If you are new to the gaming industry, the best thing to do to succeed is gain a lot of experience first. You are lucky enough to have your foot in the door of the industry.
You would also be thankful there are many available tools and educational materials that you can use. Download some of them and get many, many hours of tutorials you can walkthrough.
Two things you must do:
- Build your skills.
- Develop an impressive portfolio.
As you grow in the industry, you also have to build connections and develop relationships with the giants who help beginners like you. You can work with web application testers or a QA testing company to make sure that your game products will be flawless and ensure that your business metrics will always be encouraging and competitive.
Ways to Thrive and Succeed in the Gaming Industry
Below are additional priority areas every gaming-industry beginner should focus on to succeed.
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Creativity is King
In the gaming world, creativity counts a lot. You should not produce a game that looks too simple or similar to other games already available. You must add something new to stand out above the crowd of hundreds of games already existing.
Creativity is a vital skill for digital game designers. It turns new and imaginative ideas into reality, sees the world in new ways, perceives hidden patterns, and makes connections among apparently disconnected phenomena.
If you have this skill, there is no doubt you can insert interesting quirks in your games and make them appear fun and engaging.
In other words, do something that other people have not yet done. If you do not have this skill, your games will be ordinary entries into an already crowded market.
If you need to spend money on creative designs, by all means, do so because it is worth it. As a beginner, you should work with an experienced programmer who can help you develop eye-catching, enjoyable playmats and lead you to the ideal trending designs to use.
Plan out the Story
Great games have great stories. It can be a mission that the player needs to complete or a war of competing factions or clans. Whatever it is, you need to involve good guys and bad guys. Stories need to have a protagonist. On the other side, there is the enemy – the antagonist of the story.
When creating the story of your game, you need to think about the entire journey. Map out the story from start to finish, and plan out every experience and offshoots that characters will come across on the way. Then there is also the destination, where the protagonist gets some reward for arriving victorious at the end scene.
Does everyone involved in the successful game development – designers and programmers – need to know the story in advance? It depends on the plot of the story, but they should know it at least roughly. It helps them prepare for the things the story’s plot will call for and make informed decisions about how procedures and technicalities should go and how characters should look and move.
Steps to developing a story include:
- Outline the storyline.
- Decide the type of game – action-adventure, role-playing game, puzzles, first-person shooter, etc.
- Develop the game’s world.
- Create the characters.
- Write the details of the story.
- Add non-player characters (NPCs), side quests, and other small details.
Boost Your Game’s Online Visibility
When you are ready to launch a game, employ techniques to boost its presence online. A banner ad posted on websites and an ad on YouTube will serve the purpose.
If gamers are not aware of your game, it will not land in their hands and get played and recommended. While, as a beginner, you do not have that massive budget that Mobile Legend has, hiring influencers and making YouTubers try out the game can help. Examples are Jacksepticeye, Pewdiepie, and Markiplier.
Hiring a YouTuber generates hype for products, and it has worked great for some. Check Flappy Bird, a game that has been played and endorsed by Pewdiepie.
Another strategy that boosts the online presence of digital is search engine optimization (SEO). What makes SEO effective for the purpose is because it puts your game in the path of gamers who are ostensibly searching for products that you and other game developers are offering.
“You need not sell them on your products cold if they can see them on search result pages. You want to make sure that your games are easy to find on app stores and the web.” – as seamlessly explained by Konstantin Klyagin, the CEO and Founder of QAwerk, in one of his recent blog posts.
The best successful SEO strategies for the game development industry include the ff:
Video Content
Some of the highly viewed sites for gaming content are Twitch and YouTube. Both of these sites boast massive hours of video content. Use these platforms to promote your games.
When gamers use these platforms, what they want to know is the mechanics of a game, so explain clearly how to play your game, and the advantages users can get from playing it. Then they can decide whether your product is worth buying or not.
Include links in your YouTube videos because it can help boost traffic to your gaming website.
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Build Links in Forums
This strategy works for building authority and trust in your products and your business. Gaming forums allow you to interact with gamers and developers to talk about games, talk about tips and tricks, and debate which games are the best to play. So, throw a question here and there and provide answers to questions other participants throw.
When you can do that, lead them to your website content, where you feature your products and content, explaining how great your games are. Lead them to your content using links and by encouraging participants to share your links. People will try to visit you to find valuable content that helps them with their hobbies and interest.
Along with building great, valuable content, make sure that it is easily accessible. If you already have people coming to your site, make it easy for them to find information and make sure your articles show up fast. That can drive traffic to your site, and traffic means high ranking in Google search page results.
Use Social Media
Gamers worldwide use Facebook as their social media platform for sharing personal experiences with games that they have played and asking questions on newly launched products. You can see hundreds of likes, shares, and views gaming-related content receive daily. That is how powerful these marketing channels can be.
Note that social media marketing is not just about selling products. Social media needs to be social, and that means building relationships and interacting with people.
Common mistake game developers and designers make is thinking that they only need to post art, videos, and images. Far beyond that, you need to interact with your target audience and help solve their pain points. They want answers to their questions fast and need to get information before they decide to purchase.
In that sense, you need to make sure that you know your buyer’s persona well to have smooth conversations with them. Know the particular questions they ask and consider going the extra mile by providing them additional resources to obtain information and guidance.
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Keep up with Technology
With the pace technology keeps these days, the game development tools that people use will most likely be outdated after a couple of years have passed.
Successful game developers who thrive keep themselves updated with technological changes and immediately leverage them to upgrade the products they are making. You ought to do the same.
You need to push the boundaries to survive and be always a step ahead of the competition. By the time your game goes live, that is also the time you should start thinking of the possible future iterations for the gaming technology.
Think of virtual reality in video games, for example. Virtual reality in your industry provides a full-blown-immersion gaming experience, and it does not only relate to gaming and entertainment.
Medicine and science are attempting to incorporate virtual reality in their research. Recently, they experimented on the possibility of teaching people with lower-extremity paralysis how to walk again by using virtual reality. That is unbelievable.
Right now, virtual reality is limited by time and space but is it unthinkable that in the future, gamers will be able to operate without using a hand controller and without colliding with anything within their physical latitude? That can just be a scratch on the surface of these possibilities.
Think also of motion control and voice control. On paper, this sounds like neat features that game developers tried to implement in their products, and for now, the sounds we hear are yells and self-talking. Would it be possible to have actual conversations with the characters in the games that people play? Concerning motion control, will it also be possible to integrate motion with virtual reality?
Thus, you need to keep yourself abreast with technological advancements and find ways to use them in the games you will be making. Other technology-related aspects you need to focus on include:
- Mobile gaming.
- Screen power and graphics.
- Local multiplayer features.
- Portability.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
