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Finding a gaming niche worth it to develop for (Forums : Ideas & Concepts : Finding a gaming niche worth it to develop for) Locked
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Oct 8 2014 Anchor

Dear all,
as the mobile market gets saturated more and more and it gets harder for us indies to get even noticed with our games (heck I even don't talk about making money, but even free games get rarely more than a few hundred downloads nowadays!) I just want to discuss strategies and ideas how to enter niches and how to find them.
Personally I have now 7 games in the stores (Google Play, App Store, Windows Phone Market Place) so maybe I should just start sharing my experiences.
So my initial thought was to create something unique. I did this with my first game, even though not completely new but very unique and well received from those who accidently downloaded it. :DThe problem: Doing something unique makes it hard for the gamers to find as most games are found via the search function (not speaking about the top 20 charts which you simply can't enter). So how could a gamer find something he even doesn't know about and never would search for? ;)
My second approach was to just look into the top charts and doing something similar. Mainly the way that copying something that works well should create some success. Look at games like Candy Crush and so on. Up to now I haven't done that because this casual market is totally saturated, even if you make a really nice clone there are already thousands of them.
What finally worked for me best was to look for localized niches. My best working game so far is a card game (called Mau Mau) which is almost only known in German speaking countries. The competition is very small there so people looking for it would immediately stumble across it. I did another one which is a battle ship clone. This worked excepionally well especially in the local German markets. The same international version has only 20% downloads of the german one. The competition is just much larger there.
I'd be interested how you would spot niches which are worth making games for?
Cheers!

Nightshade
Nightshade Unemployed 3D artist
Oct 23 2014 Anchor

I think that a very big portion of your issue is marketing.
You can´t just toss a game into the app store, cross your fingers and "hope" it will work out. They did that at the past company I worked for and now it´s dead. Marketing is hard - exceptionally hard even - and is usually not something that we game developers are decent enough to deal with.
How are you reaching out on social media for example?

For your next game, consider finding some marketing-wizkid via say freelancer.com and pay them for marketing your game. You don´t have to invest a lot ofc but having something is better than having nothing.

Edited by: Nightshade

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   - My portfolio
“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” Hunter S. Thompson

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