[InclinedPlane]

"PAX East? - That's a holiday not a legitimate business expense."

For a game developer? No, it's a fantastic way to raise the profile of your game. You get the most avid gamers interested in your game (who will spread the word if they like the game) and you get press coverage too. For an exhibitor PAX isn't a 3 day vacation, it's 5 or 6 days of working 12+ hours days, most of them staying chained to their booth in their expo hall.

[jay_kyburz]

Nar, a game as great looking as theirs would get the press anyhow. The press are dying for more interesting games to write about.

You raise another good point though, not only is it 3k, but its 5-6 days at 12+ hours. A whole week of dev time lost to the event.

Events are great fun, but if you don't have money you don't know what to do with, I don't think they are a very good investment. Not much bang for the buck I don't think.

[corin_]

I've been in the fairly unique situation of seeing the results a wide range of companies in the extended games industry (from top games publishers to indies to gaming hardware... etc.) got from exhibiting their products and I couldn't disagree more about it being a good investment.

[jay_kyburz]

Hey Corin, I'd love to hear more about why you think so. I'm always trying to work out how to best spend my marketing money (and energy).

Do you have any metrics you can share about how an appearance at a show relate to final game sales? Or even press coverage?

For example, if they were to spend that money on banner advertising they could generate say 6-10k clicks through to their website.

[corin_]

Press coverage - not metrics, but I've seen an awful lot of stories come out of events, and most importantly an awful lot of journalists meeting exhibitors, from bloggers to mainstream websites or newspapers. Obviously this doesn't guarantee coverage, but it puts the ball in your hands, once you're stood talking to a journalist while standing over your product it's time to knock it out of the park.

I don't really have any customer data I can share with you, the sort of selling points generally used are more vague - such as "The average spend per visitor at last year's event on products sourced at the show was £767, a total audience spend of £79.8m" (taken from the sales pitch of a 2012 event). The overall focus of selling - though I'm not actually in sales so this isn't my direct area - is about the size of the audience, and what sort of demographic they are.

I don't know if events are a good use of your money when it's as tight as that, i.e. if you can chose between $3k on an event or $3k on a PR company, but only one, as I can't think of any exhibitor I've ever had that paid that little, or that was small enough not to have marketing budget around it.

The single biggest argument I can give, I think, is that if you go to PAX you're going to get more people looking at your game than you'd get clicks for $3k online - and when it comes down to it, are you going to sell your game better by having somebody look at your website, or stand in front of you try out your game?

Incidentally, what adverts are giving you that click-rate, and do you have any calculated CPA figures?

edit: I just want to note that like I said above, my experience comes more from big budget companies like big studio publishers rather than indies, so I can't necessarily say events are or aren't a great idea for people like you, just that they do offer bang for buck.

[shuzchen]

I'm an armchair theorist on this topic, but I suspect you get more benefit with an event booth, especially if the people that attend the event have already been self-selected into your target demographic. There's just so much more room for engagement in person, as you can answer questions, provide clarification on the spot, and even obtain advice (perhaps some passerby has a cool idea they want to see in your game). This is drastically harder to do with a website.

This is even more important for smaller indie teams where the developers are the ones manning the booths. I'd be way more interested in discussing the product if I knew I were talking to one of the developers. I found this reflected in my behavior at the vendor booths at pycon this year. When a booth was manned by salespeople, I'd just go take their free shirt and if I was interested in the product I'd only ask a few brief questions and leave with a brochure. When the booth was manned by the founders and three-quarters of the dev team, I was more apt to discuss further, asking about their software stack, or their thoughts on competing products, or the future roadmap of the product. This type of perspective a salesperson doesn't have and usually can't officially speak about.

[jay_kyburz]

Last time I did an Adwords Campaign I was paying about 30-50c a click. I'm doing web games at the moment so really don't have any figures for buying adds on mobile.

I have heard anecdotally that a click in a mobile game costs a lot less.

Fully agree that spending a small percentage of your marketing budget on shows is great. And as I said before, they are heaps of fun and a great holiday for the team. You get to rub shoulders with the press and meet other devs.

But, I think somebody else mentioned these guys aren't even paying themselves a salary yet.

[corin_]

How does that 30-50c look once its turned into sales, as in how many clicks per sale? (Unless you don't directly sell anything).

Anyone who exhibits at an event for fun is a fool, as is anyone who exhibits at an event but doesn't find it fun. In my experience - and maybe this differs in other industries or indeed other parts of the games industry - events couldn't be further from holidays, most event organisers and exhibitors I know, myself included, would tell you they are the most tiring and most stressful times of the year. But for some of us, that's what makes them enjoyable.

Of course there's fun to mix in and around them in ways that being away from the normality of office life let's you have, but it's generally a case of lletting off steam while working crazily hard, not of enjoying a break from working. My last event consisted of 10 days without a break, 10-12 hours minimum, or 15+ during the 4 days of set-up / pack down, but it was still the most fun I've had recently.

[vibrunazo]

But it's a lot of money tho. If your goal is marketing, then isn't it a more efficient cost per user acquisition to just buy adwords or whatever online ads instead?

$3k is a lot of ad impressions.

[patio11]

It's virtually impossible to make AdWords work for their business model, and if it were not impossible it would require someone intelligent to implement, and unlike game developers SEM specialists expect to get paid on a regular basis.

This is largely a function of the unit economics of indie games being terrible compared to e.g. the unit economics of a free to play MMORPG.

[gavanwoolery]

It's hard to make an impression when you have no money left to make a game. Make the game first, and if its good it will market itself. If you have funds left over after the game is finished, THEN you can spend them on extras.