What makes Neave special and successful? Find out and follow the 5-tips to success.
What makes Neave so successful? I wondered why people from different ages want to play Paul Neave’s games. So I went to the site and explored it myself. Honestly, it was hard to leave it.
What is the developer doing so well?
The answer is simple: Paul Neave offers innovative and original stuff as well as popular games. As he says in an ICanLocalize blog post, “I love making stuff people enjoy.” Paul stands on the gamers’ feet and makes games as if he was the gamer himself, the user is all the time in his mind at the moment of creating.
How to achieve that success? For weddings, it’s said brides have to wear “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue” -the tips to achieve success in their marriage. Maybe something can be learned from Neave and developers can take the following as 5-tips to reach success.
Everybody likes to remember the old games that we used to play. It goes beyond the game per se, but it brings back old memories, and all the nostalgia that comes with it. Who doesn’t like to feel what we felt when we were kids or teens.
If you visit Paul’s site, you can perceive something special, something that for many people is ‘digital gold’. With all his potential for innovation, Paul never forgot about that first golden age of gaming and features popular games of all times, such as Simon and Tic-Tac-Toe.
Neave offers users the classic retro mobile phone game Snake and the traditional game of Tetris as well. For some, ‘retro’ is the future. Retro represents a generational response by the under-40 crowd against the uniformity of much of today's mass marketing. It’s good to include something that’s reminiscent of the past.
We are all caught up by innovative stuff, games that have something outstanding that calls our attention, some feature that makes it different from everything else in the market. Have you tried the Neave’s Webcam Toy? I have, and can’t stop playing with it.
The same goes for Bouncy Balls, a simple game to keep bouncing balls with your mouse or microphone. Create interactive and original games that keep everybody –from kids to grown-ups- totally hooked to the screen -success is in your hands!
We can’t avoid a link to social media. We can’t say it rules the world, but it’s top high in everyday life. And, for a good reason too. When you create a social game, you’re letting people spread it virally. If it’s good, it’s going to catch fire.
Neave combined old and popular games with innovative tools all in one place and made it even accessible to share in Twitter and Facebook. All of his games and tools are available to share with friends! From complex and amazing tools like Planetarium - an interactive sky map for exploring the stars and planets- to relaxed ones such as Television - a TV without context that let’s you click and channel-hop. Don’t forget we live in a “Play and Share” era. If we understand it, we’ll be in.
It doesn’t matter the kind of music you like, music is fun and can even reduce stress. Music can catch you for hours. How did Neave incorporate it to his site? With a Digital Graffiti at Alys Beach, making use of a resource who all of us have used some time or use regularly: YouTube! A space to stand back and just watch a video -good idea among games, don’t you think so? Music is a universal language enjoyed by everybody, take advantage of it!
Developers with games who do well feel an urge to expand globally. Many game developers find in ICanLocalize the easy way forward. The localizers at ICanLocalize help with the construction of a version of the game in different languages, they help testing it in context and help work out the variants that will work in the target cultures. For example, Neave’s “Webtoy Camera” would not have made sense if translated literally, translator found the way to make it catchy and “Cámara mágica” (Magical Camera) was used instead -it definitely catches Spanish users attention!
Neave didn’t become successful overnight. No matter how much great advice you read, there’s nothing replacing hard work and tuned senses. You need to be out there, see what the people want you to build it for them.
Sometimes, especially when you’re just getting started, huge success comes only after failed attempts. If you wrote a great game but it’s not getting the traction you had hoped for, don’t give up. Go back to the drawing board, see which essential elements are missing and try again.
Once Neave’s games became so popular, the next logical thing was to expand and offer the same great games to people from different parts of the world.
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