Recommended: How To Market A Game urges readers to "Consider the Horse Game"
How To Market A Game is the website and blog of game marketing consultant and strategist Chris Zukowski. His work includes highly condensed lists of game marketing tips on Steam that I recommend anyone building a Steam page for the first (or second or third) time take a look at.
This week, Chris’ latest blog post is all about horse games, summarizing some insights into our niche from yours truly. Find and read the full blog post here.
The post won’t be groundbreaking for any regular TMQ readers, but I do love the opportunity for the horse game plight to be exposed to more solo or small team game developers whose main concern is usually how to stand out from the mass of available games a problem that horse games decidedly do not have.
Part of Chris summary is “I don’t think every indie should make a horse game. They are very difficult to do correctly. They require a big budget, and a lot of expertise.” I agree insofar that nobody without the appropriate budget and expertise should try to make the sort of dream horse game that players in the niche say they want.
But making small horse-oriented games of a contained scope and growing from there is absolutely possible in my estimation. It would do our entire niche a lot of good if more developers tried to break out of the standard horse game mold and dared to remix the horse topic with other genres and playstyles.
I also really like Chris’ distinction that targeting a niche requires empathy more than it requires passion. If you’re a motivated game developer, I think you can absolutely make something worth playing and worth supporting for this audience even if you’re not a passionate equestrian yourself. All it takes is to be willing to listen to feedback, to treat our audience with respect, and to make use of the countless resources on how to tackle horses as a gamedev that I’ve written over the years.
If you’re a horse game developer, I can only recommend taking a look at Chris’ 60 Marketing Mistakes ebook in particular. And if you’re aspiring to get into the business of making horse games, here’s some highlights to get you started:
Join the Community of horse game players to read along and learn
Adding Horses to your Game: Tips, Resources, Do’s and Don’ts
Horse Animation: Guides, References and Resources