Okay, imagine you're on a business meeting, in office on your video game making job, and your boss angrily asks you what do you propose for a project, he expects a very definitive answer on how to make the video game your company develops make loads of money, or else you can say goodbye to your job.
What do you propose?
Pander to NEETs here with animu boobs and pre 2007 graphics.
As long as it has muh fap muhfugga and its not made by dose ebil essjaydoubleyous it'll sell.
I propose you get the fuck back to cuckchan with your template thread and stock photo.
Checking my dubs is a good idea too.
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Considering the amount of flops being released this year, I wouldn't be surprised if OP was literally at the board meeting he just described.
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Fired.
Not only that, but pandering to a few thousand losers vs pandering to millions of normalcattle is just silly.
Probably this.
Ok OP there's basically three ways you can go about making money with vidya.
Option 1 you can luck out and stumble across the next big fad. In older times this was shit like World of Warcraft or Halo, today it's shit like Minecraft and Angry Birds. Big payout but mostly luck.
Option 2 you can make a well-made game catering to a particular audience who can be predicted to buy it if it hits all the right notes. Respectable payout but not a huge payout, but if you're careful not to try to go Option 3 on it, it's also a pretty safe route as there's little luck involved. This can turn into Option 1 if it turns out your niche is more popular than expected.
Option 3 is you take a well-liked series and dumb it down for wider audiences using its name and identity for market traction. Throw in microtransactions and shit. Bigger payout than Option 2, less than Option 1, poor staying power in the long term but not very luck dependant.
Option 1 seems appealing but the fact is, you're probably not going to be the lucky ones to make the next big thing, that's hard to predict, and copying the existing big thing has never worked. So scratch that. Look at 2 and 3 instead.
Option 2 is good for long-term sustainability, but it won't yield returns as big as Option 3. If you're a private business looking to make games for decades and just make a living for all your employees you will probably want Option 2. If you're publicly traded and have shareholders to report to, you're stuck with Option 3 because legally you have to make them as much money as possible.
So, OP, I guess you should buy up some old beloved series and make a sequel to it, but dumb the sequel down and pack it with DLC and P2W and all that crap.
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Fire everyone in the company, outsource all jobs to India, and have those pajeets make shovelware P2W mobile games based on successful flash games, until the end of time.
It can't fail.
That brings me to think, if i silently released a game for a few days to see if it meets some positive reception, and later started fully advertising it, would it be successful?
Make a boss rush game and sell DLC that adds a "skip boss" button to it
Considering how every single publisher lost the cahones to actually take risks, throw out suggestions of the newest fads in vidya, like overwatch multiple characters that are often sex symbols, with polished gameplay, and wrap it up in a singleplayer campaign, with online components to defeat larger bosses like monster hunter. Make it casualized with a bit of grip mechanics and optional loot boxes to earn random shit with your money for the extra shekels and go back to my office and drink some whiskey.
Depends on how fast you need to at least recoup your losses on production.
The whole point of hype and pre-orders is so companies can sell you a game quickly before words gets out that it's actually shit and so they can get back their losses plus profit within the first week.
Maintaining a big company is not cheap.
If you have cash lying in the bank, a sensible budget and a decent game, advertising could be reduced to simply letting people know your game exists and what it is.
A 600 gorillion dollar hype machine would be unnecessary.
Sales would be slow in the first week, then as word of mouth got around, they'd pick up and then dwindle down again.
You'd be looking at a year-long wait to get most of the value out of your game.
Can you wait that long?
Either full jew route that kills the shitty company or truthful and say make a fun game, though that would obviously get me fired in current year.
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I'd tell him to give me a moment or ask to go to the bathroom, then start a thread on Holla Forums to have idiots give me ideas under the premise of it being "purely hypothetical.
Fucking Tf2 formula and advertise your shitty ass product.
Tell that to the DoA and Fatefags
First, make the game good. Get some autists who really care about game design and give them time to work out the best way to improve common gameplay types or to alleviate the problems that many consumers have with the type of game you want to make. The problem with many games these days is that underskilled devs are thrown into projects with the goal of making things profitable, which often means they cut corners and go for the exploitative route of DLC, microtransactions, pre-order bonuses, and misguided PR stunts and ad-blitz marketing.. and somewhere in there, they work on the game, but mostly just recycle assets and work from previous games.
Second, slash the advertising budget. If an 8 year old with his Mommy's computer can edit together youtube videos, there's no reason why an adult professional can't learn to edit together gameplay footage and trailers. Once you've got your video guy, have him do that shit regularly. Do dev diaries and in-house interviews. When some communications major faggot tells you to maintain an online presence, that doesn't mean paying out the ass to run full-page ad skins on IGN and GameSpot. It means keeping your product in the minds of potential consumers and allowing them to naturally build interest and hype on their own.
Thirdly, actually finish the fucking game. Since you're not paying an ad firm to send journos on 5 Star cruises as part of some absurd marketing stunt to promote a game that's not even playable yet, you can take more time to work on the damned product. At the end of the day, you want a game that will sell and continue to sell for a long time after release, and you do that by making a complete, fully realized, deeply engaging game that people will enjoy enough to tell everyone else they should get it too. Do thorough QA while you're at it. Day one patches are common, but they destroy consumer confidence, and if any of it is really bad, it may destroy any hope of your game ever being picked up or supported down the road. Look at No Man's Sky; It's practically a different game now, but no one will forget what a steaming pile of shit it was at launch.
Lastly, sell it at a reasonable price, don't be afraid to put it on sale since 50,000 copies sold at $20 is better than 10,000 sold at $60.
2/10 fucking apply yourself dubsman.
Bonus.
DoA has good gameplay though.
Fate I dunno honestly.
I tell him to fuck off and go form a worker cooperative. There is no hope for quality video games under the harsh pressure of a top-down business.
microtransactions.
Don't you know? Spending money is the point of the entertainment industry. Advertising is a racket about getting paid. They also accomplish a service, usually, but that's totally uncoupled from the insane amounts of money those people give themselves.
Put big anime titties in the game. Weebs love it
This. Don't also forget to take any concept (WW, Anthromorphic animals, Gothic settings, fantasy world) and fill it with cute girls doing cute shit. What is that? You want a serious game that doesn't consider you a fucking retard? Too bad, they don't make money (Supcom, Xenogears….)