In my steam research, I saw over and over how important an interesting capsule image was. A good one was a mouse magnet. The participants I observed couldn’t help but hover over some capsules so that the tooltip appeared with the screenshots and tags. This was the first step in Continue Reading

Hi, both of my GDC talks got posted to youtube last week. Here they are What to Write So People Buy: Selling Your Game Without Feeling Sleazy Empathizing with Steam: How People Shop for Your Game One of my favorite parts of the research I presented were the quotes from Continue Reading

One night when I was 12 my dad came home from work and handed me a 3 ¼ inch floppy disk that had a the words “Wolf 3D” scrawled across it in red ball point pen. He said a colleague gave it to him because he thought I would like Continue Reading

Alright, so last week my talks went live on virtual GDC. If you didn’t get a chance to catch them DON’T worry! They will be going up eventually on the GDC youtube channel. Just hang tight.  The weird thing about doing this is I spent dozens of hours on these Continue Reading

Expert guest post Today I am super excited to have Richie de Wit take over my blog to give you a personal demo of his new Steam game estimation tool. It is really neat and I think it is vital to do this no matter what stage you are in. Continue Reading

Did you see SXSW in Austin was canceled? This follows the cancellation of in-person GDC. I know nothing about contagions or epidemiology but it seems good that people are taking this seriously. Many indies go to these shows to show off their games. There are several reasons they buy a Continue Reading

User feedback for your game is one of the most important things you can do to determine if your game is fun or not. Note that user testing is not the same as running a focus group on your game to squeeze out the last ounce of your indie personality. No! Continue Reading

Hi there all this month I am writing about the people you need to talk to as you grow in this industry.  I started with an article about talking to Streamers and moved on to a bit about talking to your customers. Today I am going to talk about talking to us Continue Reading

In the restaurant business, chefs and managers always make a point of swinging through the dining room and schmoozing with their patrons (usually after the customers have had a few glasses of wine.) This is an excellent way to build rapport but also so the restauranteur can better understand the Continue Reading

The benefits of talking to people Digital platforms like Steam, Youtube and Twitter have made it so that you can market your game without having to actually talk to anyone. You can just post a link then hide while random strangers find your game and buy it. Or so you Continue Reading