The curse of being original - popularizing Matrix Games

[MatrixGamer]

Okay - I have a few minutes - time to tackle this issue.

First the curse. Say you actually have something that is "New". It doesn't easily fit in any catagory and when people look at it they see it through the lense of where they are at. This means your thing is going to look weird to everyone. If it is not refined and VERY presentable it is going to be so quickly dismissed by people that your head will spin. Taking the step to a larger audience is tough.

For many years I contented myself with development work and spreading the idea to a small range of folks. A few years ago I seriously started work to make Matrix Games more popular. This has consisted of putting together different products and test marketing them (at Gen Con, Origins and on line). So far each experiement has died. It's like being the Monster in My Life with Master that never comes alive so they don't get to make the first move to find love. What the experiments have done though is help me refine the product.

Now I have a board game like product (color laminated map, characters, scenario, wooden counters, short simple rules) that I can sell at a low price point. I've got production methods ready to make profit on a single sale or 1000 sales. I've got the PDF sale route set up. I still think my web page sucks but that can be improved.

The plan I have is to offer one new product for sale each month up to Gen Con. I'm sending out review copies and putting up notices on web forums. I'm also joining into web forum discussions to be part of the community. So the production is there, a back log of product is there, the sales machinery is there, and I'm getting the message out. The marketing plan is six months in nature and doesn't cost much to run.

The challenge is how to popularize this thing. Most inventors don't popularize their own work. The tasks of popularity are not the same as creation. I know some of the popularizer skills from years of story telling (I love a good medicine show) and doing education seminars. What I'm wondering are people's thoughts on how to push snake oil? What are those skills?

This topic of course applies to all our games not just MGs.


Chris Engle

[komradebob]

First, find your audience.

I think your audience is "Gamers that want to play with their non-gamer friends/loved ones/kids".

[komradebob]

BTW- Have you ever submitted one of your games to Games Magazine either for review or as a one off article submission?

Link:http://www.gamesmagazine-online.com/gameslinks/askeditor.html

[MatrixGamer]

I haven't but that sounds like a great idea!

Chris Engle

[moonflovver]

I am with you on this one, I have helped write and create a few games under our independant label and the task of getting them out there and getting people to ackowledge them and understand them the way you do seems daunting.  We have taken the game to a convention or two but in reality I think the only thing you can do is make friends with junior high, high school and college kids, get them playing and have them spread the word from there.  I am thinking this will be my next marketing tactic.  If it works I will let you know.

[guildofblades]

>>We have taken the game to a convention or two but in reality I think the only thing you can do is make friends with junior high, high school and college kids, get them playing and have them spread the word from there.  I am thinking this will be my next marketing tactic.  If it works I will let you know.<<

That works and I highly encourage it if you can find a cost effective means of spreading your game virally through school age kinds. Once upon a time we seeded four local junior high and high school game groups in the Detroit area with a little over a thousand copies of a small 20 page digest RPG and utilized those groups and the local school libraries and three local comic shops (No actual game shops within a reasonable distance of those schools) to distribute that game's core rules. Over a two year period all the core games were distributed, we turned a tidy profit selling the many source books for the game through the local comic shops and had at least (as near as we could track) 50 different game groups spread throughout several local school districts that played the game.

The key, I think, is that when trying to turn schools into a viral marketing system you have to be able to get the product "out there" and make it easily accessible.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

[MatrixGamer]

A thousand games - say 25 cents a book (I'm guessing you did a small booklet on your digital duplicator). So you budgeted $250 to the project. Advertising.

Good idea.

Having an advertising budget can product results if you have a line of products to follow it up with. I'm not quite there but I'm getting closer. I still need to focus on lower cost approaches.

Chris Engle

[guildofblades]

>>A thousand games - say 25 cents a book (I'm guessing you did a small booklet on your digital duplicator). So you budgeted $250 to the project. Advertising.

Good idea.<<

Actually, those little booklets had only cost us about $.03 to $.04 each, so that cost of it was super cheap. It cost us more to give the free copies of the other gaming products we gave away to the core group of kids we had used to be our initial distribution point and launch that experiment.

We've since lost that connection. Well, not lost, but those kids grew up and are now off at college instead of junior high and high school. So not sure exactly how we would tap into that young market again through a similar project. But thats ok, what the experiment showed was that giving away an inexpensive core rules set could drive interest in a game and push sales of add on products. Now are am ramping up to begin preparations for the eventual printing of a million copies of a full color expanded core game set to give away to take the base idea from that experiment and make it big time. But to make that profitable we have to have a good selection of follow up product ready and a very well developed website to maximum our return so we can capitalize on the enthusiasm the give away generates. That and a couple hundred grand to kick start the program.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com