Market Flow and Trends in Game Industry.

The past three decades, the world have seen great changes in the fields of art, science, culture and entertainment. The emergence of games industry as a method of modern entertainment was literally a gamechanger to the entertainment industry and there for the associated product marketing industry. I as someone working in the game industry who tries his best to learn and understand the marketing and sales of the creative products. I should admit that it is not an easy task to master over. The trends and market interest is an extremely interesting topic to learn and observe as its far from what most people could assume. I have made and published a platformer named "Dreamtopia" both on itch.io and steam. not so later

I got to watched a GDC talk regarding the market trends and the sales per genre, I was shocked and realized the mistake which I have made in choosing the genre. but after all the product want made for sales but for advertisement and marketing. From then on I always remind me of the fact that the market interest in game industry is more than meets the eye. In general people tend to assume an even distribution of interest across all the genres of games out in the industry, but the matter of fact is that during a specific duration of time a certain genre could draw more traction and searches, the factors affection this are broad and varied.

So as you could see the sales and thus the interest of the audience is varied across different genres. Speaking of the current market and popular trends existing during the writing of this blog, As per an article referenced from the website straits, Action games comes the first in the list and comparing that data with the graph show above its safe to assume that Action genre always secure the top spot in both the market sales and human heart.

Speaking of market trend and sales, One of my friends published a game on google play store. The game was named "Monster Splatter" and he shared with me the market sales and traction he was gaining from the product. after observing in for about 2 weeks we came to a few conclusion. One marketing is a key factor for game to go viral or at least seen. Monetization should be considered from an early stage of development and finally how important an online presence is to gain notice and there for downloads.

So now coming back to our studio one game "Intrepid Hancock" we were planning about the release and marketing right from the beginning of the game production, at least me and Anekith were.

Our game by gameplay design will come under Horror genre but due to the goofy but artistic style it can be considered more of an Adventure game. We are planning to publish the game first on itch.io and if we gain enough positive feedback we might might expand and publish the game on steam.

References:

Danley, K. (2020, April 11). Top 10 Most Popular Gaming Genres in 2020. Retrieved April 29, 2020, from https://straitsresearch.com/blog/top-10-most-popular-gaming-genres-in-2020

Game Dev Underground. (2017, March 9).Indie Game Marketing - 5 Things to Know Before You Start[Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EehTJ4N5SLU

GDC. (2018, April 18).Marketing on Zero Budget[Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3QnovWYvwo&feature=youtu.be

GDC. (2016, November 21).How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit[Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmwbYl6f11c&feature=youtu.be

Statista. (2019, July 3).Game Sales per Genre[Graph]. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/189592/breakdown-of-us-video-game-sales-2009-by-genre/