”Our only strategy was to get the game featured. There was no Plan B. It was ‘if this game doesn’t get featured, we have 0 money to market this; no-one will ever hear of it.’” - Barry Meade

That’s one of the co-founders of Fireproof Games, talking about The Room for GamesIndustry.biz. Earlier in that same talk Barry discusses how they created three prototypes in three months and picked the best to progress. So, a lot of focus on making a great game and almost none on marketing. It’s since sold millions and was Apple’s (and my) iPad Game of the Year.

The CEO of GungHo (maker of Puzzles and Dragons) was interviewed recently on PocketGamer.biz about the secrets behind their phenomenal success (their market cap now exceeds the actual Nintendo!).

“Any game we make, we expect it to be good, of the highest standard,” [Kazuki] Morishita says.

“We were very confident that Puzzle & Dragons was a good game, but the success was mind-blowing.

“It had a lot to do with luck,” he adds.
…
“It was intuition and luck,”

Rovio had famously made 51 titles before Angry Birds (source), and similarly OMGPop made over 35 games before Draw Something and their subsequent acquisition (source).

Lots of food for thought from the how-do-you-make-a-mega-hit point of view, which shares a lot with the let’s-make-a-viral school of missing the point. You can’t bottle lightning. All you can do is give lightning the best possible chance to strike, whatever kind of content you’re making.

And, yes it’s quite distorting to focus on these outliers, but I have much more admiration for craftspeople who start with a focus on quality than those who start from a cynical need to be popular, to be ‘viral’.

It’s the difference between building a skyscraper topped with a lightning rod, and running round on iron stilts in a thunderstorm waving an umbrella.

With the former, if you’re not struck by lightning you’ve still got a beautiful building. With the latter, whatever happens you look a right ninny and you’re probably going to get electrocuted.

Photo by Mike Behnken

Using gaming apps as examples, I’ve written a companion blog to this for a brand/agency audience.

These novelty apps fail because they’re treated like an advert, where the initial spike is all that matters. But no one wants an advert on his or her phone. We download useful apps, fun apps, apps our friends are talking about; and the few brands that understand this, that create not branded apps, but great apps, are getting phenomenal results.

Read in full at The Marketer: How to make a great branded game

On behalf of Best of British, I’ve written a piece for Pocket Gamer about my experience at Somethin’ Else making branded games.

Historically, a ‘branded game’ had some pretty grim connotations.

It was work-for-hire of the most embarrassing type – game mechanics glued to product placement and churned out as cheaply as possible (it’s Pac-Man with cereal. Or is it Fridge Tetris? No, it’s Frogger Road Safety!).

More recently there was the gamification boom, which had brands haemorrhaging money until they realised it was 99 percent snake-oil, 1 percent quite-difficult-actually.

Now, rather than sticking some badges on a thing and calling it a day, brands are commissioning increasing numbers of proper, full, credible games – games that aren’t plastered with product placement.

Read the full article at PocketGamer.biz: How brand power can turn your work-for-hire into something to be proud of