HentaiWriter
Future Fragments
- Joined
- Jun 19, 2015
- Messages
- 314
You still don't get it and you never will. If you make a porn game, you're going to fail there as well. Because you have yet to bother with coming up with something people want but can't get anywhere else. You have no passion and no new ideas to bring to the table, you just read some dude on a forum saying porn games are where teh bucks are at and decided to chase the next fad. Just like every single creatively bankrupt developer ever. Indie or otherwise.
Read HentaiWriter posts again. The guy isn't making money because he is "making porn games", he is making money because he knows exactly what his audience is looking for, but can't get anywhere else.
Another big thing from what I could tell in the OP that was a problem was lack of marketing. A lot of people shit on marketing as "shilling" or whatever other negative stuff, but that's not because marketing itself is inherently a bad thing, that's because people have misused marketing over the decades to drop it down to the scummy level that most people now perceive it as.
Marketing, if done correctly, not only gets your game more attention (as honestly, word of mouth is great but it only works once you've already got an audience), but it can also help you actually connect with your audience through PR and let you show them that yes, you actually give a shit about the people helping you make your game come true with their finances, and yes, you actually give a shit about this game you're making, instead of making it a quick cash grab.
A lot of people will market their game like this;
"5 wonderful, unique, completely action-packed levels full of thrills and challenges!"
The problem with this kind of marketing is that it's completely subjective. To me, maybe these levels aren't packed with thrills, and maybe to another person, they're unique, but not action-packed.
IMO, the best way to market is to be completely objective with your marketing; let the game itself prove that it's quality and fun and such, but when it comes to what the game's content is, lay it out on the table exactly as-is, period.
Here's what I have in the current public demo for Future Fragments, for example, and how I market it in the topic post;
- 4 enemies with 2 sex animations each
- 1 boss with a lengthy sex animation
- 3 long cutscene-based sex animations
- 5 game over CG scenes, with 2 variations each (first time around and second time around)
- 36 main maps across 6 paths
- 16 boss puzzle rooms
- 2,500 lines of dialogue, across 4 hours and 15 minutes of spoken audio, with 16 voice actors/actresses
- 25 songs (with about 10 of those being variations of the main track due to the dynamic audio)
- 30 total cutscenes with over 90 variations of the ways they can play out
- 30 databanks with over 50 variations in reactions
- 18 powerups and 3 charge shots, 2 utility abilities
Be honest too, be transparent, update often on all your blogs and let people know exactly what's going into what, why you're doing this or that change to gameplay, things like that. Blizzard's Overwatch has done pretty well with explaining the method behind their changes and frequent updates and such, for one example to look for in AAA games.
Feedback from players is invaluable too, because it lets you see the game in another way that you probably don't see it, because you've got "dev vision" and don't realize that that puzzle you did is mindnumbingly easy, or so complex and convoluted that you'd basically have to be, well, yourself to figure it out. Conversely though, don't let other people drive your game's direction; get feedback, take it, figure out if it improves your game to add it in or change things, but only do so if you're still "staying on your path/vision". Balancing that is a really hard thing to do, and a lot of games wreck themselves due to a low amount of implementing user feedback, or too much user feedback implemented.