So in the end, we had the Star Trek, Civilization, and modding communities all involved in the creation and aggregation of the game. It is the sort of incubator that, with a big enough boost, can create spin off games like DOTA.

直接营销

You Can Do This

Social Media isn’t entirely responsible for the success. Positech and Steam Workshop played a big part by making the download and installation of the mod as simple as possible. This broke down many of those hesitation barriers people get when trying something new.

The reality is that your marketing data is going to change some of the things in the game. You wouldn’t want to invest a bunch of time into a feature no one really cares about and you’ll want to make sure the things people like and use often are in good working order. You’ll want to know your audience and consider their desires. But overall, I think most developers and fans agree that marketing is there to support the product, not to design it.

The cringing fear is idea of the marketing taking over the development of the game through A/B testing as we have seen in some games that have come out.

Democracy 3(from pujia8)

现实是，你的市场营销数据将改变游戏中的一些内容。你肯定不想投入大量时间去创造一个没人会关心的功能，所以你需要确保人们喜欢什么以及习惯什么。你需要了解你的用户并考虑他们的需求。总之，我认为大多数开发者和用户都同意市场营销的存在是去支持产品而不是去设计产品。

下一篇:将游戏移植到主机平台上的过程

我尝试着将Steam上的《文明4》的用户带到《Star Trek Mod II》，但因为游戏中缺少Steam Workshop，所以玩家对它的接受度还不是很高。

是的，虽然市场营销可能很吓人且非常花钱，但在你开始花钱购买广告空间前还可以做许多事。而我所提到的只是皮毛。但还是希望这些内容能够帮到你们，让你不再讨厌市场营销。

你可以这么做

Direct Marketing

我们最成功的产品之一是《Star Trek Mod II: The Wrath 》，大概获得了2万的下载了（游戏邦注：包括所有版本）。这是一款拥有粉丝基础的游戏，最初是基于Jon Shafer的《Final Frontier》模组进行创造，并最终由Deanej创造出了《Star Trek Mod》。《Star Trek Mod II》是《Star Trek Mod》使用了《Final Frontier Plus》模组所创造出的扩展版本。

Marketing Can Be Scary

我想说的第二个事实是，原创IP更难推广。现在的人们都达到了高娱乐饱和度并对全新授权内容感到厌倦，他们害怕自己会再次喜欢上游戏并在上面浪费时间。这是一个非常艰苦的市场！

Soon it seems like social media is taking up all your time and you can’t even work on your other marketing stuff. Before you know it, you need a person just to manage social media. If they’re real good at their job, they’ll wrangle in a good five to twenty volunteers to work with. That’s a valuable person who should be getting properly compensated along with everyone else. Your artists are probably on double duty now making art for the game and your promotional materials. It all quickly becomes expensive and time consuming for a small team with other tasks, be those as part of development or external commitments.

The only things you should really avoid is spamming or being off-topic. Don’t start talking about your dwarf gold mining game in a Star Trek forum unless everyone else already was. This is just basic etiquette. While there are some great social media mass posting tools out there, they have no etiquette and so even with their help, you have to do a lot of personalized writing and making friends.

在这里你唯一需要避开的便是发送垃圾邮件或离题。就像不要在《星际迷航》论坛上讨论你的小矮人挖金矿游戏，除非其他人也在这么做。这是最起码的礼仪。尽管你可以找到许多不错的社交媒体发布工具，但是它们通常都很“死”，所以即使选择使用这些工具你也要进行一些个性化的修饰。

I spent six hours on it and got a boost of about 1000 subscribers and 2000 unique views in the first few days. Black Operations ranked in the top most popular daily and weekly mods for about a month from that one day of work. That’s about a 150 user per hour conversion rate. Not bad. The real achievement though is that now when people google that question it doesn’t take them long to find our Mod.

很快地你会发现社交媒体几乎占据了你的全部生活，你甚至不能致力于其它市场营销工作了。所以在你遇到这种情况前需要找个人去管理社交媒体。这是一个非常重要的角色，他必须与其他人进行有效的融合。在这种情况下你的美术师可能需要承担双份工作，即既要致力于游戏美术的创造也要致力于推广素材的制作。对于一支小型团队来说，这很快将变成一种高成本且耗时间的工作。

市场营销可能很吓人

Our Star Trek Mod was sucessful, but image how much more sucessful it could have been with an official licence and proper marketing budget. Another thing to consider, working in a familiar story can save time in world building to get both the developer and the player right into the game. Obviously plenty of indie games have broken out with original IPs, but keep in mind, soild marketing had a big part to do with those successes.