Marketing PlanBy Oliver Stroud.

Review of type of market.Ninja rush is a digital downloadable game for iPhone/iPad. 59% of Americans play

video games, this includes Smartphone apps all the way to high end consoles such as Xbox’s/Play stations. 68% play games on a Console, 53% play games on

smartphones and 41% play games on a wireless device. The smartphones have increased by 22% since 2012 so this gives our game a good reason to aim for

Smartphone apps. The average gamer is 31 years old, 29% under 18, 32% 18-35 and 39% 35+ this also tells us that if we make our game slightly challenging then it

will show to the older generations that it has a task instead of younger people playing it and not getting as much sales form it. The gender on the other hand is

52% Male and 48% female, we can now target our game at mainly Killers and Achievers so it gets both the audiences to try and play our game.

46% of the population would rather play a casual game on their smartphone this tells us that if we make ninja rush a casual but hard game people may be interested in it,

Angry birds had over 200+million downloads and is a casual game, it is similar to our game due to shooting the enemies.

The digital game sales in Q2 last year were hit with a $1.4billion, making a 22% increase in previous years, the annual spending on game in the USA for retail was

$7.1billion, which represented about 48 percent of the total of $14.8 Billion spent on games. the retail market for new game is now less than the combination of other

revenue. !!

Description of target market.Ninja rush focuses on the Killers and Achievers of the gaming market, Killers focuses on the fun of completive game and dominance, win and loss situations, These players may end up knowing certain strategies such as how to shoot faster, when to shoot, how to get high scores and things

like this. whilst as an Achiever the fun comes from gaining the high scores and better possessions such as upgrades on guns in the game, bombs, your own personal equipment and things like this, they would try to achieve this by getting as much coins and completing the goals

as soon as possible. !!

Ninja rush has a potential market age range for 12+ this is because the game shows moderate violence with the use of guns and lethal weapons such as ninja stars, also the strategy of the

game is quite complex and can be hard to master. the reason why this is a 12+ game is because EA rating board in 2013 received a rating of ‘12+’ which stands for people who are old enough or have parental convent although it still as a very high market window at 54% of people can then play. This will show the rating for Ninja rush and stands out more for consumers and or

parents to buy the game. due to it having violence but not very graphical, but must be rated at the age due to what equipment is being used.

!The game would be based for iPhone/iPad, 44% of people play games on their smart for that are

casual/achievers so this is almost half the video game market on one type of style. !!!!!

Promotion idea.

To promote our game, we could set up a twitter account, by doing this we could follow whoever we want and get as many people to try and follow back, we can get our game out there by giving a few packs of stickers or iPhone cases giveaways, for example a certain amount of retweets and/or favourites then we would pick someone who done it

and give them a free iPhone case and some stickers. !

We could also fund a 5-aside tournament and get people to wear and play in our t-shirts, we could link this to the twitter posts by showing people wearing the merchandise

for sport and then for the winners of the tournament they could get more stickers, t-shirts, iPhone cases and small merchandise like this.

Primary research.From data collected from Rovio’s Angry Birds, males are 35% more likely to buy an Angry Birds game than females, and 18-24 year old males are 76

percent more likely to buy an Angry birds game compared to females 25 and older. !

In our app is also a game, we are targeting a similar audience, we took this data into prospective when planning our marketing strategy, competitive

insights can provide direction for how to best package our game for mobile users, as well as recommendation on what strategies haven’t worked.

!To help my research for who might play or buy our game, i made a

questionnaire which would give me a more accurate and precise idea of what audience i would be looking for and also the genders of each player.

Primary research.Gender:

From the feedback i have got, it has become clear that the game appeals to the male audience more than it does the female, i reckon this because the game consist

of weaponry and violence, Although, the entire feedback group both male and female have mentioned it has the appeal of a highly addictive game and that they

would buy it if it was to go on sale for smartphone apps. !

Theme: The theme has a high amount of positive feedback. Every member of the feedback group have appreciated the characters we have used and they feel that the ninjas

are fun and promising concept in our game and it shows enjoyment. !

Casual and core: From the feedback group half were core gamers who also happened to be male and

other half were casual. The core gamers picked up where they thought the game needed enhancing and also other games that are similar to ours. where as the casual gamers like the involvement of unlock able content and achievements

include in our game, such as your own personalised armour and things like that.

Primary ResearchPromotion product stickers and labels are one of the best forms of advertising by far, and its not hard to see why either, they are cheap to create and a lot of them at one time, also they can be

stuck anywhere you would like to stick them. !

We can put or logo/design on anything. They are great for planning a bit of marketing, or want to brand everything that is in sight, it’s great way to spread the word about as a brand.

Two possible adverts.I have decided to make a few stickers for an idea of my advert, as stickers can be used well to find out about certain games and also it attracts the consumers eye to the game depending on how you show it, for example the use of gradient colours in

one of the stickers.

These are two basic stickers, they show the title of the game ‘Ninja rush” and a picture of the

secret agent holding his gun with an angry face, this can appeal to the consumer because it’s a bold

gradient colour sticker and stands out well

Two possible PromotionsFor my first idea, it is aimed at the casual gamers, i decided to do this

because it’s a simply design with the characters on the t-shirt facing each other on the back. Also if the casual gamers are interested but not overly

hyped about the game this is a good t-shirt as it has the two main characters of our game and stands out but not to much.

For my second idea, it is aimed at the more hardcore but also slightly more than casual gamers as you would spend a bit more money on the product, also it shows the meaning of the product in a more of a gamer

way. The iPhone case is a good product as i personally believe it has more of a meaning that a t-shirt or hoodie with a print on it, it shows that the

person enjoys playing the game and also enjoys the graphic design on the case.

How would we sell our products?

We would be able to sell our products by using the website to sell them, or we could use websites such as amazon, eBay, also we would try to market

our game at the gaming websites as well such as GAME, hmv, play.com and places like this, this allows the gamers to recognise our game as well as is

good for promotion as we would be using the gaming websites. !

A schedule for the release of adverts/promotions.

We would schedule the release of our adverts/promotions before and after the game comes out, for example the stickers we can stick anywhere before our game is completed so people know about our game and that it will be coming out soon, also with the stickers we could make it so that you can scan it and it would take

you to our webpage where updates and news about the game will be coming out, for example, once taken to the website before the game is out it will give you the information of when the game is coming out or what updates we are doing at the

the moment to the game. !

After or once the game will be released, the fans that enjoy our game may be interested in buying a phone case with the characters, or logo’s on the game, we

would release this a bit later like a week or two once our game is out, we would do this because people may enjoy the game and be really into it where as if you

publish it before the game being out people may have no idea what the game is about, but we would release it this early because even though the game would of

just came out it is a good way to promote the game in a quicker way as well instead of leaving it for a little longer when there may be new high end market

games around such as titan fall, Call of Duty and games like this.

Competitors of our gameThe competition for our game is hard, due to the fact that so many games are like ours such

as running and shooting games, also you have to compete against the rest of the market such as big hit games like Candy Crush, Angry Birds and games like this, so we need to find the

best time to publish our game, from the data we have found we would go to a few of the events that are big, such as the EGX London show, this show has the biggest console and PC games before release, also they show all indie games and small business games, even Board games. This would be a good place to market our game and show it before release because the amount of people that go to this also it gives us a good idea as well to see what category

we have to compete in.

Budgets.For the EGX London games show, it costs £60 for a ticket, also travel would cost a fair amount around £50 on travel. and then we can stay somewhere in

London thats cheap for 3 nights on the 25th-28th september, !

Web banners would cost us a fair amount, around £350-400 P/W for sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Game station all the websites are more or less casual gamers or used for socialising, but if i wanted to use it on proper gaming

websites it would cost me around £650-700 for websites such as IGN, PAX, Gamespot.

!Using the website. www.merchasylum.co.uk t-shirts were at a reasonable price at 100x1 colour prints only £320. this is using a oversized print as well so our logo or picture would stand out well, but if we wanted to have 100x2 colour

prints it would cost us slightly more at £390. if we wanted say 500 t-shirts in x2 colour prints it would cost us £1950 we could

sell the t-shirts at around £10 each which would give us £5000 with a profit of £3050. !

For our Twitter we would have a budget of around £500, this allows us to use promotion tweets for our game and when someone would retweet it our

favourite it, a small amount of money would be taken out of our account via twitter for letting us promote our game over there website instead of using web

banners and things like this.

Price of our game.Our game is FREE, but if you want something really badly such as coins/credits for

weapons and armour and things like this, we will allow you to pay a small payment for a pack for example, 2000 credits/coins could cost you £0.99 but if you want a good pack deal were say you get 50000 credits/coins and armour/weapons in your game

you could say it cost £19.99 for all this, it works out cheaper than buying 2000 credits every now and then but in the long run it may be better, we would promote this offer by maybe making a special weekend deal and announcing it on the game or over

twitter using promotional codes to get 50% off, also if you play the game 5x in a row each day we may give the consumer a little something to say thank you for playing

our game like 1000 free credits.

Twitter

We made a twitter account, we followed a lot of people that we don't know just so it can get the name out of our game for us as you can see within 1 minute we managed to gained 4

followers after following 454, yes it’s quite shy and not many but as we have only just started we can now do tweets for giveaways and purposes like that.

This is tweet is promoting our game by giving away free stickers at a certain meeting point, also underneath

someone shouted us out; this means his followers can see us as well and they might follow us or see what we

actually are.

Smartphone apps that have done well.

The app temple run was self budgeted, they used there money from the 2 jobs they had to create the game, the ended up quitting there jobs to focus more on the gaming market, at first they made a few that got a decent amount of downloads but not enough to keep them living. When temple run came out, it was in the paid charts, it got to about top 50. and then

dropped to 100, then they decided to make it free. this is when it went top 1 for the 28th december - 7th january, the ability to be able to pay in the game is why they went free so

people could decide if they wanted to pay for a few extra coins or credits or new characters/power ups.

Evaluation

What have i done?My marketing plan was fairly brief, i had target

audience for 9+ year olds, but the thing was all of them didn’t use twitter, so i had re market my

game at the adults as well so that they can see it and then buy it or download it for the child as it has an age restriction towards it. Also i had not

included who i will be competing against in games, so i researched game shows, and when

they are on so we can advertise our game. I done this by looking at what game show would be

suitable for ours and would work well.

Further evaluationFurther research will be taken into consideration,

I will be doing this by focusing on the price, product, place and promotion and how they would all relate towards my target audience

weather it would be a game for free, but have a pay in purchase as well incase you want to buy a certain upgrade for weapons and things like that. I would research into games that are like

ours, such as endless runner games to see how they market their game and weather they have

pay in apps as well.