Perceptio - Officialy Released, Now what ?

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Finally after many years of trouble Percetio is officially out on Oculus.

If anyone has experience requesting reviews or contacts you know in the VR space please let me know, I have no experience in this area.

Many Thanks

Comments

  • Congrats on releasing something!

    A minor point of feedback, I keep reading it as "perceptiq". The notch makes it look like a Q and that might hamper communication/search.

    As for marketing, it's one of the most difficult things in game dev. Have you tried searching? Have you reached out to anyone? Have you searched? One of the biggest lessons that I've learned from the community is that marketing should start WAY before a game's release, since it's difficult to generate news-worthiness post the release event.

    VR is an even smaller niche in the niche of games, on the plus side, you're not competing against other noise. On the down side, not as many people would pay attention.
    Thanked by 2sumisukyo critic
  • Congrats indeed.

    What @Tuism says is true. I also made a game, dropped it on Steam store and then started marketing, and I do feel like it was too late. I tried getting reviewers in any way I could, but the simple fact is most people who would do reviews and play the game on the channel, mostly wants to play games that have good reviews or was highly hyped and will gt them lots of views. So busting out something out of nowhere is very difficult.

    I'm not familiar with the Oculus store as I have my game on steam, but running promotions is probably your best bet. I tried curator on Steam but the only people that took the keys, didn't even play the game and kinda just copied the description from the store page as their review. I don't know if Oculus store has a similar function.

    Anyway, I kinda just try to spread word of my game by telling as many people as I can about it. Also I think I learned a valuable lesson that marketing needs to start much earlier. Like when you are running testing already. Then again maybe I just don't have a very appealing game. But never give up. The fact that you got something done and on a distribution platform is a great achievement. Just keep telling people about it and maybe you get lucky and someone with influence helps you out. Good luck.
    Thanked by 3sumisukyo critic konman
  • Thanks for the help @MajorPain and @Tusim.

    I think the best thing is to learn this lesson and move onto the next project.
    Thanked by 2critic MajorPAIN
  • Hey man. It's good you take this as a lesson learned, however I still am a firm believer that no game that gets finished is a failure. I still believe that my game, although it hardly sold any copies, managed to land me a really good job (which isn't even in the gaming industry). But going all the way with a project shows a lot. It's something to be really proud of. But yeah. Take that lesson and hopefully next time your game will be successful in a financial aspect. I'm hoping my next one will be.
    Thanked by 1ashashza
  • edited
    For the most part, developers are not marketers. We might be really good at making video games, but knowing how to win friends and influence people and formulate marketing strategy -- that's quite a different skill. However, one way to think about it is to think about your game development as the marketing itself. What can you create that would look really good in a gif? What would make for an entertaining tweet or Instagram loop? If you cannot show how your game would be interesting in a screenshot, a short animated gif, or an elevator pitch, getting anyone to talk about it is an immensely uphill battle. If you're making something with commercial success being an aim, that's vitally important. (And even if you're not, it might still be a worthy thing to do. Unless you're making something purely for yourself, then the point of making any creative thing is for other people to play it!)

    "Marketing" is sort of a multiplier over what you're already making. If your game's isn't very interesting (or isn't good at showing people very quickly why it's interesting), telling every streamer and YouTuber in the world isn't going to help, because they're (for the most part) trying to create material for games that they think will earn them subscribers. You have to make them something that they think their readership would be interested in. And usually, you've got to go from the start with some kind of hook: are you an incredibly skilled artist? Are you a great storyteller? Are you in possession of some kind of technical wizardry that few other people have? Are you trying something that nobody else has thought to try? If there isn't something in particular, then is there something that you'd like it to be, in which case it's a skill you can practise until you've got enough excellence in it to stand out amongst the countless games coming out every day?

    It could be useful to look at some game-dev related tweets that are very popular, or Let's Play videos that have taken off, and figure out what part of the game had influence on the virality -- particularly games that are relevant to what you're likely to make (i.e. not AAA), and think about what you could make to hit the same hook. You don't have to make the actual game either: you could just focus on making just enough to make the gif (even if it's pre-rendered), and post it around, see how much engagement it gets, just to see if it's marketing-wise it's worth the effort of pressing forward with making the actual game around it.

    We could share contacts and lists, or talk about the right days or the right times to post things, or strategy around release dates or publishers or dev streams or whatever, but without the above in place their usefulness imo is negligible.

    The point, I guess, is that making an easily-marketable game is quite difficult, but if you get that right the rest is so much easier. It's the shift from saying "nobody talked about it, so I need better marketing" into "nobody talked about it, so I'll give them something they'll want to talk about." I think that's pretty useful to think about given that you're probably moving on to some new projects.
  • Found this really interesting and direct talk about marketing with very little time and budget:
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