Contents

Contents 2 1. Introduction 3 2. Development 5 2.1 Concept Development 5 2.2 The Process of Development 7 2.3 Testing video game before release. 9 3. Game Marketing 11 3.1 Marketing Strategy 11 3.2 Your media channels 15 3.3 Distribution Platforms 16 4. Bibliography 17

1. Introduction

Interactive entertainment industry (sometimes referred to as the video game industry) is the economic sector involved with the development, marketing and sales of video games. It includes a tremendous amount of different job disciplines and employs thousands of people worldwide. This industry exists since 1970-s when the first arcade games appeared, like space invaders and pong. Today, the video game industry transformed into vast and high-growing market. According to data compiled by the “NPD Group”, a global market research company, and released by the Entertainment Software Associations, the computer and video game industry sold over 273 million units in 2009 leading to an astounding $10.5 billion in revenue. The statics of United States of America shows how great is the consumption of video games is. There are 67% of gamers in this country with average age of 34 years old. This is very inspiring that people keep playing games in their conscious adulthood. It will be correct to assume that the result of this statistics tells us how video games have penetrated in life of peoples. I took the US as example because this country has a great influence on other nations. In other perspective if we will consider video games as the product, which is not only, produced by big studios, because we cannot definitely say that they make the main volume of gross profit. The point is that not only AAA games considered as successful but also casual and indie games, which have a significant impact on the industry itself. There are many successful indie examples like “Minecraft” whose revenues made $330 million. It is true to say that, the industry is keep changing from year to year and it could be very unpredictable, because the role of so-called drive here takes innovations. Which could be interpret not only in creating new game engines, but also in creating a new game mechanics with unordinary game-play. The main emphasis of this term paper will be on the success in Interactive entertainment industry. We will consider of what success is and how to achieve it. Before we move forward, I want to give a strict answer to the question of “What is the success?” It deals with establishing and optimizing of each department in any game company. Their product makes the success of company or studio. It dwells upon two pillars, which indicates the success.

* Development of video game – is the first. * Marketing of video game – is the second. According to each of them, I divided my paper in ___ parts. The first chapter will reveal the essence of developing of video games. We will consider how to come up with idea and transfer all of your thoughts into games development document. In order to make a game In second chapter of the paper, we will look at game marketing and consider different options of dealing with it. Finally, in the third chapter we will talk about life of a company after release of product. This chapter is very special about how to keep in touch with install base. How to make updates and DLCs. To keep audience attracted to you product. Actions within this chapter will help game to live and sells longer on the shelves.

2. Development

2.1 Concept Development

At the very beginning of game development, everything starts with idea. Idea is reflecting your vision of the game and it must be great. The best way to achieve this is through a written brainstorm. The idea is to focus on what you would want to play, because you need to love your game. Before writing down your idea, it is best to get some inspiration from different sources or other video games. Otherwise, the game can, and most likely will, be a failure. When you finished with inspiration and you know, what game do you want to develop you should determine what genre or genres your game would fit. It is very important to give a report to yourself about differences between game idea and story idea. * Story idea – involves your vision of setting and story. By word “setting”, we understand the environment of your game world. How it is going to be look like. Here is the example of game setting: cyber-punk world in 23rd century with sky-scrappers, flying cars, robotic people and so on. Story is the plot of your game it includes main antagonist and protagonists. * Game idea – involves story, setting and gameplay. By word gameplay, we consider game mechanic, genre, game design, interface of your product etc… When a game development team starts building a game, they start with a Game Design Document, or “GDD”. Usually this is a literal document but sometimes it is a more informal thing: sketches, drawings, and memories of previous conversations. However, the best game studios record their design in a written, illustrated document. In order to have even more chances of getting your idea published you need to turn it into a GDD.
A game design is much more than a game idea. It is a detailed specification for how the game should work. What does each button on the controller do? What does the HUD look like and what do each of the pieces do? How does enemy AI work? What pickups can players gather and what do they do? The game design describes every part of the game and tells how all the parts fit together to create a fun game.
This raises another question. What makes a fun game?
There are many possible answers to this question. No one has found a sure-fire formula for fun. Sid Meier says that a game is a series of interesting decisions, and this is a helpful starting point. Players have “fun” when they have to make choices. But not just any choices. Fun choices have to be intriguing, meaningful—interesting. How will your game design produce interesting choices for the player?
This is a hard question. Let me show you two examples that illustrate how hard this is.
The first example. The original Half-Life took the gameplay of Quake, then amplified and extended it in many ways. One of the ways they amplified the gameplay was to add a Reload button. Now ten years have gone by since Half-Life was released, and games like Halo have made Reload commonplace. But at the time it was a risky design. In earlier games, you never had to reload, so Valve was making weapons harder to use. Players could easily get annoyed—”Why do I have to keep hitting Reload every ten seconds? None of the older games made me do this. Why can’t the gun just reload itself?”
Valve took a gamble on reload and the gamble paid off. Players loved Reload even though it made more work for them. Why? Because Reload creates interesting decisions.
When you are fighting enemies and your gun has a little ammo left you do not want to spend the time reloading. If you are sure, the area is clear of enemies you will reload. But what about those times when you would like to reload but you are not sure whether an enemy is about to pop out at you? Then the choice of whether to reload becomes an interesting decision. Half-Life was more fun because of Reload even though Reload made the game harder.
Now let us look at another example. Doom 3’s design called for the game to be set in darkness. Many of the rooms had only one light and some were completely black. To counteract this, the game gave the player a flashlight that could be used to light up any environment. Yet the player could not shine his flashlight and wield a weapon at the same time. This created a decision: do you want light or protection?
Many players hated this game feature. It seemed arbitrary and unrealistic. It often put players into impossible situations where they could not see their enemies or fight them, but not both. Players would find themselves looking on enemies or shooting them.
Half-Life’s reload feature and Doom 3’s light feature are similar in many ways, but one of them was fun and the other was not. If you can understand exactly why that is, you are one-step closer to turning your game idea into a winning game design.

Most game designs also talk about the game’s setting, story, and characters. But I want to stress that this part of the game design usually accounts for less than a fourth of the total document. Usually ideas consist from 99% setting and story and only 1% gameplay. The problem is that they do not have a game idea—they have a story idea. A game design is not a story design. If you want your idea made into a game, you will have to fill out the details about how the game actually plays—what the player actually does, how he moves his character, how he interacts with the world.
It is hard for most people to think through how a game should actually play. Here is a helpful hint for how to do this. Write a “Five Minutes of Gameplay” document. Many studios require this, and it will help you think through your game.
In this document, you will describe, in absolute detail, what a player does in your game for about five minutes of play. When I say detail, I mean detail. * Do not say, “The player goes north.” Say, “The player pushes forward button on the left joystick.” * Do not talk about what the player thinks or decides: just show what he sees and describe what he does with his hands.
If you can describe five minutes of your game’s gameplay in that kind of detail, you are well on your way to writing a great GDD. In fact, you can put your “Five Minutes of Gameplay” document into your GDD as a kind of overview of the game.

2.2 The Process of Development

Once you created a GDD it's time to ctreate a team. According to the size of your game you need to consider how many team members do you need and what posts should they equire. In order to make a game you wiil need: Artists/painters - it's important to check their portfolios before applaying them for a job. They need to understand the atmosphere and mood of your game. Moreover they should comprehend the setting and stylistics of it. Considering this problem will be true to say that first exprassions are most lasting. Work of the artist is very important because they are making a key-art, and logo which are figguring evrywhere, from your web-site to boxes of games. Artists are very valuble members of your stuff because they foster with your ideas and if one of them will leave it will be a challenge to find another one. Musician - is very important to create a soundtracks for your game. And it also should reflect the setting and probably story of your game. Making a game with good music and sounds is key to success. Some gamedeveloppers prefre to hire musicians because there are no need for them after developing and they are right. Programmer - is a core developpers they creates the engine for your game. In addition they are tailoring pices creted by musicians and arts. There are usually from one to several lead programmers who are in charge of each department of programmers. There are about 7 departments: AI, PHYSICS, Graphics, sound, gameplay etc... Level designer - is a specialist who creates levels, challenges or missions. They work in complete and incomplete versions of the game. They intened to the language of game-engine. In constructing teams, it is important not just to get talented people, but the right combination of tallents. In the famous phrase, it's important to have a great team of minds, rather than a team of great minds. Meredith Belbin sees these types as necessary in teams, whether in business or elsewhere:

* The implementer, who converts the team's plan into something achieveble * The coordinator, who sets agendas, defines team members roles and keeps the objectives in view * The shaper, who defines issues, shapes ideas and leads the action * The Resource investigator, who communicates with outside the world and finds new ways to get things done * The monitor evaluator, who evaluates information objectively and draws accurate conclusion from it * The Team worker, who builds the team, supports others, and reduces conflicts * The Completer/Finisher, who meets deadlines, gets the detail right and makes sure nothing is forgotten.

This model tends itself better to some business situations than others, but the idea of roles and competencies in a team is important, whatever form these take in particular situations. Some organisations are more hierarchial and less democratic than others and team members are obviously expected to behave more deferentially in the former. Senior managers there have the traditional leader's role: what they say goes. In other organisations, power is more devolved and managers tatk about, or at least pay lip-service to, the empowerment of those under them: the idea that decision-making should be decentralised to members of their teams.
In addition to the tiaditional organisation, we increasingly find virtual organisations and virtual teams. People are brought together for a particular project and then disbanded. Here, in addition to Belbin's types above, the role of the Selector/Facilitator is crucial. Finding the right talents and co-ordinating them takes on new importance, especially when the team members may never actually meet face-to-face, but work by e-maii and phone.

Stages of team life
The typical team is said to go through a number of stages during its existence.

* Forming: The group is anxious and feels dependent on a leader. The group will be attempting to discover how it is going to operate, what the 'normal' behaviors will be: how supportive.
How critical, how serious and how humorous the group will be. * 2 Storming: The atmosphere may be one of conflict, with rebellion against the leader, conflict
Between sub-groups and resistance to control. There is likely to be resistance to the task, and even the sense that the task is impossible. * 3 Normiing: At this stage, members of the group feel closer together and the conflicts are settled, or at least forgotten. Members of the group will start to support each other. There is
Increasingly the feeling that the task is possible to achieve. * Performing: The group is carrying out the task for which it was formed- Roles within the group are Flexible, with people willing to do the work normally done by others. Members feel safe enough to express differences of opinion in relation to others. * Mourning: The group is disbanded, its members begin to feel nostalgic about its activities and achievements. Perhaps they go for a drink or a meal to celebrate.

2.3 Testing video game before release.

Testing video game before release. Before you release a game it is very important to test it, beause it may have software deffectes (called "buggs").

Quality assurance is a critical component in game development, though the video game industry does not have a standard methodology. Instead developers and publishers have their own methods. Small developers do not have QA staff, but large companies may employ QA teams full-time. High-profile commercial games are professionally and efficiently tested by publisher QA department

Usually Testers points out two test phases: * Alpha Testing - The first testing should occur in-house with different operating systems and different hardware configurations. An alpha version may not yet contain all of the planned features, and may lack documentation. Use virtual systems or test drives to fully test software with various operating systems and patches. * Beta Testing - Beta testing is considered the second phase of software testing. Beta tests are typically external tests to identify any performances issues or bugs prior to an official release. Beta tests can be open or closed. A closed beta test is used to control the number of users participating. An open test is open to anyone who has an interest in beta testing.

Alpha Testing starts as soon as first code is written and increases as the game progresses towards completion. The main QA team will monitor the game from its first submission to the QA until as late as post-production. A good bug-reporting system may help the programmers work efficiently. As the projects enters beta stage, the testing team will have clear assignments for each day. Tester feedback may determine final decisions of exclusion or inclusion of final features. Introducing previously uninvolved testers with fresh perspective may help identify new bugs. At this point the lead tester communicates with the producer and department heads daily. If the developer has an external publisher, then coordination with publisher's QA team starts. For console games, a build for console company QA team is sent. Beta testing may involve volunteers, for example, if the game is multiplayer.
Most companies rank bugs according to an estimate of their severity: * A bugs are critical bugs that prevent the game from being shipped, for example, they may crash the game. * B bugs are essential problems that require attention; however, the game may still be playable. Multiple B bugs are equally severe to an A bug. * C bugs are small and obscure problems, often in form of recommendation rather than bugs.

3. Game Marketing

3.1 Marketing Strategy

Marketing is a vast and complex area that contains too much to cover in a few articles so the focus of this paragraph is the practical rather than the theoretical. In this part, I have tailored information about game marketing that should help a beginner create a successful marketing plan for their game.
I guess the very first piece of advice I can give you is to think about how your game is going to be marketed right at the beginning because there are a couple of important decisions you will make that will impact the game design and how successful you are in taking it to market.
Assuming you are at the beginning of the process, there are 2 key artifacts(documents) you need to create: * Marketing strategy * Marketing plan
I advise you to keep these two things separate, at least, in the beginning. I recommend this because thinking strategically about something is very different to thinking tactically or focusing on the more tangible parts of a plan. Think of the strategy as the over-arching guide as to what you are trying to do – your goals – and the plan as the more detailed translation into what exactly what you are going to do to execute on the strategy and deliver the goals. The plan is something you could give to someone else to execute on your behalf, for example, the strategy is probably either too high level or too important to delegate. Once you are pretty confident in creating both of these artifacts then the marketing strategy can merely become the first section or two of the plan. To begin with, like I said, keep them separate, as they require you to think at different levels to create them.
You need to think about the marketing strategy right at the beginning of the game creation process because certain decisions around things like game design, monetization, languages and localization will all be impacted by your marketing strategy.
Indeed, the very first question I would ask yourself is “Am I going to self-publish my game or not?” If the answer is ‘no’ then many of these strategic decisions will be made by your publisher and the whole process should look very different. After seeing a vertical slice (sorry – I know many people hate that term now) of your game, the publisher will have a view as to who you are going to target and where, on what platforms etc. It’s really those that are self-publishing that need the crash course in marketing, as one should rightfully expect a publisher to bring a huge amount of marketing expertise and to be able to direct the process from beginning through to the end.
If you are self-publishing then the key things you need to cover in your marketing strategy are: * Product or Service - Are you going to launch your game as a product (the traditional model) or as a service. If you are self-publishing studio, you really need to think about your game as a service. Because it is better for you will launch the game as early as possible and you will steadily iterate new releases while simultaneously building a loyal audience. This is much more akin to running a subscription business and developers who are self-publishing need to think about their games business in this way. You will effectively, find the most effective marketing channels and use them to acquire new players who you will then convert to paying players. The success of your business will rely on you being able to generate a higher average revenue per player than it costs you to acquire that player (through marketing). * Business Model of your Game - Are you going to charge for the game (premium) or provide the game for free, charging for additional content (freemium) or charge for in-app items or virtual goods (Free to Play). You really need to have a view on this right at the beginning as it has a big impact on the overall game design. Quite a lot of Indies make this decision too late on and try and add in the monetization or business model at the end. It rarely works when done like this so you should really take note and decide how you are going to make money from your game right form the get-go. * Target Audience – For whom is your game aimed at? Kids, adults, male, female? While it might be ok to be reasonably open-minded about this in the beginning, early testing should tell you which target audiences you are trying to appeal to. In my view, games should be designed with target audiences in mind and there is plenty of research available to tell you, which games, are doing well with which target audiences. The particular audience will make a big difference to the marketing channels you exploit obviously. TV companies decide which TV programs to make or buy based on the audience they are trying to target. So for example, a TV company will decide that at 8pm on Friday nights it wants female audiences in the 18 – 30 bracket so it buys and / or makes programs that it knows will appeal to this demographic. We, in games, need to get far better at this. If you are finding your audience at the end, you have not thought about it enough and while it is still possible to create a successful game you have seriously handicapped your chances. * Platforms and Stores - Is your game destined for console or PC? Or perhaps you are building it for mobile, tablet or other handheld. Most game developers decide this pretty early on based on variety of reasons such as past experience, bias for technology, budget, relationships with publishers and / or console providers etc. There are lots of factors. However, I feel relatively safe suggesting that not enough of that decision is driven from the marketing strategy. Am I right? Certain platforms are much better for certain audiences and certain types of game. Traditionally, it has been harder to self-publish on certain consoles than say on mobile for example although all of this is changing rapidly. There may be several channels or stores you can push the game through and some of them may offer significant advantages over others. The Samsung store on Android devices has far fewer games on it than the Google Play store, for example, and they are offering a higher percentage of the revenues to the developers (90% last time I checked compared to 70%). There are too much factors at play here so careful attention should be given to the choices you make here. Of course, with development tools like Unity and Marmalade, games are becoming a lot more transferable across platforms so the trend is for games to be released across several platforms. Keep this in mind * Geography - Where are you going to launch your game? Are you going to test it in a trial market first and then roll it out to others subsequently? Which countries are going to target? These are all key marketing questions you need to think about. Many games developers launch their game initially in a test market where they gain valuable insight into how it is being played so that they can make initial changes before they launch the game in other perhaps lee forgiving markets. The selection of test markets and eventual launch markets depends a lot on your game, the target audience you are after and a lot of the other factors we think need to be in your marketing strategy. * Budget - Any marketing strategy should give careful consideration to the available budget. For most games, particularly those being run as services, the budget will vary over time as the game makes revenue. This is to be expected however, you should still plan a budget around how much you can spend before the game makes any money and then how much you are prepared to continue spending at various different revenue levels. You should know when you are going to stop spending too. It is possible to continue spending money on a project that becomes very personal to you and it is helpful to plan upfront what the limits are to your spending. Every project should have kill criteria and I would definitely incorporate these into my marketing strategy. * Marketing Channels - There is a large variety of channels, which you can use for marketing. Big console games still rely heavily on events, news reviews and other PR. High advertising spends across TV, radio as well as online, launch parties and a number of other channels. Naturally, most developers don’t have these budgets so it is unlikely, for example, that you would even consider a TV ad in the early stages of your game marketing plan (if your game becomes the next Clash of Clans then you might well use TV ads quite a lot). This blog series is much more targeted at self-publishing Indies, so we are going to make certain assumptions about budgets will which in turn focus our efforts around certain channels. For more constrained budgets, web and social tend to take priority along with cross-promotional networks. The best channel a game developer has is its existing customer base on other games it has launched. Never forget this … this is at the core of creating a successful indie games business today. Start somewhere and continually build a loyal audience from there across a range of titles. * Measurement - One of the most important things to do in advance of spending large amounts on marketing is to set up the measurement and reporting so that you can tell exactly what return you are getting from various channels. Unfortunately, given the wide variety of channels you may employ, there is unlikely to be a single reporting solution that will be able to track everything across all channels. Most of the stores are able to tell you where the referral came from however these are not 100% conclusive across all of the channels. Its a little bit trial and error, unfortunately, and the effectiveness of certain tools over others will depend a lot on the marketing channels you use. Understanding which channels are the most effective for you is a critical part of your ongoing marketing so a lot of thought needs to be given to it and we will post a blog on some recommended reporting methods at a later date.
All of these areas need to be considered carefully at the beginning of your game project and the analysis and conclusions are what make up your marketing strategy. Once the marketing strategy is complete and you understand how you want to try it on the market, the next step is to create a marketing plan. The marketing plan is much lower level and will specifically allocate money to certain channels that have been identified in the strategy .
3.2 Your media channels
Web site and micro-site is the place of your own media channel.
Before announcing of your game, you must do your web site where you are going to publish news about your game, inform audience about upcoming events and publish bug-fixies document. Work with as a blog of your company. It is very important to communicate with your customers via forums on your web, it helps to create a brand loyalty and rose a respect to your company. It’s also important to have a functioning profile on different social networks. So first of all you are going to create groups in: * Twitter * Facebook * VK * YouTube * The more profiles you have the better you are doing

If you are going to lunch your game on Steam, it will be good create a topic on steam forums.
When you are doing PR activity, communicate and act as human but not as company. Fans like it. Anyway, successful companies hires community managers who are talking a role of communicator with the audience.

3.3 Distribution Platforms

There is a vast amount of methods hot to sell your game. When you have decided for which platforms, you are going to create your game. It is time to choose sources of distribution. In this section a have demonstrated ways of selling your product on each platform: * As for PC, Mac and Linux you have to thing wisely. If you have a publisher than you will probably sell your product via stores and digital markets. And if we are talking about digital distribution you can sell your game via Steam, your own web-site, others web-sites. * As for Xbox there are only 2 ways of distribution: regular and digital (xbox live marketplace) * As for PlayStation: regular and digital (PlayStation Network PSN) * For Android it’s Google Play * For iOS it’s AppStore * For Windows Phone, Windows 8 it is Windows Market.
These are the most used market place where companies sell their product yet there could be found more but less popular sources for selling.

4. Bibliography

1. John Grisham “Masters of Doom” 2002 2. Bob Gates “Game Design” 2012 3. Meredith Belbin ”Team roles at work” 2010 4. Robert Galyonikn” Marketing of Videogames” 2014

Electronic Resources: 5. ESRB statistics 6. Corona Labs “steps of game development“ 7. Jeff Wofford’s Blog

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[ 1 ]. Information from www.ESRB.org
[ 2 ]. AAA (pronounced “triple A”) - is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion.
[ 3 ]. Indies- are video games created by individuals or small teams without publisher.
[ 4 ]. HID (Heads-up display) – a display with a small piece of information. Ex: health-bar of your hero.
[ 5 ]. Sid Meier – is one of the most successful developers. Famous his “civilization” game franchise.