How does marketing work?

[Stealth]

Why does $ go down? Is that just the cost of marketing vs. profit? What happens when the green bar fills, is there just a big spike in sales or is it just to limit how much you can market a product?

Been watching a let's play and I'm curious as to how it works.

[Pazox]

The money goes down for marketing, because marketing costs money (material, pay for deals and so on).
The green bar fills, because this is the daily progress from the marketing. If it is full then the work is done for the day.

[Emonadeo]

Yeah. And depending on how far the bar got till the end of the day it's unavoidable for 100% filled or sparse for 10% filled for instance.

[Stealth]

Ok thanks

[erikickes]

Sometimes marketing deals seem to cost me money and i'm trying to figure out why. Do you think if the daily budget isnt used up I have to pay the difference or something? Usually I make a lot but occasionally I'll see a huge red mark on my monthly from a marketing deal.

[The Prophet]

Originally posted by Emonadeo:

Yeah. And depending on how far the bar got till the end of the day it's unavoidable for 100% filled or sparse for 10% filled for instance.

+10

[Jason]

I dont know I make stuff and sell 0 copies and have no clue why, spend thousands in marketing....makes no sense. this whole game makes no sense. I can't even get started because nothing I've made has sold any copies.

[POTATOMAN19]

Originally posted by Jason:

I dont know I make stuff and sell 0 copies and have no clue why, spend thousands in marketing....makes no sense. this whole game makes no sense. I can't even get started because nothing I've made has sold any copies.

Start off doing some contracts, a 5x5 office for your founder would be enough. I usually kick off my first project at around 50K sometimes 30K. A 2D editor would do, don't rush into other stuff too early if you're playing hardcore without cheats or some sort. I would hire another guy that specifically do art stuff with a bit in coding and leave the majority of designing/coding and marketing to founder. REMEMBER the money (30~50K) is for facilities upgrade, you'll need a toilet, a common room and a "workable" office for your employee. (Plan a head, maybe make space for 6 people in the office? - but start off with just a desk is fine.) If it is still tough, try 2-3 days a month slows the game down but easier to play. I would also do contracts in between when money is a problem (you're heading to bankrupcy- pause the main project a bit). I would not reccommend press release too early on when you just got into alpha stage. (would normally wait for in house review get around 7 for that). Biggest jump for followers would be a press build, do this when you're confident with your software (outsource 7-8 or even 9 if you're hardcore). My rule of thumb is to just promote right after the press build review, and give it another month for bug fixes then release.

I normally bank around 500K to 1MIL after the first project. This is where the game gets trickier. But for now getting pass the first stage in Alpha 9 is pretty hard :) imo.

Hope this helps

[erikickes]

Originally posted by POTATOMAN19:

Originally posted by Jason:

I dont know I make stuff and sell 0 copies and have no clue why, spend thousands in marketing....makes no sense. this whole game makes no sense. I can't even get started because nothing I've made has sold any copies.

Start off doing some contracts, a 5x5 office for your founder would be enough. I usually kick off my first project at around 50K sometimes 30K. A 2D editor would do, don't rush into other stuff too early if you're playing hardcore without cheats or some sort. I would hire another guy that specifically do art stuff with a bit in coding and leave the majority of designing/coding and marketing to founder. REMEMBER the money (30~50K) is for facilities upgrade, you'll need a toilet, a common room and a "workable" office for your employee. (Plan a head, maybe make space for 6 people in the office? - but start off with just a desk is fine.) If it is still tough, try 2-3 days a month slows the game down but easier to play. I would also do contracts in between when money is a problem (you're heading to bankrupcy- pause the main project a bit). I would not reccommend press release too early on when you just got into alpha stage. (would normally wait for in house review get around 7 for that). Biggest jump for followers would be a press build, do this when you're confident with your software (outsource 7-8 or even 9 if you're hardcore). My rule of thumb is to just promote right after the press build review, and give it another month for bug fixes then release.

I normally bank around 500K to 1MIL after the first project. This is where the game gets trickier. But for now getting pass the first stage in Alpha 9 is pretty hard :) imo.

Hope this helps

Helps but doesn't really help with the marketing. What to spend, what do the bars under marketing even mean, how long do you run the marketing, what is Hype, etc.? I feel like there is a manual out there somewhere that i'm missing.

[Luciferci]

Originally posted by erikickes:

Originally posted by POTATOMAN19:

Start off doing some contracts, a 5x5 office for your founder would be enough. I usually kick off my first project at around 50K sometimes 30K. A 2D editor would do, don't rush into other stuff too early if you're playing hardcore without cheats or some sort. I would hire another guy that specifically do art stuff with a bit in coding and leave the majority of designing/coding and marketing to founder. REMEMBER the money (30~50K) is for facilities upgrade, you'll need a toilet, a common room and a "workable" office for your employee. (Plan a head, maybe make space for 6 people in the office? - but start off with just a desk is fine.) If it is still tough, try 2-3 days a month slows the game down but easier to play. I would also do contracts in between when money is a problem (you're heading to bankrupcy- pause the main project a bit). I would not reccommend press release too early on when you just got into alpha stage. (would normally wait for in house review get around 7 for that). Biggest jump for followers would be a press build, do this when you're confident with your software (outsource 7-8 or even 9 if you're hardcore). My rule of thumb is to just promote right after the press build review, and give it another month for bug fixes then release.

I normally bank around 500K to 1MIL after the first project. This is where the game gets trickier. But for now getting pass the first stage in Alpha 9 is pretty hard :) imo.

Hope this helps

Helps but doesn't really help with the marketing. What to spend, what do the bars under marketing even mean, how long do you run the marketing, what is Hype, etc.? I feel like there is a manual out there somewhere that i'm missing.

The more money you spend on marketing the faster it reaches an "unavoidable" marketing status. I usually pay 50.000€ /day (8days=1 month setting) per software. When I drop it to 20.000-25.000, after a while it's no longer unavoidable status.

After you're marketing (press release or a beta build for the press) a software during development phase you should get some followers for that particular software. That's the moment you should start hyping that software. With hyping you get more followers (and lose less).

[POTATOMAN19]

Originally posted by erikickes:

Originally posted by POTATOMAN19:

Start off doing some contracts, a 5x5 office for your founder would be enough. I usually kick off my first project at around 50K sometimes 30K. A 2D editor would do, don't rush into other stuff too early if you're playing hardcore without cheats or some sort. I would hire another guy that specifically do art stuff with a bit in coding and leave the majority of designing/coding and marketing to founder. REMEMBER the money (30~50K) is for facilities upgrade, you'll need a toilet, a common room and a "workable" office for your employee. (Plan a head, maybe make space for 6 people in the office? - but start off with just a desk is fine.) If it is still tough, try 2-3 days a month slows the game down but easier to play. I would also do contracts in between when money is a problem (you're heading to bankrupcy- pause the main project a bit). I would not reccommend press release too early on when you just got into alpha stage. (would normally wait for in house review get around 7 for that). Biggest jump for followers would be a press build, do this when you're confident with your software (outsource 7-8 or even 9 if you're hardcore). My rule of thumb is to just promote right after the press build review, and give it another month for bug fixes then release.

I normally bank around 500K to 1MIL after the first project. This is where the game gets trickier. But for now getting pass the first stage in Alpha 9 is pretty hard :) imo.

Hope this helps

Helps but doesn't really help with the marketing. What to spend, what do the bars under marketing even mean, how long do you run the marketing, what is Hype, etc.? I feel like there is a manual out there somewhere that i'm missing.

Okay, for marketing, it's a bit crazy confusing concept imo. I'll try to explain it the best I can...

For the developing stage (alpha), I feel that the more followers you get, the more the product will sell. ( I haven't test this with no marketing afterwards so I don't know how much it impacts the sell) Reason for me to say that you better off doing a Press Release 60-70% into alpha is because Press Release [For the sake of it I'll call this PR from now] reduces its effect after each use (You'll see that the press mention something like "Yes, yes we know...." or "Monkey Lab has been annoying us with..." and the followers hardly increase much more)

Hype is what you do to reduce the amount of followers dropping. Right after your first PR the amount of followers will usually increase for the first couple of months, and after that they start to drop. This is when Hype comes in, you use it to slow down this rate. So the more people in your marketing department, the slower this rate is (or the better they are at marketing). My experience is that because of the fact that PR reduces its own effect after each use, Hype is there to compensate this.

Last but not least the Press Build. It's your ULTIMATE! BOOM, followers increase like cray cray. Drop this Nuke at around 80-90% of the project so you get crazy amount of followers.

After the Release:

Here's the thing, the more product of the same kind you put it out there, the more reputation you got for that specific product line. So don't rush it if your first product only sell around 5000 copies even though its quality is great. This is actually your ground for the next product. Marketing after release will increase buyer each months so that you can sell more copies. So for the first project with only 5000 copies printed I would normally only go for 1000 bucks for marketing, my bet is that this number is the amount you want to put out each working day, so even though your market man does not finished the job on the day, it resets and roll over the next day with a "net amount" in the bar. I generally stop this when the amount of active users starting to drop ( A great product can last for 6-7 months after release or an operating system at high quality can last more than a year, your sales increase/decrease based on the day/month).

For me I played the game on my own and tested it out with couple of fails to get to this point. So there's not really a manual for me. I also watched how people failed, first before I played like Flabaliki and his run at alpha 9, tbh I only watch to EP4 and winged the game from there.