Welcome Gamers and Players,

today I’ll end the brief overview upon Game on Demand methodology. I hope you could get useful suggestion  to figure out how to build your own games, meeting with business requirements.

After playtesting time, and the finishing touches, you think it’s the end, right?
Wrong. Very wrong. True challenge starts now.

• Now you have to enter in the Promotion step: your game have to be promoted, and this is typically Marketing, but is quite sure you have also to promote the game, in first person, or to support Marketing. I’m not a communication and marketing expert, so I can only give some common advice on how, with your game-design skills, you can help in order to a successful marketing campaign.
• Obviously, your marketing campaign will be very different if you have developed a “marketing game” (to increase brand awareness and customer engagement), a “serious game” or “training game” (used in education or human resources) or something else, that possibly you have created by yourself.
• First of all, share the goals of game-design process with marketing sector. You have to help them to understand why the game is designed that way, what target you are aiming and so on. More information you give, more easily they can build an accurate and effective campaign. This should also include the key-point of “fun” and similar (to be sure that an adrenaline and competitive games is promoted this way).
• Get support from the higher level possible. In HR improvement games, for example, you can rely on support from Executive level. In a games designed to crowdsource the testing of products, talk with Coo or equivalent and so on. They have the vision to implement the project at best into corporate process.
• Use a lot of analytics to monitor the first step of the campaign and the plays of your game. You are not too late to fix some minor issue (some math and coding problems, or some balancing the system) or even slightly change focus of the game.
• Be creative and, in necessary, “unfair“. I mean that you have to force yourself outside your usual boundaries. As example, in my project “Socket Puncher” is something I usually despise: money award. In my opinion, first of all a game is funny, and it’s played because it’s funny. However, in that case, a money reward can be a perfect way to increase participation and have good and fast result, so I use it also if I don’t like.
  So, be creative in promoting your game and creating your awards. You know your game, your potential player and your business target: there is no one better than you to think upon what award or strategy may increase result.

Finally, remember that not all project may work. Most of the best and most brilliant ideas in history was a complete failure in their first try. If you have carefully and objectively developed your game and it’s a failure, it may not be your fault. In those cases, try to figure out what’s wrong and, if possible, fix it. If the causes are too far away from you and you can’t fix them (for example, it’s too early for your idea, or a technology has not spread enough, or you miss the focus) list them out and keep your project in a locker until it can reborn under different skies.