What type of a game you should be making?
I just took a look into a nice article on Gamasutra which discussed about the"A "Hot or Not" genres on Steam. I wanted to share my thoughts around this, since I find this type of thinking very important, when making your game.
THE GENRE
The very first thing everyone should understand, when making a game is that you should try to find a genre which people are (already) interested. It sure is possible to make a game which is 100% unique, but in my opinion, this is like "inventing the wheel". If you have confirmed references of game types which people like, shouldn't you focus into making more content for those players?
VISUALIZE IT
Of course, it's not that simple. You can't just make a game to a existing genre and expect people to be interested. This will automatically bring more people to your "Store page" but next you need to give them enough "new & interesting" features around the same game type. This new stuff should be easy to discover from your store page description, trailer and other promotional materials. Even from your "one liner!". I've seen it too many times, that games offer a lot of interesting content, but the developers are not able to "visualize" it on their promotional materials.
DO YOUR HOMEWORK
It's a good habit to take a look into 'Recently released titles' when having your morning cup of coffee and maybe take couple of games which you find potential and save those for later. Then come back to these games after a week or so and see how did they perform. When doing this multiple times, you start to understand what it is required from a game to be interesting enough. Only looking at the 'Top selling games' isn't enough, since you will only be looking at games which are mostly developed by bigger studios, which have enormous marketing budget / strategies. Try to pick up trends from different sources and and try to find reasons, why these games pop-up as an interesting title.
Do not expect to find the "perfect recipe" by doing this couple of times, but I promise you if you keep on doing this for months, or even years you're able to identify potential games and games, you should be developing!
I'm trying to teach myself into keeping the articles short and compact, hopefully this time I managed to do it!
Have a great rest of the week!
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