Making games costs money, a lot of it actually. And behind every successful game out there isn’t just some guy who wants to give us the best experience we can have in order to escape our reality, but a whole bunch of businessmen who invested their money and expect to make some profit in return. And if you ask them what makes a successful game, the honest answer would be the one that makes them or others like them richer than they were before.
Now there’s no grand secret that will make any game successful; there are only those who work and learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of others, that being said, a game’s failure can be prevented by maintaining a certain mindset. And I’ve spent a while figuring out what that mindset is.
If we can predict the future to figure out the kind of game that’ll make a tremendous amount of money, we’ll make millions in no time. But that’s not possible. We can’t predict it if our definition of success is breaking the records of first day sales or selling your company to huge ones like Ubisoft or Microsoft.
And like I said before, there is no grand secret that grants a game success and fame, there are specific strategies the one can follow to ensure a decrease in the chances of failing. I’m not going to lie to you and say I know how to make a hit game, but here’s a concept that deserves a place in my definition of success:
Consistency is one of the most critical factors for a game’s success
I contemplated this concept after attending many conferences where game developers talk about how things can go wrong and why some of their games failed. I feel like this is what most of them wanted to say, but they couldn’t find the words for it.
Then again, it’s only my opinion, but I believe discussing it will shine the light on the knowledge that is yet to be used to the fullest in game making.
With this in mind, you should know that a bad game will fail no matter how consistent it is. Sadly, there is no quality-meter that will tell us whether a game reaches the minimum requirements to earn success. But what we’re focusing on here is the fact that a lot of games could have gained success had they been consistent enough.
What I Mean by Consistency
Creating a game is like magic, you get to make a whole new world, but it isn’t as easy as it sounds, here a list containing some of the things a game developer creates in the process of making a game:
- A universe
- A user experience
- Rules of physics
- Visual style
- Soundscape
- Interaction between parts
- Characters
- Stories
- Mythos
- Rules of interactions between systems
- Languages
But that’s not enough. All these elements need to be consistent in themselves, with one another and with the buzz going on around them.
Doing the Marketing
Showing the game before its release is without any question a necessary step. It is now a tradition that most of the major video games companies choose to show their games during E3, it’s basically the highlight event for games in the entire year. But I feel like most game developers aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity they get in such high profile events. I feel like in many cases; there’s a significant inconsistency between how the game is marketed and how the experience of playing actually feels like, and not in the way that the marketed product ends up being way better than the end result.
Sometimes, the marketing gives off an entirely different vibe that doesn’t necessarily disappoint but rather leave the gamers questioning the reality of what’s going on. And sometimes, the marketing is so uninteresting that it can hurt the hype surrounding what ends up being a rather excellent game. That, of course, leads to failure. Companies release trailers and slogans for their games that can be misleading. They release still images of action-packed scenes and talk about development details when many would rather know about the gameplay, the story, and the characters.
You want the people to buy your game. And if you give off a dull vibe concerning your game, you’re not going to ultimately break sale records, to say the least. There are a few examples of good games that unfortunately suffered from this kind of marketing inconsistency, and as you can guess, these games didn’t get the payoff they deserved. From those, we can mention Brigador, a game that at first glance seemed like just another typical twin-stick shooting game. But it had a whole lot more depth to it than that.
Of course, this example doesn’t mean that all marketing inconsistencies would necessarily lead to failure, but still, it remains a dangerous thing.
Let’s Talk About the Genre
This factor is one of the most important ones in generating fan expectation. If your idea of what your game’s genre doesn’t come across right, you’ll be setting up yourself for failure. Because here’s the deal, it’s effortless for fans to categorize a specific unreleased game under a particular genre, because it’s highly unlikely for new games to come up with new, never seen before, ideas and because most games that are released these days fall under a certain type willingly.
If you give off a certain feeling that your game falls under a certain genre, players will immediately start to think of successful games relating to that genre, and their expectation will begin rising in the hopes of getting a new game of a similar quality or even better.
If you go about making a survival horror game, for example, you make sure that it respects the mechanics of a survival horror game and you should be ready for the expectations to meet. If there’s one element that deters it from being as such, like a bunch of machine guns that would make it more of a horror-action game, than you make sure that everyone knows about it. You don’t want to target the wrong audience.
At the end of the day, there are a few times when the expectations simply cannot be tamed by clarifications. Playtonic, for example, set themselves on a challenging path when they announced Yooka-Laylee, a game that can be considered in many ways the spiritual successor for Banjo Kazooie. That on its own is just an impossible feat.
Putting the quality of the end product aside, the game didn’t do as well as it was expected financially. If you ask me, that goes back to the fact that the game adapted even the tedious parts of Banjo Kazooie, and it could’ve been better received if they had been let go. Still, that could’ve been unfruitful seeing that it’s following up to such a classic game.
The Consistency of the Game
As we’ve mentioned before, the game components need to be consistent with each other. The experience needs to be harmonic. Otherwise, you can risk breaking the immersion. You don’t want to do that in any practical experience. That includes the game mechanics as well as an aesthetic element in the game’s presentation. If any change or alteration is needed to happen in any of the game’s details, it needs to occur through a smooth and unnoticeable transition.
But anyway, imagine playing an RPG fantasy game that has a sci-fi inspired HUD.
Without a reasonable explanation (if there’s ever any), that would be a big mistake. It’s inconsistent. But that’s just a minor example. The most critical factors that beg for consistency are the gameplay mechanics and the characteristics of the story and the characters. Imagine playing as a crime-fighting vigilante, but then finding out that the game mechanics allow for killing innocent citizens. Or maybe you’re a mass murderer in a Cyberpunk setting, and you end up pulling out wooden bow and arrow.
That doesn’t make sense, does it?
The game should set up its universal rules from the start, like how the laws of physics work in our world. And thus they should never be broken, or else all the immersion is thrown out of the window.
Why Does It Matter?
You might be wondering why anyone would make a big deal out of consistency; there aren’t many articles out there making a big deal out of it. Well, here’s the deal: Any expectation that the players build as they anticipate a new game is founded upon consistency. And once the players are exposed to inconsistent game design and marketing, all those expectations are destroyed. That’s never a good thing.
The matter of the fact is, all the preconceptions that get cooked up in the players’ minds are the result of a mix of screenshots, trailers, demos, concept art and interviews that the developers choose to release. But besides that, the long years that have passed with thousands of games belonging to different genres have implemented a particular perception in the players’ minds towards games from these different genres. Because of that, you have to be aware of the various genre tropes, and you’ll have to keep them in mind while developing and promoting your game. And that’s how consistency plays a significant role in making or breaking the experience.
Here’s How It’s Done
Now there’s no point of going through the meaning of consistency and discussing its theoretical upsides. And it’s worthless to mention a number of bad examples that suffered from inconsistency without shining the light on games that actually benefited from being consistent in design and marketing. There are no fixed rules and no cases to affirmatively prove a point, the only example for us to follow their lead.
So let’s take a popular example from the recent years that had critical acclaim and appreciation from the fandom; a little game known as Shovel Knight. You’ve probably played it or at least heard of it.
Developed by Yacht Club Games, the game falls under the 2D, side-scrolling retro genre. It’s a love letter to challenging, old school games of the 2D era. That’s how it was advertised, and that’s exactly what fans got. But in the mix of all of that, the developers threw in some unfamiliar features to the retro genre.
The game was quite long, it came with responsive input and save files besides other things. But none of that compromised the pleasant feeling of the old school gaming era. It didn’t lose its consistency. In fact, it’s the consistency that attracted the players and kept them fascinated by the game. This includes the sound design, music, the menus, art style and the level design and much more.
There are also other games that make it clear right from the start what you’re getting. The trailers for Firewatch by Campo Santo were pretty effective. They conveyed the feelings of discovery and suspense, the sense of fear, relationship making, and relaxation. For a game with such a unique tone, the marketing team did a bang up job. The end product, from the environments to the music, matched the exact tone that the trailers communicated.
What Can Improve Consistency?
It can depend from one game to another, and on the person, you ask, but here’re a few things that I believe can improve a whole lot of consistency problems with modern games.
The trailers you put out need to be a concentrated essence of the spirit of the game.
Making a trailer can be a tricky process. That’s why many developers fall in mistakes that damage the perception of the game. Sometimes the mistakes are made by other parties hired to create the trailers which just makes it all just worse.
The trailer must translate the player’s experience when playing the game in about 3 minutes. And the thing is, inconsistent marketing doesn’t necessarily mean putting out bad trailers but rather inaccurate representations through these trailers. If a game is an experience that focuses mainly on nonstop action and mayhem without prioritizing the depth of the story or the characters yet you release a trailer that puts the spotlight on those latter elements, then you’ve missed the mark. You could easily alienate the targeted audience with a mistake like that.
Get an artistic perspective
It’s really a shame when an ugly presentation hinders a good game. Some developers don’t have an eye for coherent design for menus and user’s interface, and that can, unfortunately, damage the perception of the game. So if you’re not sure what to do, make sure you have an artist on your team.
Expose your game to the world regularly
And make sure to do so early on in the development process. Letting the public, the press and the critics have a look at your game from the start will naturally create an ocean of feedback from every perspective that can only be beneficial for you as you build the experience. Doing so at the early stages allows you to find the parts that were met with adverse reactions and improve them or take them out altogether. Like that you end up with an artistically coherent representation of your game.
What’s Your Take on It?
Do you find that this article shines some light on an important yet ignored aspect of what makes a successful game? Or do you find this consistency matter to be irrelevant to the whole game development process? As a community of players, you should be the judge of that.