We all know about investor-owned games with millions of funding and a massive marketing budget!
But how is it when you try new visitors as an indie?
In this article, I will point out some very important attributes in our marketing industry ; the gloves are off! but let's also enjoy the article with coffee ; croissants ; and a light-hearted mind too. :)
We are gaming enthusiasts, we are crypto enthusiasts,
and it's all about navigating current society:
and making our EXODE game succeed!
Let's dive in!
Some work was done first!
Preliminary steps before distribution:
(1) Have code to check what happens when any person comes,
(2) Have your game well or better explained,
(3) Make sure players can enter shop with fiat and other crypto even if it creates a HIVE account,
(4) And while doing distribution, keep some clarity of mind, some data science taste and ability to make A/B testing, check user paths and usage, costs, optimization of costs, and logical reasoning:
You have to identify:
if current strategy works ; how to improve it ; identify problems, reasons and solutions.
Pre-distribution steps were completed for EXODE in June and July.
we set up our own code, a non-cookie way to check our user activity (in addition to our visitor system for EXODE captains, the "warp point" system), and cross-checked our results with another non-cookie platform.
We don't share your data or sell it: and we despise companies who do!
To complete our strategy, we delivered in July our new explanatory video.
Objectives
- renew the community with fresh members,
- make EXODE gain quality users,
- fund development on more shoulders,
- make your packs and cards easily sold,
- your game activities shared!
- and make everything fun to do as a larger group of people.
Distribution!
There are several ways to distribute a game:
You can have a distributor putting your game on "the top of his shelf" ; or hidden as a database line which savant people can still search!
You can have expert influencers with niche but quality communities speaking honestly about your game ; or people who did not even touch it, with weak engagement channels, who gathered communities who barely can read your text, trying to just gain sponsor money!
You can try marketing packages on specialized websites ; and pay a lot of upfront money!
You can try generic ads marketing ; and pay a lot per click and receive AI scraping bots!
You can try targeted ads marketing, targeting specific communities and methods.
You can try "promote" options on some articles.
... and so many other ways!
I know I revealed some of the flaws too!
This is because there is an entire industry made about "eating up your marketing money".
And this industry has grown fat because of our marketing-led companies, driven on overload, receiving funds to flood the internet and to try to get their top ephemeral audience position, like cocaine to their flawed business model.
AAA and AA Games:
It is no secret that for any game budget, there could be a lot additional money (such as +50%).
Movies:
... and for the movie industry, having it up to +100% is not unheard of, even for the ones where they sunk hundreds of millions already on actors, hundreds of technicians and contractors for months and months of work.
Why it works:
The objective is that once you have grown "big enough" by spending enough to get into the mind of everyone, you can benefit from herd mentality and social acceptance of people "trying the same things other people are doing", and leverage other distribution abilities, such as having influencers speaking about your game to gain audience, because you created the population they will use.
Startups:
Many startup companies also often run on flawed models but gain audience to leverage more funds from investors, to leverage more audience, to leverage more investors. The entire concept is actually to capture more audience and "more bling" to get stronger investors next: the startup product is thought as a vehicle for that gain. The startup "works for investors" in more ways than we think!
Web3:
And we know about these WEB3 games: the free or almost free play to earn ones, or at least in the beginning, where the game is free, and you gain some currency for free, and then you know it must be flawed but you send more of your wallet into it to accelerate the gain.
These setups literally run on marketing money to sustain their model.
The more they can spend, the more leverage they get on separate positive effects too.
Their reality is the audience and the ephemeral existence of "something in your mind at the moment", and they want us to accept that this "is" the only reality.
The problem is that the spending they do drives growing marketing costs (on clicks, impressions and click-through rate).
Usual cost of a visitor runs at 1$ to 2$ on average; and on specialized packages such as dappradar, announced costs for some display positions can go up to 7$ per click once you do the math.
Ouch, right?
The Experiment
I started the experiment as soon as July instead of waiting for August.
Our programs were ready a bit earlier than planned.
We tried several hundreds visits from targeted communities.
We could observe how different source of visits reacted differently, we could reword our advertisements, reposition some contents and see them clicked more. We could navigate how platforms are anti-blockchain (even for ads) and improvise how to still deliver our content.
According to the third party analytics website, we managed to have close to 0% bounce rate, which means that all visitors clicked on the "Enter the world" button. I was surprised, to be honest, but we have 33% bounce rate before so that was progress.
50% of our visitors then explored at least one content such as FAQ or signup information,
and some number tried the demo.
Only a few tried the shop.
Our best visitors (the most engaged) came from the WEB2 EVE Online community!
They were more engaged than visitors from WEB3 communities.
This was not a surprise to us: we think EXODE immersive approach and musical atmosphere is very welcoming for players who went through the same games we like.
Analysis
EXODE has known several website versions, several dashboards, several colonization models. We still lack on the game loop.
But we ended up having some versions we are now happy with and we are eager to go forward now!
We know we are here for the long run.
EXODE is here to last.
This is the way you'll get a positive feedback for your budget.
But I am not here to be "all bling": when there is an obstacle, I do not turn a blind eye to it.
We need to achieve distribution capacity as a way to sustain development. This means identifying the distribution cost, the return on investment, and be at a positive. Before going to other distributors or spending larger money, we must first make sure our conversion rate is good.
We identified a huge obstacle to our distribution:
and it's not because of our game loop, because visitors did not reach that step.
And it's not because our content is not explained.
Any work on game loop or game content is not the thing the new visitors need at the moment (even if our current players do deserve our work on this, of course!).
Visitors did not get this far certainly because they expect something different of us.
I gave thought during the summer about how to address it.
For Web3 players
WEB3 has been influenced by many free-to-play & play-to-earn models.
Players have been stripped of their funds numerous times in failing currencies and seeing developers invoke the regular "ooh it's the bad market, not our fault!" argument. (which is a flawed argument, by the way)
There are also very good-looking game apps. (it's great! but EXODE has to keep up! ;) )
And despite having been owned, players still WANT free-to-play, play-to-earn models.
I have been there in 2023 at Web3 Berlin conference speaking about how marketing-owned game companies were creating a toxic environment on web3 where they loved to launch a 6-month lasting game before its economy literally crashes.
Web3 can support games: blockchain is a database that lasts, blockchain assets can be tied to developers and models that do last. There is nothing wrong with blockchain as a database to log transactions publicly. This allows games to last, with a creation spirit, and a universe that can last for decades. It can also free developers of the need to be owned by marketing and cede company to investors, because they can have these funds from player-investors who are on the safe side thanks to blockchain.
There are few developers like that (but fortunately more of them on HIVE).
Players are unused to this culture, they were flooded with P2E arguments instead.
Players are wary of pay-to-play even if it is for 10 USD, which they need to relate to earning.
They could get there if there was some influencer to raise their trust about it, but influencers on crypto are few and often seem shadow-banned by google algorithms.
... players can still "try it"... if it is free-to-play!
and in that case, as your players will be unfiltered, they will look next to the P2E economy.
For Web2 players
Web2 is influenced by publishers (and their associated press) who understood web3 game economy was often run by bandits with no editorial culture ; but also giving more benefits to the players and not to them.
For web2 publishers, they don't need a player economy: who needs an economy where you can sell your legendary card for x10 of money of player-to-player economy, instead of paying the publisher for the next "newly released shining legendary".
And publisher love to close their game if it fails, they want to launch the next games to sell.
They have a policy of releasing games yearly, and releases lasting six months, games running on limited content.
So WEB2 has developed a culture extremely wary of web3.
Back to a problem at hand:
Even if we discard any issue with web3, Pay-to-play is not expected in a browser environment.
Instead it's expected in a place where you can check numerous positive player reviews, such as a Steam page. We are not there yet, so web2 players have no honest way to get an environment when they can be comfortable to pay-to-play.
Conclusion
Why games are free to play with paying visits:
Paying visits is only bad if the visitor does not do anything.
One of the reasons companies can pay up to 7$ a visit in web3, or up to 1$ in web2, is because they do that when proposing their free-to-play models; as a result they have a very good "visitor to created account" conversion.
And once they have you with an account, they have an entire setup meant to propose a good game loop, but one which is progressively more and more predatory on your wallet.
Current culture is driven by huge marketing companies that made visitor clicks very expensive but to send players into dopamine-heavy games with free accounts and huge rewards. Human brains are not resistant to this. This is how they make it work.
We will always have visitors coming with this culture in their mind.
This is the world we live in.
So we need to propose at least "some" of the game they expect us to be!
Our decisions
To distribute with an important success EXODE needs to make some changes.
(1) Propose a free-to-play version.
It is the only way you can have results from very expensive visitors.
We can have a pay-to-play once we feel ready for a steam page and have very positive reviews, but this will come later.
(2) Be more graphic.
We'll need to work on getting back our very "graphical colonization landscape".
This was always planned but needs a +10 in priority.
The graphical colonization takes time and initially we felt it was the wrong way to scale on numerous ideas, but we are more mature now.
(3) Test a F2P economy.
Running a F2P economy on web3, with huge rewards at every step?
We need to be cautious about this!
Developing a honey-trap is easy!
But having a viable economy is something games failed.
It's all good to work on our ego and think "we can tackle this" but I will consider the risk huge and prefer to be more strategic about this.
F2P in three steps
Please note that there will be numerous advantages to having your paid starter, and numerous ways to make players interested later in taking it from you.
About F2P:
So far EXODE worked without having to put any risk to its economy:
so we want to play safe.
We did not create EXODE to turn it into an ephemeral trap.
- Step One -
We will test our visitors on a F2P compatible system, to verify our hypothesis.
So we will work for 3+ weeks in September on testing a F2P/P2E economy compatible for web2/web3 and developing our F2P acumen.
We have worked only 3 days on it so far, after some time of maturing the idea during August.
We are making good progress. We still want to be on time for several EXODE releases (and still have to catch up with some of our summer items).
This will be on another theme and setup to avoid cannibalizing a future F2P EXODE: something very quickly made (you noticed EXODE is not that quick to develop because of its large content), autonomous & very attractive with PVP autocombat, which is quicker to do.
We want to test a model that works for web2 and web3, making web3 "living & accompanying" web2 without players having to notice it. We will use that knowledge next.
- Step Two -
We will open a channel on our discord to recruit testers.
There will be some advantages for EXODE players.
And of course you will be able to try it for free!
We will test our existing distribution method on it.
If successful, this will fund next developments for EXODE too: we need that.
- Step Three -
If this works, we will develop our own F2P system for EXODE with this experience in mind.
Our next-EXODE needs more dopamine: once you are F2P, you need to take care of an unengaged audience, one very quick to leave your game. This means a dopamine evacuation.
Colonization will have to get back to our graphical landscape colonization (our new dashboard is hardly dopamined), which will use our Next Day screens when completing missions but with the addition of a nice region map.
We will nest our dashboard into it:
this way you can open screens and lists with that aspect, and we do not lose time.
In all case: you should expect end October to see a first release of EXODE free-to-play attempt. Which will include whatever is ready at that time (will be at least the graphical colonization!).
Other developments for EXODE will continue meanwhile.
We will do weekly updates on EXODE.
There are a number of items on our backlog on utility, content and gameplay.
Sometimes, we have to address obstacles!
And it is one of these times.
It is always important to take your own data and results seriously.
Being able to self-distribute our game is very important to us.
This will keep us very busy in September!
We'll have some results at the end of this month.
EXODE is a science fiction game in development and currently played on HIVE.
It can be played with just 10 USD by taking any of the beta starters!
This gives access to all of current gameplay.Or, while supplies last, you can engage in other packs to get rarer factions.
Feel free to try it here, or to join our Discord if you have any question!
