Indie Plexus / Free Cross-Promotion / Community based Publisher

Discussion in 'Game Marketing' started by Christoph, Dec 31, 2015.

  1. Christoph

    Christoph Miniboss Boxer

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    In a couple of months (or less) I will have finished my first game and like everyone else I would like to get a huge revenue from it. I’m very confident to have a really great game, but even with a high quality game, there are only three ways to succeed:

    • Cross promotion by a big publisher (i.e. Ketchapp)
    • A feature by Apple in the iTunes Store
    • Huge influence in the Media (gamer communities and sites, social platforms with a lot of followers)

    The most secure option is the first one. For example, the new game by Buildbox owner Trey Smith will be published by Ketchapp. That pretty much says it all and you almost can’t go wrong with it. The downside of this option is the huge share that Ketchapp gets for publishing: 70%!!! But as we all know: Better 30% of something than 100% of nothing. With 1 to 5 million downloads this still gives you a pretty nice revenue.

    I most probably will submit my game to Ketchapp and some other big publishers too, but then again, I really wished there was another way. Do we really depend on big publishers to get a great cross-promotion?

    Indie Plexus is a new project I’m working on and I would like to hear the opinions of others:

    • Is it feasible?
    • Is there an interest?
    • What should be taken into consideration to be done right?

    Screen Shot 2015-12-31 at 1.30.52 PM.png

    Idea:
    Indie Plexus is a young but fast growing network of indie game developers from all over the world with the main goal to cross-promote each others game through in-game ads. Contrary to all big publishers, Indie Plexus does not acquire any rights, distribute or publish the games in any way. Therefore, developers get 100% of their revenue while getting the attention they need to succeed.

    What's the deal?
    To get your game promoted by Indie Plexus and become an active member of the community, it is necessary to submit a trailer and 3 screenshots of your game. Indie Plexus only accepts high quality free and freemium games which will be selected by its existing members. Each week we will promote a new game and if there is no quality submission at the time, games will be promoted repeatedly to assure 1 million total downloads each.

    Do you want to participate?
    At the time of this writing, I'm the sole member of Indie Plexus. To get started, I would like to join 5 other developers, each with a quality game, so we can cross-promote between each other. If only 1 game gets an US feature, the others will succeed too. This 5 members will also discuss the small print privately and define the final strategy and legal status of Indie Plexus.

    As an alternative I'm considering to accept also new members with already published games and an active userbase of over 100,000. You can help Indie Plexus to grow and achieve our goals. By forming part of our community you would not only help others with their new games, but your game gets promoted and your user base will grow too.

    After the initial stage, Indie Plexus will be opened to all interested developers to submit their games. The idea is simple: the stronger the community, the bigger the sells. Let’s change the industry as we know it and help each other to stay away from the big publishers. We worked hard to make our games and the revenue belongs to us.

    How does Indie Plexus survive?
    I hope Indie Plexus can survive with donations from its active members. An alternative could be to charge 5% of the revenue (with a top limit of $10,000 per game), but I hope this won't be necessary. There will be only small expenses like web design, hosting and domain. Once growing big we would need someone to be paid for the admin work. But I'm sure, developers who get over 1 million downloads thanks to Indie Plexus, will happily donate enough to achieve this part too.


    What do you think? Shall we?

    Please join the discussion in the thread and if you want to participate, please write me a message.
     
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  2. Jamie

    Jamie Avid Boxer

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    There are other platforms like TapDaq, and Chartboost may even enable this.
    I am honestly more interested in doing what Ketchapp does: Promote own company's products across own company's products. I think someone posted on here that this is achievable with Chartboost, but am not sure. This is the solution I am interested in.
    I am not really interested in the double-edge sword of cross-promoting with other companies: sure, you might get traffic from someone else's game to yours, but then you might loose players the same way. When players are in my games, I consider it tacky and undesirable for them to see an ad for someone else's game as soon as they enter my game. If it is an ad for a newly released game from my own company, cool! But I want to make sure that my game is essentially a fun, unique play experience, not essentially a downloaded chance to download something else. For this same reason I will even limit the types of ads I include, restricting money making to rewarded video ads and IAPs of coins for power-ups and character options.
     
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  3. Christoph

    Christoph Miniboss Boxer

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    Of course, having it all for yourself would be a best case scenario. Ketchapp is not a developer though but a publisher. That's why I propose to make a network that works like a publisher but doesn't take away any shares from your revenue. The idea is to have the members decide which game is worth it to "publish" and with that there would be a strong filter to what games are getting in. You still can build up your facebook community independently and do whatever you please. You are completely free. The only thing you are obliged to is to cross promote when starting up your game, as long as you distribute your game. If your game is fun and has a unique gameplay experience, then the users will not go away. There is more to it, they even will recognize the brand of Indie Plexus and will know that games labeled with it are all of high quality. If you have made a strong community with your first game, you then can take advantage of it for your second game and go completely independent as you say.

    I agree with you that it's always better to have less ads. Indie Plexus can design the cross promotion ads all in a similar style so it always will look integrated to the games we publish.

    Regarding the TapDaq and Chartboost thing, actually I thought to do it with Chartboost. They have the system already implemented yes, and it is easy to cross promote only with the ones you want. But Chartboost is not a community, network or publisher. They only provide the software to cross promote with ads. That's all. Indie Plexus is a completely other beast that doesn't provide software or anything like that. As said before, it's like a publisher but community based.
     
    Last edited: Jan 1, 2016
  4. playsgames6666

    playsgames6666 Miniboss Boxer

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    Chartboost does have a community, you can join a group or create a group and offer your game, or ask for your game to be advertised in theirs. They have a direct message system set up, so can talk and offer a deal. There are hundreds of them, You do direct deals with other publishers. Works quite well, you have the option where you can have there advert in your game and your advert in theres, or you can charge them a fee to have there advert in your game, or you pay them to have your game in theres, and you get 100% of the money. though your game downloads and impressions need to be good, for another publisher to consider you. I was lucky with one game years ago, that i had dozens of offers from other publishers, I tried straight swaps with a few of them and it worked well.
     
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  5. Christoph

    Christoph Miniboss Boxer

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    You need at least 20,000 impressions (per day) to request access. And for sure, this isn't bad at all. But I think it's made for something completely different than what I propose with Indie Plexus. I would use this feature for interstitials after dying a certain amount of time once the game is a big success. You can use it to A) get even more players (not really interesting when you already have a lot of downloads and you should take advantage from the interstitials to bring in real money) and B) get great games announced that have a much higher install rate than others (which can double your income). I'm certain that the second point is the real goal for what it was made for since it helps you to direct the revenue stream and the interested party can be sure to get a lot of attention through your game.

    But again, this is completely different than what I want to do. To make it even clearer: Indie Plexus will work like Ketchapp. But instead of being a company that decides what is going to be published (or in this case advertised) it's the active userbase (the community) that does this job. It will be like a quality stamp or a label that can be recognized.
     
  6. swnam12

    swnam12 Boxer

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    I understand what you're trying to do but as others have mentioned, something very similar exists with Chartboost and Tapdaq. Instead of another solution, I'd prefer something different and somewhat radical.

    For example, members would submit their games. They, along with a small non-developer outside community, would then vote on their favorite a la Steam Greenlight. Then the winner would be promoted by ALL the members for a month, each with their unique channels and connections (word of mouth, social networking, videos, cross-app, etc).
    Earnings would be split by amount of work put into the project. The game creator would get the largest percentage, with the possibility to earn more. The rest would be split based on how much effort (and how successful) one puts into promoting the game. For example, if you create a promo video, you'd get more than the guy who just posts to Twitter and only has 100 followers as a video is much more powerful advertising tool (when used correctly).
    Then the next game of the month would be advertised to the user base. The process would repeat and after a while, the oldest members, most successful, members who commit the most, or other superlatives would get special privileges, such as submitting a game per month that doesn't need approval.

    I just thought of this on the spot but if anyone is interested, let me know!

    On a side note, it doesn't take much to build a website and host it, especially if you can find some members with the skills to do the initial versions for free and then upgrade as necessary. Also, Chartboost is regarded as one of the largest networks for mobile game developers but of course that does have the problem of attracting all the big players.
     
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  7. sysads

    sysads Serious Boxer

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    When I see all these awesome ideas flying around and I look at the conditions requested, I just wonder what hope some of us indie developers have when we hardly get up to 2 downloads per day :(

    Sometimes its good to read this things and just mark as Read and move on :D
     
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  8. Christoph

    Christoph Miniboss Boxer

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    @swnam12: I like the idea but it would be an organization nightmare for which I definitely do not have the time. :( For sure, the website would not be a problem. I can do this for free since we don't need anything complicated as said above. No software needed since we can just use what is already there.

    A general question: Don't you guys want to apply to a big publisher with your games?

    I for sure will and this is where the idea comes from. If there would be a community based publisher that is able to give you 100% instead of 30% of the revenue with the same impact through cross-promotion like Ketchapp. Wouldn't you prefer the later?

    @sysads:
    What do you think would be fair conditions/requierements for something like this?
     
    Last edited: Jan 3, 2016
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  9. swnam12

    swnam12 Boxer

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    @Christoph
    I don't think it'd be that bad in the beginning as there would be fewer members but setting up an LLC or something would be best. Although it would require a high level of trust among members and with the organization.

    Ketchapp is a single entity that can easily cross-promote because its games are all similar, in a way, "niche" games. It's much harder to do this with a group of people because everyone will have different games. If you really want to copy their strategy, the best option in my opinion is to focus on growing your user base. That is the only visible advantage they have.

    It's one thing to apply to publishers, another to get accepted not to mention the countless stories of Ketchapp stealing ideas and modifying them after being rejected. I'm guessing there is more to these stories that we don't know though.

    @sysads I don't understand your dilemma. The whole idea is to take advantage of other people's user base to promote our own apps.
     
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  10. Christoph

    Christoph Miniboss Boxer

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    I agree, it would need a good organization and it probably would be best to set up some kind of a forum for the active userbase. Each submitted game could have a single thread in private where the members can vote on which would make it easy and very fast to decide which game is accepted or not.
    I see a real problem here. It never would be possible to put my hand into the fire for each member if the community is big. There is a high probability that 1 of 100 (or even 10) would take advantage of the games submitted (and rejected) and copy a game entirely. But wouldn't this happen anyway? How is the experience in the STEAM community? Does it happen often?

    I must admit, I don't have an answer to this problem right now and it for sure makes me rethink the project. It probably would be best to have only a small core of members (the first five who start it all?) with the right to decide over the submissions (which seems to be what members here are suggesting). But if it's not community based, then it probably would be better to make it a real publisher all the way. It could still be the most just publisher in the world with a 10% share for admin related tasks. But somehow I feel it just falls apart and doesn't make much sense anymore. Somehow I want to think that a community based publisher would be something new and worthy that even Apple could be convinced to help with a feature for the first 5 games.
     
  11. swnam12

    swnam12 Boxer

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    I didn't even think that far but that'd probably work best unless a custom system is built.

    When I was typing that up, my idea of a community was more like a couple developers that new each other and had been in the business in the while, almost like friends. It would grow its members slowly and carefully or maybe not at all. There are pros and cons to having a smaller, closer family versus a larger, open community, of which you pointed out just one.
    I assumed the trust would be there among the members as its not a group of complete strangers. Also, with the revenue sharing system, it'd be in everyone's interests to see the game succeed. To combat this, the group could just accept all submissions like Buildbox Publishing and then improve on it together, although that is another task and organizational nightmare in itself.
    I don't publish on Steam so I don't know what it's like but making available any work (whether it be games, apps, video, design or other) before its production ready carries a risk. With the risk comes valuable feedback and in this case, also a higher chance of success and profit.

    You brought up a lot of potential issues but if done right, most of them can be avoided in my opinion. Of course, this is all just hypothetical and nothing is certain until something is created. And then, some issues, like the copying, can only be mitigated, not completely eradicated.

    It seems like a lot of my solutions are also pointing to a smaller user base. But that doesn't mean its not community based although I think you're wanting a large, open community.
    Another possible solution is to have smaller groups within a larger organization, sort of like chapters of national organizations. Then people can choose who they partner with and occasionally receive and give support to the larger organization.

    A publisher is a business and all (for-profit) businesses exist to make money. I don't think the publisher benefits at all if it's only breaking even with a smaller share of the revenue, unless that publisher is owned and operated by the indie developers.

    Another idea is to have form a new publisher and it'll publish the top games as voted by an open-community. It would be like Steam Greenlight for mobile games. It'll be a fairer split then traditional publishers and will rely on it's community to do its marketing. The publisher would be run by a core group of indie developers and a marketing expert or two. Same as before, members who contribute to the game, whether in marketing, design, social media, etc, will be awarded a small percentage of the revenue. Split could be 30 for publisher, 50 for the game developer, and the 20 split among the community.

    I keep coming back to the revenue share because of two reasons . First, I believe it's another great incentive for other developers as well as non-developers to contribute to making the game a success. Second, it's been done before by successfully by Quirky (an invention platform) and unsuccessfully by now defunct SellAnApp. There was also a game version of SellAnApp but I think they may have changed structures.
     
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