Apologies for the clickbaity headline!\u00a0 Since MMORPG Tycoon 2 was greenlit about a month ago, I’ve been finding myself giving Greenlight advice to a lot of people who are struggling.\u00a0 And rather than typing out that same advice over and over again every couple days, I figured I’d put the advice here, so I can just link people to it.\u00a0 If you’re interested in the process, read on!<\/p>\n
(Spoiler:\u00a0 there actually isn’t “one weird trick”.\u00a0 Just a bunch of potentially useful basic marketing techniques and strategies.)<\/p>\n
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I’ve divided this up by time.\u00a0 Please feel free to jump ahead to later sections, depending upon where you are in the Greenlight process!<\/p>\n
![\"greenlight_logo_dark\"](\"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/greenlight_logo_dark.png\"){kind=logo}
Your first decision to make is when to launch on Greenlight.\u00a0 Popular wisdom is that you want to launch when your main audience is awake and likely to be at a computer, so they’ll hopefully be caught by your first wave of marketing.\u00a0 I’m in Australia, and my largest audience is in the USA, so I chose to launch early in the morning here, which is about lunchtime in much of the USA.<\/p>\n
In terms of day of the week, Steam pushes people to you for approximately the first two days that you’re on Steam, so you want to pick a “first day” such that you’ll get a lot of people during those two days.\u00a0 This means you probably don’t want to launch on a Friday, since one of the days would be a weekend, and lots of the audience goes away on the weekends.\u00a0 In my case, I launched on a Thursday (local time), which was fine.\u00a0 I feel like later in the week is better, but I don’t have any data to support that.<\/p>\n
In terms of when in the year, the same rules apply.\u00a0 You’re better off not launching during any major holidays, as a lot of your audience is likely to be away from their computers during those two free days where Steam pushes traffic to you.\u00a0 In my case, I realised that I wasn’t going to hit my original ‘Early November’ date, and so had to delay all the way to March\/April, in order to avoid launching during Winter\/Summer holidays in the territories I was focusing on.\u00a0 You’re not actually selling your game, so you don’t need to worry about avoiding other major game releases, or game sales, but overlapping with holidays is best avoided.<\/p>\n
A greenlight trailer isn’t a game trailer.\u00a0 I can’t stress this enough.\u00a0 A Greenlight trailer is just a teaser.\u00a0 You’re not actually trying to get people to open their wallets and actually give you their cash; you’re only trying to intrigue them enough to click on the little ‘yes’ button, which costs them nothing.<\/p>\n
The number one thing to understand about Greenlight is that most of the people who are browsing submissions are only lightly engaged.\u00a0 They’re browsing, and looking for something that leaps out at them and shakes them by their shoulders, yelling “Look at me, I’m awesome!”\u00a0 This is very different from someone who visits your store page, who is actually thinking about perhaps spending money on something.\u00a0 The person on the store page is saying “Demonstrate why you’re worth my money”, and wants details, whereas the person on the Greenlight page is just saying “Do something to make me excited.”<\/p>\n
All the best advice says that your Greenlight trailer should be short.\u00a0 Ideally, only about 45 seconds long.\u00a0 Most Greenlight trailers, including MMORPG Tycoon 2’s<\/a>, are about a minute long.\u00a0 Any more than a minute, though, and you lose control of the viewer;\u00a0 they’ll see how long the video is going to be when it starts playing, and if it’s much over a minute they’re likely to start skipping around, or will simply disengage.\u00a0 And if they’re skipping around, you’re not in control of what they see.\u00a0 Which is totally not what you want, when you’re trying to coax them into loving your game enough to click on that ‘Yes’ button!<\/p>\n