Hello everyone!Nice to find you! I'd love to read your views on a subject that is troubling me lately. Let's say I build a number puzzle game like Thees,2048 or Sudoku..I do know that to have any chance experiencing any success i have to have a solid gameplay,However,when it comes to marketing,do I increase my chances of success by artistically conecptualizing my game?What I mean by that,is maybe building a story around my game,creating characters or let's say replacing numbers on tiles with something more ...alive (characters,objects etc).Also,how much a good game title really counts?Would all those efforts make sense for those kind of "brain" games? I do know of course that games like threes,or 2048 have followed the "naked" route and succeeded.However,does that tell us anything about the artistic approach a developer with a similar kind of game should adopt? I'm looking forward to your thoughts!
You are wasting your time, finish the game and just release it. Promote it for free any way you can, but spending any money on it is a waste. I had a novel number game (5BY5) just as threes and 2048 were becoming popular, their games are no better, no worse, not graphically special, or even special game play. Why did theirs succeed but mine fail? Most likely they knew the right insider contacts or got lucky, probably both. There is no point "gaming" the system with a number puzzle game, having a success in that genre is basically like winning the lottery, for every success there are what: 10,000 - 100,000 failures? At 500 games released per day your chances of making money on a number puzzler are nearly zero. It doesn't matter if your game is the best game, it doesn't matter if you have the best execution and do everything correct, in the end it is nearly all luck.
I made a math puzzler game called Pug Ninja: Math Challenges some time before. Didn't dare to spend money marketing it. Tried any free way I could find. Didn't succeed much.