Jason was recently interviewed by Gamasutra: Topic – Interview: Novaleaf’s Swearingen talks injecting Biology Battle onto XNA Community Games , and appeared on their front page!  (also on GameSetWatch) In this post Jason talks about the costs involved in starting up a game studio, and the impact of doing so in the Kingdom of Thailand.

Jae (our artist) made some new box art for the game, pretty good.  What do you think?

Biology Battle Retail Box

One of the biggest reasons we got around to fixing our blogs website is the need for marketing.

We have spent about 1 year working on Biology Battle, and so it would be a shame if all that hard work (and great game) went to waste because the gamers (Be them “core” or “casual”) dont even know the game exists, and will be on xbox360 in less than a month.

I’ve spent some time on the XNA forums asking questions like “how much do you think this game is worth?” in an attempt to figure out a proper price point. (FYI, MSFT will allow us to charge 200, 400, or 800 points for our game: $2.5, $5, or $10 respectively). So far, I’m starting to think the $10 price would be best, just because of the awesome features we are rolling out into the game over the next month (which are only hinted at in the PC demo).

This post is about marketing?

So yes, back to marketing. Here’s what we’ve done so far:

• Forum Posts: We have started posting to various game related forums,
• Sent PC Demo to review sites: we sent copies of the PC demo for review at various game sites. Though in order to get better responses, we will probably have to send them the full version as soon as it’s done, including sending them msft points to play the game “for real” on xbox live come launch date.
• XBLCG Launch Title: Our game is scheduled to be one of the launch titles of the new XBox Live Experience, this Nov 19th, and so hopefully the novelty of XBLCG will get it some attention
• Dream Build Play (DBP) entry: we entered as a contestant in the September DBP contest sponsored by Microsoft. Unfortunately we haven’t heard the results of this yet, so it’s still unknown if we will get any positive press release from this, but I’m hopeful our game will be in the top 10 (at least) so there’s a chance for press coverage due to this.
• Google Adwords: we are going to do an adwords campaign, hopefully to get the word out about our game to what I consider the “target market” via words I think the target searches for. Since this will by first foray into Adwords, I’m sure we’ll miss the target the first few weeks/months, but we better start learning this system now, “it’s a strange new world” out there folks.
• Blog: And last but not least, this blog. I wanted to have a blog for myself, my company, and my employees for a long time, and we did for a short while, but for various reasons the old system didn’t work. This time around I’m going for the “hosted site/service” model, which I’m hoping means we wont suffer the technical problems that plagued the old site. Though unfortunately this also means less customization options, which is rather disappointing as I want this blog to be shared by perhaps 15 people at my company…

In conclusion:

I’m not a marketing guy, Phil (our marketing guy) is. I have enough business experience to recognize this as being critical to a successful launch and lifetime for any product, and I recognize (and now fully appreciate) how difficult it is to market effectively. Let’s see how the next month, leading up to our Nov 19th launch goes. It’ll be an interesting ride, to say the least.

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