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What About "Ad Placement" in A homebrew to defrey costs?


wiseguyusa

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and I don't think ad placement really works out for games with orders of magnitude more distribution than Atari 2600 homebrews have, much less the few dozen to a hundred that a successful homebrew will sell.

And this is the ultimate nail in the coffin regarding this debate, putting aside all ethics and philosophy. Advertisements in homebrew or really any extremely limited form of media have an entirely negligeable Return On Investment (ROI.) Additionally, the context in which the advertisement sits is also extremely important. This is why successful internet advertising campaigns rely on contextual ads (such as Google Adwords/Adsense.) You can't put an advertizement for Dial Soap or even a Mom and Pop restaurant into an Atari Cartridge and expect even a single person to see and visit that establishment even if your homebrew had a release on the order of 10k sales.

 

If you advertized WITHIN the homebrew community, such as (just an example) an advert saying "Developed with Batari Basic and a Harmony Cart", your effectiveness increases, but this ad isn't something I'd see people paying real money for, but rather a scratching each others backs or a genuine appreciation for a product and not quite an ad in the traditional sense.

 

To be quite frank, traditional Advertizing is THE weakest form of marketing and branding, and the only reason it works with the bigger guys is purely because of the reach of the product or media it's contained in. (Millions of seen ads when going into branding territory, 100s of thousands to push for sales for ROI) It's power in numbers, and the homebrew community does not have those numbers.

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I guess I should clarify when targeting local companies merely a shout out isn't going to work. Basically, the whole game must revolve around the brand. When I was negotiating with a local video game store to sell my carts I offered to make them a game. I talked to the owner about what kind of game he'd like and possible names.

 

The game never came to fruition but it did end up with an affirmative to getting future games on his shelves.

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Yes, assuming you're willing to actually talk (gross, I know) to small business owners that deal with retro gaming, getting your cartridges available for sale outside the internet isn't exactly difficult, even if it's on a consignment basis. And in that sense, getting the 5 dollar "profit" margin to defray development costs isn't entirely unfeasible if you're patient. I've actually been approached by a couple of shops in my community (and one outside of it) to do this, but getting cartridges made is kind of expensive to consider that right now. Maybe if I had my own eprom burner.

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