Crafting Unique Gaming Brands

When a game is inherently entertaining, it's easy to assume a compelling brand will naturally emerge. However, without focused effort, even the most engaging game may not stand out in a crowded marketplace. This article explores a potential roadmap for creating distinctive intellectual property. A clear, consistent, and distinctive brand increases the chances of success by providing clarity and cut-through in noisy environments, whether pitching to publishers, gaining in-house recognition, at launch, or maintaining a live game. To help players connect with your game, you need a clear offer that eliminates the superfluous. It's not about downplaying the great things your game offers but understanding that consumers and backers respond best to clear, consistent, and unambiguous ideas. Keep it simple to improve your chances of standing out. In a highly competitive market, distinctiveness and maintaining best practices improve the probability of creating and maintaining share of voice, mind, and sales, whether you're a major publisher or an indie developer. Being 'different' is nearly impossible, as most successful brands are built on linear category improvements and successes. However, being distinctive is available to all games, whether you're in a crowded category or doing something new. A three-part approach suggests a best practice roadmap to ensure your brand stands out and attracts backers and players. The three stages are: where you are now, where you're going, and the final route map. Stage one involves a reality check on your current position, starting with an internal brand audit and then applying the same audit to competitors and comparators. Capture internal views on your game's personality, review market opportunities, and use these to critique your current position and distinctiveness. Collate and review existing brand materials, such as character art, narrative, gameplay design, or early treatments. For competitors and comparators, conduct desk research, charting available visual and communication materials and identifying what makes them distinctive. Internal stakeholder analysis gathers opinions on the brand you're trying to create, capturing the personality, tone, or attitude you want to project. Market barriers and opportunities review the market and future trends, identifying barriers to growing your brand and opportunities to take advantage of. After mapping these pillars, critique each element, especially how you perform against competitors and comparators, using a simple scoring system to mark how well your brand is doing. Now that you know where you are, you can start working on where you need to go in creating a distinctive brand. You don't have to be completely different; you can develop and improve upon existing games. Take a successful game like Angry Birds, which stands out in a crowded genre through its cartoon birds, audio, and star system. Workshopping the following approach as a group exercise can help build a shared vision. Use your stage one findings as stimulus and work through where you can win and lose, what approaches will beat the competition, and what you want to keep, ditch, or develop. What works and what doesn't? Focus on emerging brand elements that motivate the team and align with your aims. Write a summary of your ideal player, including the experience they're looking for, what motivates them, and what else they play or have interests in. Avoid standard socio-demographics and focus on what motivates them and why they might fall in love with your game. Ask yourself what you want them to stop playing to create time or money for your game. Plot where your game's personality sits on various scales, such as serious to frivolous or traditional to novel. Describe your game in terms of smell, touch, taste, sight, and sound to distinctly represent your brand. Use these workings to describe your game in as few keywords as possible, focusing on what really matters and helping with the final stage of writing a value proposition. Create a master mood board as a group exercise, using visuals to communicate what's in your mind's eye and develop a visual consensus. Finally, write your value proposition, which should be a simple summary of what drives your players, where you stand out from competitors, and where you can win. Try to define it as a sentence or short paragraph, using the structure: THIS GAME IS – what the game does, FOR – description of your audience, WHO WANT – player motivations and needs, WE – where you win, THAT – the benefit of playing, UNLIKE – overt differentiation from competition, and BECAUSE – statement emphasizing your vision. Use the content from this process to create a short, punchy, memorable brand bible containing key findings, background, thought process, and value proposition. Refer to it positively when game development or marketing plans support it, and use it to induct new team members or third parties working on your game. When planning what and how to pitch, stream, or talk about in interviews, you'll have a clear, distinctive message. Communicate the few things that make you stand out, and mine these areas consistently for game content ideas and marketing collateral. Focus on optimizing the distinctiveness you already have, then scale it exponentially across your game, community relations, and marketing channels. Do your homework, collectively define a clear value proposition, be consistent, identify signature actions, own your proposition, be engaging, and tell stories. Make sure everything lines up with the value proposition, as it's never too late to pause and review. This process is designed to neither replace genuine creativity nor shackle it to a formula but will flush out ideas that don't make the mark. In a creative industry, your gut feeling about a game being 'right' or not is probably correct. This process can help elevate that gut feel into actionable activity that brings your idea to life and maintains your vision through development and publishing. Being distinctive is the ultimate memory maker and the first step to a successful game.