My game looks decent enough in screenshots due to a minimalist style. However, even before the players see them, they'll see the capsule image when they first come across the game in the “more like this” section. And that image sucks. I'm just using a modified screenshot of a grid background from in-game with a logo on top. I'm worried that the players will just see the boring capsule image while browsing and just move on.
Steam analytics tells me I have a lot of impressions Vs clicks. If this type of thing truly is an issue, is it worth paying an artist to make a custom banner art for the game? Has it been worthwhile in your experience?
You can safely assume that by not having an appealing image, you're dissuading people from clicking on your game. The mistake that I made on some of my games was thinking that having a good, fun to play game was enough by itself to get sales. I was wrong. We're up against people who may have created a worse game, but have put more polish on it and they will be the ones who get the eye balls, not the one who creates a nice game, but which is visually unappealing.
The anecdote that i was told was ‘if you spend X on creating the game, expect to spend the same amount of time / energy promoting the game’. By ignoring presentation, you're hamstringing yourself.
Or to put another way - you think the image sucks. Why would any player give you the benefit of the doubt when there are less sucking looking options immediately to its right and left?
If you think it sucks, then you should definitely change it. But spend some time thinking about the problem and making a plan before you rush out to hire an artist. It's incredibly frustrating for an artist to deal with clients who don't know what they want.
You can safely assume that by not having an appealing image, you're dissuading people from clicking on your game. The mistake that I made on some of my games was thinking that having a good, fun to play game was enough by itself to get sales. I was wrong. We're up against people who may have created a worse game, but have put more polish on it and they will be the ones who get the eye balls, not the one who creates a nice game, but which is visually unappealing.
Steve
I definitely agree. But I think I should look at some numbers before deciding. I haven't found any definite examples of developers gaining more clickthrough rate after spending on a pretty capsule image.
a light breeze said:
If you think it sucks, then you should definitely change it. But spend some time thinking about the problem and making a plan before you rush out to hire an artist. It's incredibly frustrating for an artist to deal with clients who don't know what they want.
I do have a rough sketch of what I want it to look like. But I'm no artist and I don't have he composition skills to arrange objects in a picture in an appealing way.
I'm mainly concerned about price. Obviously that'll vary depending on the artist. But something like this will need to work for various aspect ratios. A single promo art needs to work in landscape and portrait sizes while accounting for a logo. I can't imagine that'll be cheap. And I most certainly can't pay for different art for all cases.
If you think it sucks, then you should definitely change it. But spend some time thinking about the problem and making a plan before you rush out to hire an artist. It's incredibly frustrating for an artist to deal with clients who don't know what they want.
Yes! * 1000.
Bear in mind that the graphics artist you use will have artistic skills, but it's you as the game developer who knows what you think the game should be like. They won't be able to guess what you want.
When I was asking the designer that I use (MetalZebra on Fiverr - he's good!) to do stuff for me, I provided him with the list of what each game object was meant to do, some game play videos showing how they interacted etc. as well as the general backdrop to the game (links to YouTube videos of similar styles etc.). Yes this set up took time, but this way, you come up with a much better overall view point of what was wanted.
For some of them [the game objects], I had a rough idea of how I wanted it to look, and he then did the honours, e.g. for the ship object, you can see how he was able to take my rough overview and create something that I really like (guess which was the one I drew! ;-) ).
As he had done the graphics for the game objects, and he had seen the game play videos, when he came to draw the game store page, then he was able to create something which really captured the essence of the game **and** made it look appealing:
7th_dragon_knight said:
I do have a rough sketch of what I want it to look like. But I'm no artist and I don't have he composition skills to arrange objects in a picture in an appealing way.
I'm mainly concerned about price. Obviously that'll vary depending on the artist. But something like this will need to work for various aspect ratios. A single promo art needs to work in landscape and portrait sizes while accounting for a logo. I can't imagine that'll be cheap. And I most certainly can't pay for different art for all cases.
If you have a rough sketch, then this is what I describe above. It's something that the designer can use to influence their thinking. As for the compositional skills, that's what you're paying them for! :-)
As for the price, it all depends on the size / style etc. Have a browse of the various sites (this one's area, fiverr, various art websites etc) and see what price they come up. I've not yet targeted steam - that's this week's project - but presumably you can use the same image everywhere, or you'll have certain sizes which need handling, at which point, then make the artist aware of that and then they can get everything to fit within the boundaries etc.
7th_dragon_knight said: I'm mainly concerned about price.
Think a moment about how much time you have spent making your game. Try to estimate the number of hours you spent. Then estimate how much your time is worth per hour. Minimum wage in the US is somewhere around 15perhour.Itcanbeenlighteningtoseehowmuchyouhavespentonthegameevenatjust15 per hour. It can be enlightening to see how much you have spent on the game even at just 15perhour.Itcanbeenlighteningtoseehowmuchyouhavespentonthegameevenatjust15 an hour. Let's say it took you 3 months (12 weeks), working 40 hours per week. That comes to 7,200. That's a LOT more than a couple hundred dollars, say, if an artist were to cost that much (for one Steam banner image) If you spend 7,200 on development, you need to spend that much on the marketing. $200 (say) is a pittance compared to the overall amount marketing really needs.
I'm going to have to disagree with Tom here. Any time or money you spent on your game is irrelevant. Spending more money on something because of how much you have already spent is called the “sunk cost fallacy”, and that's never a good place to be.
From a business perspective, all that matters is if the 200 dollars you spend on an artist will result in at least 200 dollars of additional sales. Which might or might not be the case depending on a lot of factors. Ironically, the better the game is selling, the more worthwhile it is to try to improve the rate at which it is selling, because most improvements will be in the form of some percentage boost over existing sales. If you expect to make 20000 dollars in additional sales at your current rate, then spending 200 dollars on better art is a no-brainer because the new art only needs to result in a 1% boost in sales to pay for itself. If you expect only 200 dollars in additional sales at your current rate, your new art would have to boost sales by 100% in order to pay for itself, which is a lot less likely.
It is indeed a good idea to avoid throwing good money after bad, however, what we're talking about here is paying the price to ensure that the product gets the visibility that it deserves.
For my first game, I got deflated after it was rejected for the ID@Xbox program and did zero marketing efforts / investment in graphics, which meant that the 3-4 months of full time work on it at the rate of pay that I left my job for in order to do it was completely wasted as I didn't want to spend a few hundred dollars on graphics and then invest some time in actually marketing it.
Would spending that extra money (maybe 200-1,000 US$) on polishing the experience guarantee extra sales? No. However, I can pretty much guarantee that me not having done that polish meant that the existing few 10s of thousands of GBP that I forewent by writing the game were completely wasted.
An extra to that point is the drawing of graphics - I like drawing graphics, but I'm going to be slow at it and the results aren't going to be amazing. Picking a cost to your time which you could reasonably be achieving if you weren't doing the game and then working out how long it'll take you to do something vs. getting someone who's actually good at it, will allow you to work out whether to buy or build etc. I, in effect, spent almost £10k drawing rubbish graphics vs. the $1k it would have cost me to pay someone decent to do so.
If one's making sales with, self described, marketing that sucks, then one's fantastically lucky and clearly are doing a fantastic job and you should be amazingly proud etc.. However, the question was originally asked because they thought that it was hampering them
a light breeze said: Any time or money you spent on your game is irrelevant. Spending more money on something because of how much you have already spent is called the “sunk cost fallacy”, and that's never a good place to be.
This misses the point of what I was saying. I was saying “marketing is necessary, and proper marketing costs as much as development.”
