's awesome, sick, um, but if you're kind of thinking, N, I don't know, this guy's a bit iffy, um, that's okay, disregard as well, um.

take the things that you like, disregard the things you don't like, kind of like in life in general, I guess. Um, so cool, so that's out of the way, let's get into the six stuff. So the key pillars, going to have a little sip of water, cool. Um, so yes, I love key pillars. If there was a t-shirt that said I heart key pillars, I'll be wearing it right now. Um, because once I figure out what my keill is, are so what my strengths are, it makes my job so much easier. Like 50% of the work is done. And what's so great about key pillars is, yes, as I said, it gives you an idea of what your strengths are and it tells you what it is that you should be saying about your game. Like there will be times when you start marketing a game where someone might ask you a question, could be journalist, could be a potential player. They might ask you, Hey, so what's good about your game? And if you don't have an answer, uh, in your head, you couldn't

of start freaking out a little bit, and you might go, Oh, you know, it's an action game, and it's like, it's pretty cool, and the graphics are all right, but you know, we're working on it. And you know, once you start giving that sort of answer, it's like, Okay, you know, you're kind of losing the audience. Um, so the key pillars, it'll help you to kind of come up with the answer even when you're like in the middle of the night, someone can shake you up at 3:00 in the morning, and you just yell it all out. So to start the key pillars exercise, I like to actually go analog mode, and what I do is I bring either a whiteboard or a blackboard or a giant piece of paper. Um, I bring heaps of pens, crayons, markers, anything with color. Color is awesome 'cause helps you kind of think and remember things a little bit easier. And then we usually get a few people to come into the room. Uh, it could be either

someone from production, uh, people from marketing, uh, anyone in the company that you feel actually knows their game and know, you know, like, pretty invested in it, and also kind of play games themselves. Um, you don't want to bring too many people, like having a room of 300 people is going to be kind of useless, but you know, one person, unless you're a solo Dev, you know, having a couple of people bounce off ideas is cool too, but the main thing is bring heaps of honesty about your game, like, leave the bias out the door, uh, like when you come out and when your game is out, people will be comparing it to other games that you'll be competing with, and not just in your sector, but also higher and lower. Um, little sway, like I was talking to a developer that does a very specific sport, a niche Sport, and their Studio only has 20 people that makes this game, and no matter wherever event they go to, their game always gets compared to like FIFA, which has hundreds of developers, and no matter how many times they

explain and saying look, we don't have the budget of FIFA. All the players were like, nah, but FIFA does it better. So it's kind of something you have to think about. And yeah, leave that bias out the door. Now, as I was writing this, I was thinking to myself, this is kind of funny, but now I'm not too sure. So just let's hang on tight with this. Um, so this is an example of a made-up game. Uh, that we're going to do the Keers exercise, and it's for a story-driven Street brawler set in the post-apocalyptic city of CRA inside the parliament. Um, this is not a statement or anything. Parliament is good. It's just an example. So you get all these people from your room, from your studio, into a room. Um, and you start talking about camber fighter, and you start listing out the strengths that you have. Um, and you might start thinking to yourself and say, well, crap, you know, we don't have the budget to have 15 different characters with their own unique stuff like we just.

don't have the money for it, but what we do have is we got two characters, and these two characters, well, they're actually Senators. They want to get in and like beat their way into the top, you know, and that's pretty cool, something that's a little bit different. We've got a really cool narration person who wrote a pretty good story because these Senators that are, you know, smashing people and reciting the legisl. They actually got a really cool background and a cool story behind them, and that story talks a lot about social issues. What are those social issues? That's for another presentation, but it is definitely something that not any brawler has. Also, programmers, well, look, we don't, we can't afford to have different 15 martial art style so that, you know, we can have all this different variety. We can only afford one, you know, Jiu-Jitsu 'cause a friend of ours does it. So, everyone in camra does Jujitsu, but so that's a bit of a weakness, but what's

good about it is that we actually got 100 uh special attacks combos so you can actually just combo yourself in for like half an hour flat which is pretty cool uh. We also got some really good tight controls very reactive and you feel like okay you know this is this is nice and feels good and feels like I'm actually in smashing it myself. And also the really cool thing is the we've got over 1,000 ways to kill an enemy using legislation so you can do an uppercut and you can also quote the code of conduct paragraph 4. I don't know what you what's in there um. We've also got customizable characters uh not too much customization but you know if you want to have someone with a M Hawk and a suit something you can do. We also got a bit of puzzles to solve bit of hacking to do too and finally like I again set in an open world uh once again budget cuts constraints it's not the biggest open world that we have but it does have five

different regions, and it's actually set in a very unique place. You know, I'm assuming some of you might have gone to Camra, but how many of you have been to post-apocalyptic Camra? You know, and that's a bit of a nice standout feature there. You know, didn't see Tekken 8 show that in State of Play. Um, so you pop these out, you pop them in, and you think to yourself, Well, that's all cool and everything, but like, I can't even remember all those good things about my game. How do I expect a journalist or a player to just kind of remember all those things? Well, what you can do is you start looking at him, and you might start thinking to yourself, Crap, there's actually some them happening here, and you might realize that all those things that are in relation to the character and the story, well, they kind of form a nice little cluster here, um, and also with the combos and the killing of enemies with, you know, Magnar.

whatever you know that's nice little cluster happening there, and same with the open World. Um, he got a bit of a theme happening too. Now the customizable character might not fit in there, puzzles to solve, and Hack That might not fit in there too, but it's okay. We've got like a nice three clusters in here that we can Bunch together and come up with a nice hook or a ter for Forum. So what we can do is we can create our own three key pillars. So our first key pillar, it's a story of a fighter facing the political Elite. When someone says that, you might start thinking yourself, Oh crap, okay, what is this, you know, what's going on there? And that's when you can start telling them about all those things about the good parts about your game. Um, then you tell the journalist or you know the streamer in the email, you know, you to fight of facing political Elite where you get to express your political uh brutality, and someone might say, What the hell is that, you know?

Well, I'm glad you asked. You know you can kill someone with u with legislation. Um, and then finally, it is a world you play in, a world where democracy, uh, world of democracy after chaos. It's post-apocalyptic camera, you know, it's shit's crazy. Um, so you're going in there and you're trying to restore order. So those are like your three key talking points that you have, um, that you can relate your game a little bit better and more understandable. So just to give you some real-life examples, um, for Sherlock Holmes Chapter 1 when we did our key pillars, uh, the first one was and know hand-holding Global investigation. I don't know how many of you played the game but just in case if you haven't, um, the game, the designers created the game in such a way where they wanted people to solve the case themselves. Um, if you found a clue or if you spoke to a suspect and he got some information there will be no Quest markers, nothing in your notes saying, hey.

you just found a clue. Go there. Nothing at all um just to give you an example. If you were looking for a suspect, you go to their house. There's no one in the house except, you know, The Neighbor Next Door. You ask them, Oh, you know where's John? They might say, Well, he's not here, but he drinks a lot and he always hangs out around this bar in Chelsea. So you open the map and he go, All right, I need to go to Chelsea and find a b there. So that was like the, I guess, a game play to get your intuition going to make you feel a bit like a detective. So to kind of encompass all of those different gameplay mechanics, we used the no handholding Global investigation. The other good thing about chapter one or one of the strengths of it was that he told a story of Young Sherlock Holmes before he became the world's famous detective. So he told the story of a young 21-year-old Sherlock who pretty much he's young, he's arrogant, but he's

of lost and he doesn't know what to do. He's not a detective yet. He hasn't even met his friend, best friend John Watson. And he went to an island that he spent his childhood in trying to figure some stuff out 'cause there was some things in the back of his mind telling him, look, we got to come back and try to figure out what happened to us. Um, so you got all those things about Young Sherlock, you know, before being um, the detective, before meeting Watson. So one of our pillars was Young Sherlock before being the Great world-famous detective. And finally, uh, the open world, uh, of Cordona, the island, um, it was a place full of contrast. When it wasn't black or white, it was just different shades of gray. And it was also what we like to call a detective playground. Um, so you would kind of feel and hear about the law that's happening on the island, and that could actually influence your judgments in terms of, you know, who's right, who's wrong, what's law, and what order. Um, so

those are the things that we wanted to pass on when we did our marketing materials. Same with Dying Light, uh three key pillars for us was natural movement or the parkour system. So you know climb everywhere, go everywhere, do all this crazy [__]. Um, the other thing was creative brutality. So you got all these zombies, you know someone's got to kill them, uh, so what you can do is you can got over 100 weapons that you can use, and then you can get those weapons, you can mod them as well to give it more expression of creativity, and of course, it can chop individual limbs, head, etc., etc. It's all there in the creative brutality. And finally, we had a day and night cycle as well. Uh, day and night cycle, pretty cool, nothing fantastic unless you tell people that during the day you're like the alpha predator where you know you can take on zombies individually, and if something happens, you know you can probably get out of the situation, but during the night there's

this one big zombie called the volatile that comes out, and he's stronger than you. Uh, he is faster than you. Is he smarter than you? It's on you, but pretty much if you're looking at him like eye to eye, it's too late, you're screwed. Um, so that's what we wanted people to know about Dying Light. And sure, there were these different side pillars like, you know, open world, etc., which we still mention, but if we wake up a random person in the middle of the night who plays games and say, what do you know about Dying Light, like, we wanted them to know these things. Um, yes. So once you figure out your mark, your key pillars, make sure that your marketing assets show them off. If you can put at least three key pillars in your marketing assets, that's sick, that's awesome. Two is good too, one is the bare minimum. Um, so anything that you do like screenshots, gifts, interviews, vertical slices that you

take to Publishers or you know almost for steam Fest even key out if you can make sure they all contain at least one of your key pillars uh if they don't well you're kind of missing a bit of an opportunity to send a subconscious message about your game um like a little sedway like I sometimes go on Steam and I see these really fantastic games and I see a screenshot which is just like this nice Vista and a character just standing like that and like you look at it and even before you read anything about the the the description like reading is last thing you do you look at that screenshotting doesn't tell you anything you know it could be a point and click could be an adventure game could be a narrative game could be an RPG could be anything um but as soon as you get the character to you know maybe stand on the ledge and he's kind of doing these ones and he's grabbing a coin straight away you're thinking to yourself okay that's probably a platformer right there you

know and if you've got that same position with the same character and you give him some gun straight away, you know, the person looking at it goes, Oh [__], it's a platform with like guns happening here, you know, I'm going to be doing some shooting. And if you got the same screen and you put like three different characters that are similar to the main one but in different colors, all of a sudden player knows, Crap, there's going to be some car in here, so you're sending off all these different subconscious messages about your game in your materials. Now I wish I could put more screenshots from Dying Light but I can't because of PowerPoint restrictions, uh, but pretty much. And also in the context, you go on Steam or you go on platform, you start seeing different screenshots and they all tell a story, and each of these screenshots, their message was one parkour, uh, combat, day and night cycle, uh, co-op, you know, open world, and of course, zombies, so you could be looking at those screenshots and you

could pretty much register those messages without reading any further. So yes, uh, key pillars, love them to bits, uh, really help you out. 50% of the work is done. Now, next up, something I really like as well, and it's the Quantic Foundry gamer motivational profile. Um, now just a quick little thing, uh, I've got nothing to do with Quantic Foundry. I don't know those people, they probably don't know me, uh, but they are rep paid servers, uh, but they give a lot of information for free. So go on their website, there's a lot of good stuff in there. Uh, there's even more than I put in the presentation. It's a wealth of info. And what's so good about Quantic Foundry is this is what I know about them, and I could be wrong, but I believe it was set up by a bunch of dudes who want to try to find out why people play games. Uh, and they made the survey where it lists out all these questions about your reasons to play.

believe it or not, they come up with many different reasons of why people play games. Some people play games because they want to express themselves. Others might play games 'cause it's like a third space where they can hang out with their friends and be social. And there's all these different reasons of why people play games and it's really cool to go on that website and have a look, you know, why people play games 'cause all of a sudden you might look at your game and go, Crap, like that market there, that's they will be interested in my game. So that you already start finding out to whom you should be talking to. And also, what's really cool about it is to actually give you a bit of an idea of what to say to these people as well. Now I'm not going to go through all of it, uh, but pretty much these are like the six, what I like to call them, personas or if I want to sound fancy, like behavioral Target markets. And these are pretty much the reasons why people play games, um, now for

me recently, I've been working on a few story-driven, narrative-based games, and as soon as I looked at him, uh, and I looked at, you know, gamer motivational profiles, I was like, all right, well, it's definitely the immersion Market. There the ones that could be, you know, my Prime people to Target. And you can go a bit deeper, and it gives you even more info about this market. So, once again, I'm not going to go too deep into it, uh, because it's all on the website, but if you look at the story side of things, on people that play games for stories, um, gam is with high on story won games with elaborate story lines and cast of multi-dimensional characters with interesting Back stories and personalities. So, as soon as I read that, I was like, [ __ ] like what I got to do is to show these people that our game has multi-dimensional characters of interesting Back stories. We should do a trailer that actually concentrates on the characters. So, we'll have a trailer that talks about, you know, your main

character who you are and why you here and what you're doing um but also all the people that we meet along the way you know on the adventure you know it could be I don't know the the old dude in the store that likes machetes you know he's sounds like an interesting character and the old lady that makes pies you know she seems pretty cool too and like the dog you know like all those characters you put him in and you create like a nice little asset or a trailer or an update about it and when the people who could be interested in games in story driven games they look at your video and they go oh crap this game's got some really interesting characters in here like I'm solved you know or at least I'm adding it to my wish list your job as a marketer is kind of is well not done but you know you're doing the right things uh same with the creativity Persona uh seems there's a lot of people who play games because they want to express the individuality so kind of

like people with fashion, you know, they have their fashion sense because they want to tell the world a little bit about who they are. Same with people that play games for design. Like, I didn't know that. I kind of learned about this recently. Um, but like, if you're working on a game that's maybe a city builder, uh, like a Sim City competitor, and you know you've got this ability to maybe, you know, design your own parks. So you can create your own ledges with trees, etc. And you can give them like little nice individual color schemes. And you pop that into the city. And you know, all of a sudden, you got, you can choose different skyscrapers. They don't come on random. You can choose which one comes up. All these people that love designing games to express themselves, they'll be looking at that asset thinking to themselves, you know, that's an interesting game. That's what I'm after. Um, so going into these gamer motivational profiles is awesome because it gives you

these talking love points that you can come up from uh come up with, and then you can use them in your trailers, in your steam updates, screenshots, etc. etc. uh it's hearing what it is that you should be saying now. Just some final thoughts, uh pretty much the key pillars impact your Quantic Foundry, um so you know your strength of the game kind of determine who the game might be good for, but also might look at the Quantic Foundry and think to yourself, oh crap, you know, like these people love intricate designs, maybe we should kind of go back and see if we can implement those things, um so it's like a looping thing, I guess, uh you don't want to be stuck too much or too long in the loop 'cause you can stay there indefinitely, um so use caution. And the other thing too, like you could be creating a game which is a story-driven game and it's all about immersion, and that's your main target people, but you could be making a game where you can play with three friends.

where up to three people can hook up to the game, and all three of you vote on which way the story should evolve. So all of a sudden, it becomes a bit of a social thing. You know, maybe you can vote on which way the story should go. Maybe someone in the game is, you know, like a mole and is trying to screw everyone around, but you don't know who. All of a sudden, you're also creating a social experience, so you've got a second target market that you can go after and find out what the social life points are and put that in your assets too. And there's all these different markets that you can use as well. So not just these two. I also like recently, I think there's this market for people who don't have time to play games. And like I'm one of those people that before I commit to a game, I go on Game Pass. I'm like, Oh, okay, this looks interesting. I go to how long to beat an IC how long the game is, you know, and if it's more than

50 hours. I'm like, well, you know, there goes that idea. But if I see it's like 6 hours or 8 hours, all of a sudden I'm like, Nice, I can smash that in a weekend and feel on Monday that I actually finish the game, you know? And you got that little achievement in there, so that could be an interesting target market to pursue too. And obviously, got your standard target markets to go after as well, like geography, age groups, interest, etc., etc. Um, where was I? Yes. So once you find out a key strengths and you find out what your target market wants, pretty much you're about 64 to 67% done with your whole marketing plan and strategy, 'cause pretty much what you can do then is go, Right, I know what to say and to whom to say it. Now let's just create a timeline. And you might look at your game, you go, All right, well, here's my game. I reckon I've got enough material in here for like a 6 to n month marketing.

campaign and based on like when to start announcing this game based on this scope of how much work we have and which part of the year it is. We can start announcing. We can announce our game in March. So all of a sudden you got the wi part uh. And we can announce our game at maybe. I don't know. Future game show. So you got the web part uh. And then we'll send out a press. We do a trailer. And we'll do a press release later. You got the how part. And you start putting it all together like a nice puzzle um. And then by the end of it you might actually. You know have a plan. And you look at it and you think to yourself. Crap this is like actually pretty good. You know. And you can give it to other people to go through it as well. And hopefully they feel the same way. So yeah. So this was pretty much the end of my presentation like I. I really hope that what you heard here was of some use. And it was good. And if there's anything in here that didn't

make sense please. Like ask me questions and reach out to me. Uh, you can reach out to me via this microphone or even like out in the corridors. Uh, you can reach out to me on Twitter, email, and I also have a little YouTube channel where I like to create videos that share information about how to market your video games. So maybe there's something in there that could, I don't know, rock your boat too. So thank you so much. Uh, I hope you enjoyed this presentation and yeah, let's go out and market some. [Applause] Stuff. Now, apparently, if there's a question, you need to come up to this microphone right here 'cause it's being recorded. Cool. Thank you. Miow, it's super cool to see Poland being represented in Australia. Um, question for me. You mentioned marketing plan, which is something as an indie dev I have no clue about, and I'm slowly learning the impact of that. Uh, what would you recommend for indie dev launching game across consoles to like what would the plan be to actually approach marketing that?

either on social or otherwise. Oh, um, oh man, I think it's a very big question. Uh, we kind of have to sit down. Yeah, yes. Um, okay, well, maybe some tips, maybe that might help out. Um, so obviously, I don't have that much of a big budget. Uh, so that's one thing. So you kind of look at it, right? What is it I can afford? Uh, so you can probably afford, you know, social media organic stuff, etc., etc., which, you know, that's one side of things. But what you might actually have is a really cool game on you that press might be interested in covering. But to entice the press a little bit more 'cause they're getting like a ton of emails a day, like I've heard they're getting up to 60, 80, even more emails a day saying, Hey, check it out, my game. So to make it a bit more enticing for them, maybe you can say, Hey, I'm working on a game. It looks pretty good. I can give it to you as an exclusive.

I can give it to you as an exclusive on your show, or I can give it to you as an exclusive for 24 hours. And once you kind of come up with that proposition, all of a sudden those sites might go, Okay, that's actually pretty cool for them to get exclusive. Makes them feel, you know, a little bit more important and like, Okay, I've got something here that I can, you know, FL to my people. So that's something I would think about. When I worked on Dinkum influencers helped us out heaps, and what we did with influences, it wasn't just like shotgun approach like, Please, just take my key, whoever, like, I'll be happy. We actually ended up talking to a very specific group of people. So we looked at YouTubers that play a lot of stagi Valley, maybe Animal Crossing, and also we looked at the date too. Like, we looked at, you know, when's a good time to release the game. We picked July 14th for a few reasons, but also one

of the cool reasons was there wasn't that many games to be played around that time, so some of these YouTubers were kind of struggling to find content, and that's where dinking comes in. Um, so that's something that I reckon, you know, could be worth thinking about, um, and the rest I would have to find out more about your game. Yeah, it's all a little bit, you know, bespoke and individual, but at least I hope that helps out. Hi, um, thanks for the talk. I was going to ask when forming those key pillars, a lot of the examples you used was like mostly three pillars. Is that just because three is a clean number, or is there a, like, you know, in terms of deciding how many pillars you want to emphasize on, um, and how you group and categorize those pillars, any tips for that, you know, are there common categories maybe that you find a lot of pillars kind of fall into in terms of the grouping process? Well, I've always been taught and

I kind of like the number three. I think there's something about number three. There's even some sort of theory that number three is magical. You know, like it's easy to remember. Uh, I know even Steve Jobs, he was when he was designing the iPod, he was saying, I want everyone to be able to go to one. I think you got an answer for this. I was going to say, Three is the magic number. Was a song they used for the promotion of the iPod. There you go. Yeah, it was all about, you know, wherever you are in less than three moves, you'll be able to get to where you want to go. Uh, and I think it's easy for people to remember. So like having just one key pillar, I feel might be a little bit, you know, too low. Having, I don't know, 16 key pillars might be a little bit too nuts. Um, so I feel number three is a good number, which doesn't mean you can't mention other of things, obviously. Uh, you know, like you might have open world combat and story, but he can always say

but look, you know, we also have customization, but that's like a little added bonus, like a 25% of a key pillar. Hey, um, not really sure what I'm asking here, but that's okay. Um, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on like if your game is, uh, if your game focuses a lot on its story, and you have to try and pitch people on we're telling a really interesting story, please believe us. Like, do you have any thoughts on how to, how to get people interested when story is what you're trying to push? Mhm. Um, I think it's, it's a hard one, you know, 'cause like when you go to stories and narrative-based games, you're kind of touching into emotions, so it's not like features, you know, like I don't know if you're doing a shooter, like you got guns and you got more guns and they're like guns, you know, and it's like easy, you know, um, but when it comes to stories, it's you go into like the emotional side.

of things, and sometimes what like I'm working on this one game. Uh, we're also using the key pillars, but not so much feature-based, but also emotional key pillars. So like maybe what sort of emotions will you feel, or you want players to feel when they're in this game, you know, maybe you want people to feel lost, maybe you want people to feel, uh, a little bit on edge, maybe you want people to feel really, really happy when they go in, uh, so you start thinking about those sort of things like, you know, what emotions I want to say. And that's when I would maybe use those in my descriptions. So like here's CRA fighter, an emotional story where we want people to feel happy about politics, you know. And how do you do that? Well, I don't know, um, but, but you, that's, that's the sort of things I would maybe go for. So maybe like emotional key pillars might be a good way to go, right? Cool, thank, thank you. Nice, um, curious how you feel about referring to other existing games

your own promotional stuff, like saying we're making it's Call of Duty meets Animal Crossing or you know, is it like, are there any benefits to doing that, or is it usually a danger to try and compare yourself to it's a 50/50 one for me, and I'll tell you why. Uh, I had a chat with, I'm pretty, I was actually thinking about this when I, when I was practicing my talk. Uh, I'm pretty sure I was speaking with someone from 11bit Studios about this, and I kind of feel the same way too. If you can't define yourself and you have to compare yourself to others, you know, there's nothing memorable or special about you. In a way, it's like you're trying to show that, you know, I'm doing something of my own. However, saying all that, you know, like you've got your three key pillars, you're doing it yourself, you know, showing who you are, and then he can always say, and look, I'm heavily inspired by, you know, the city builders of the past, you know, where.

it was all 2D and pixelated. You know, you can mention those things later on, and that would give people an idea, but has a straight off-pitch of the players. Uh, look, here's Call of Duty meets, you know, Animal Crossing. I think defining your own way would be better. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Thanks. Wor, hey Michael, thanks for the talk. My name is good to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Um, I was just curious. Um, you're talking about targeting different personas, and I think where we're struggling to decide which way we want to market the game is, do we either go for a single piece of content, so like a trailer hero trailer that tries to encompass, you know, our pillars and also the people that we're trying to target, or are we better off creating smaller bits of bespoke content that target specific people? Um, obviously, we only have a certain amount of spend that we can create that content, so where is it best kind of spend? Good question. Um, this is just me, so I could be wrong here.

but what I kind of like doing especially when you do with an maybe an announcement trailer. Yeah, there's a couple of schooler thoughts in that um one you try to maybe Encompass all three key pillars so you know you try to get as money people as you can interested in the game, and then once they follow it you can then maybe tease individual individual pieces one by one so go that way. Um there's another school of thought that says look just just tease a little bit you can focus on one thing in the trailer, and then in your press release and in your notes Etc you can expand it and give more info. Um I don't know it it I guess it depends on on the game and also like how you want to plan it all out too. Um also sometimes in production you know I worked in one game uh Metroid Vania uh excellent Graphics nice story you know you have to have good combat but at the time of announcement the combat wasn't that polished so we're like look we

can't show ify combat just yet in our trailer. Let's just concentrate on the first two key pillars, and then we'll show the combat a little bit later on, once it looks nice, 'cause there's nothing worse when you're saying look, we've got sick combats and tight controls when you're looking at the screen, you're going nah, you don't really have it. So maybe that might answer your question too, yeah, okay, cool. Um, I had one other question, which was, do you see, say, you have a certain amount of money that you could spend on either marketing spend, so, you know, paying for like paid ads and promotions, versus spending the time to reach out to specific influencers or content creators. Mhm, where would you see that value, or where would you get the most value out of the money that you have going down those two routes? Like, is paid marketing spend as valuable as, or is it kind of, yeah, like from the experience that I have, I'm not a paid specialist.

you know, I always try to go, Alright, let's try to make the most out of it for free, I guess. Um, but I do know whenever we spend money, um, and we were trying, for example, to grow wish list numbers, uh, spending on Facebook seems to be a pretty good place to go. Like, I know Facebook is not the most interesting or, you know, sexiest place to be on, but it does create numbers. Uh, also, depending on the type of game that you have, uh, there are moments, you know, where you can try and pay for maybe certain influencers or maybe, um, certain events that you can go to, but they can get a little bit more expensive, depends on your budget. But for me, what I love to do is try to get free stuff first, and if I'm getting good success, like influencers, for example, where, you know, I don't have to spend a dime because they're really interested because they want the content, well, and that's awesome. But if I'm starting to see, Hold on, no one's really playing the

game what am I doing wrong? And if I keep getting the same answer, look, we'll do it for you, but only if you pay us. That's when I might start experimenting a little bit, you know, like okay, that. So yeah, when it comes to money, cautious and more on the let's try a little bit and see how it go, yeah, yeah. All right, cool, thank you very much, thank you, cool. Any other questions, maybe? Cool, awesome. Well, look, thanks so much, like, I really hope it was of some use, and yeah, good luck with your marketing as well. Thank you. [Applause]

Talk The Talk: How to Say the Right Things About Your Game

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premiere game development conference, a part of Melbourne International Games Week. Situated in Melbourne, Australia in the October-November period, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, networking and inclusive environment. 

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