Research Paper : Market Research and Business Plan.

"Making a great game is one thing, Making a game sell is another". Most people go about making a game solely on the believe that a game that looks good and has novel game mechanics can attract audience and ultimately result in gaining financial wealth and there for can be deemed successful. But the fact is that the reality is far from it. Without marketing and publicity the chance of the game being a success is so minuscule that if it happens it can be counted being a miracle. I a writing this paper as a research paper which speaks about the strategies we our team at Knotgames have taken to accomplish our desired marketing outcome and thus sales. For a team like ours, for someone whos marketing budget is nearly none existent. there are a few ways men like us can pull it off. Genre of Choice : As you might know, if not here we go. Project PLGB is a roguelike shooter game. there are a couple of reasons behind our decisions. First of all if we look into the popularity of games based of the general theme and playstyle. What we can observe is that people are very much into genres which are cathartic in nature. by which I mean games with themes and mechanics that act as feed for the dark side of once subconscious mind. Which satisfies the minds cause and effect balance, which is a very crucial player in the assessment of once existence and meaning of life as people naturally thinks like works like math and every equations are balanced in some way. when something bad happened in a persons life the subconscious seeks for to witness a act with a similar or even stronger negativity and registers it as the outcome of the negativity the observer faced in their lives, thus closing the case and quenching the flame. after all game are all about escapism. The second and the most important thing to talk about here is that why did we choose to make it a Rogue-like shooter. Putting it simple and short, players these days want games with longer playtime and thats one main reason its getting getting harder and harder for developers to make a successful title as longer playtime means longer development time which also means larger budget, luckily there is a solution to this problem. as we all can agree unlike many other forms of entertainment media like film and music. games are emergent in nature. which means. mechanics are all that exists and while game play new and interesting scenarios emerges. which has the potential to make each and every run feel unique and memorable even though the its the same setting.(Silvester, 2015) There is nothing like rogue-likes that proves the above mentioned over and over again. If we analyze many popular hits and the recent releases by the indie companies. we can we that most of them tend to release roguelikes which are multiplayer and has random generated map. Our team was inspired by a game called "Gun Fire Reborn" which was developed by a game dev company based in Hong Kong called Duoyi Interactive Entertainment. which is an indie company thats kind of new to the market. but through the release of this game they were able to make more than a 1M in sales and there fore profit made can be imaginned.

Self Advertising : these days there is nothing to beat the popularity and wide spread use online social media platforms like facebook, instagram, youtube etc. And above all almost all of these are free to get in and start an account. Once I putting out content for public notice and advertising is all a matter of time and good old elbow grease. studies have shown that "US population aged around 35 to 44-year spend about 2 hours and 4 minutes of social media. While in people with the age group of 16-24 spend about 3 hours and 1 minute"(Metev, 2021). So based on the data there is nothing as good as putting interesting and thought provoking posts associated with your game.

Collaborative Advertising : Getting a large number of people to have a look at your product trailer or the product in general is a bit of a hard task especially when you are starting out in the industry and and haven't known as a name yet. One way to get the right audience to watch and engage with your development process is to find the right people with enough audience and followers to collaborate with you. From my experience Youtubers and streamers with an extremely large following are less likely to promote your game unless you pay them. but most of medium scale gaming youtubers will be more than happy to promote your game as it shares a common interest.

Blogging : Making blog posts about niche topics industry is a very good way to direct traffic to your website and therefore your new project/product. Talking about the your game and your team combining it with the main stream news will draw

a lots of traffic for example making a blog with the title "Knotgames got Covid-19 !; What we did will SHOCK you". and in the article you can talk all about your game and the development process while to be fair to the title talk about the bait here and there. Also the main advantage of this is that the freedom and choice is all yours. You can decide what to correlate with and what are the contents that should be put for display. Kickstarter/Crowd funding : One of the ways you could make money for the purpose of initial funding for the game, to develop things such as art, assets, music etc. Is to go Kickstarter. what it actually is that its a website were you could demo and detail your project/game and place a target amount. and people can support/back you by paying you a sum of money and once/if it reach the target or goes over it you can close and get that money and use it for the development. I might be tempting but there are some pre requisites that need to be meet before going for a Crowdfunding or Kickstarter. The main one out of all is that you need to acquire a fair number of followers before asking for funding as the rule of thumb goes such that if you have enough social media following its a initial sign that people will also like and might have a high likely chance of supporting you financially. So before going kick starter you need to earn enough social media following on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc, also try to form a community around the project making Discord Servers and forums were people can discuss with the development team or the PR personal. To have a look at Our Business Plan. Here is the link to the business plan I and my team have came up with while we were doing the preproduction. I learn a lot since then and trying our best to select strategies that fits our production.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tPmcuGuzofn3OK16EtAUtTGhZR0oSiEj0xSfkrrecVE/edit?usp=sharing

References

GDC.(2018, August, 23).Know Your Market: Making Indie Games That Sell.[Video].Youtube.https://youtu.be/uy0Dfr-mnUY

Kühn S, Kugler DT, Schmalen K, et al. (2021, January, 11). Violent Video Games and Aggression: Stimulation or Catharsis or Both?. liebertpub. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cyber.2020.0033 Metev, S. (2021, February, 18). How Much Time Do People Spend on Social Media? [63+ Facts to Like, Share and Comment]. review42. https://review42.com/resources/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-social-media/#:~:text=US%20adults%20use%20media%20for,and%209%20minutes%20per%20day.&text=South%20America%20is%20the%20continent,hours%20and%206%20minutes%20daily.

Rampton, J. (2019, February, 1). No Money? No Problem. 30 Low Budget Marketing Ideas for Your Business. entrepreneur. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/327097

Silvester, T. (2015). Designing games : a guide to engineering experiences. O'Reilly Media