[muzani]

I don't think marketing is too hard honestly. It's just that many people make a game that doesn't look amazing on the surface. The hits come with a different structure. If you can't hook someone in the first 3 seconds, it's going to be very difficult. That means name, screenshots, etc too.

I could do a little analysis, but Genfanad is probably hard to sell because... what's the name mean? It seems rather niche and artsy. I'm not sure what's going on from the site. Reconquest is quite obvious from the name and going into the screen, it seems... woah, maybe I have a lot of agency here? Then you look at comments and read of people getting ganked without moderator interference. That's likely why it took off.

Many games are fun to build and play, but they'll never ever be hits and have to be fixed from a structural level. Names are easy to fix. Steam is also very much hit and miss; if you don't have a certain level of wishlists, it's just going to be a waste of time doing any marketing.

[boesboes]

Then I think you underestimate your marketing prowess; because these are not obvious things to everyone.

For me building cloud infrastructure is easy, the choices and tradeoffs are obvious to me. To all my colleagues in the past 16 years it's been some sort of magic. They are smart people, mostly, but lack the experience and make 'obivous' mistakes all the time.

[muzani]

They're all learnable skills. But I guess my point is if it's taking 95% of the effort, it's probably the wrong path. But when you've already put the effort into that one game, it's hard to see yourself marketing a different game.

There's a good video on designing games to be sold. The base idea is to treat it like a search algorithm. You can be an amazing fisherman but you can't catch many fish where there's no fish. https://youtube.com/watch?v=o5K0uqhxgsE