Thinking big, while staying small

While I was admiring the screenshot with 3 of my games being featured on AndroidTV, I wondered why so few small development teams are not adding “branding” to their icons. Just a simple orange-face in the bottom corner quickly turns those three icons into one single brand. If you enjoy one of those games, that little orange-face smiling at you will probably make you try out the other games with less hesitation.

It’s called branding, and it’s something many, mostly smaller, developers are not doing.

Size doesn’t matter

You don’t need to be a huge company to add such branding to your games. All you need is a clear logo, and 5 minutes to paste it, yet so many small team developers are not doing it. Why not? Orangepixel is also a one-man team, and I’ve been slowly growing the brand over the years, in all ten years of doing business my logo has stayed close to the same: an orange-smiley. Even these days I still get people saying “I remember playing those games back on my Nokia” after seeing the logo blink onto their latest iDevice or Android phone.

Taking this a little bit further, there’s a lot of stuff many smaller teams are not doing that they should be doing, let’s do a little checklist:

1) do you post articles, posts, or blogs about your work on your site/facebook/tumblr frequently?
2) do you write articles/blogs for other sites ?
3) do you have a youtube channel showing new stuff? not just trailers, but things you are working on.
4) are you active on social media? responding to people, posting screenshots of things you only worked on for one day?
5) do you use your logo where-ever possible? (on websites, forums, etc)

Those things are called marketing, but most of all, it’s actually fun to do. You get early feedback from people on your work, you get to show them something that’s coming, and more importantly: people like the feeling of being involved in the creation of your games.

Business stuff

Creating games is great, but selling games is done by marketing and “business stuff”. Writing articles for third-party websites gets you attention and gets your name or brand known. Every eyeball counts. Showing your work early makes people know about it and showing your work often, makes people remember and hopefully even want it when it’s really completed.

You might think posting a “hey I released this” on twitter or facebook is enough, but it’s not. Most messages are not even read and you need to post it up-to four times a day to even have the possibility of all your followers reading about it (and most still won’t read about it).

And what happens when twitter or facebook are replaced with the next big thing? Do you have a way to reach your followers and fans on new platforms? You probably will want them to recognize your orange smiley and start following you because they remember the other games with that smiley and how much fun they had.

Branding is important, are you branding your games? let me know in the comments!