I was reading the YoYo Games (YYG) blog, or Glog, as Sandy, the apparent CEO of YYG, calls it, the other day. The latest news bit was about how the YYG website had reached over 8,000 games since the site went public in April (not sure, around then). Pretty cool, except YYG is due for a major decline in traffic if they keep up what they are doing now. I have pointed out a few little things that will make the difference for a strong year’s end and a even stronger new year.
Advertising -
I love the YYG website design. Why? It’s clean, fresh, and very Web 2.0-y. It is built on Ruby on Rails, is often quite fast, and definetly has content. But, when they released Beta 2 a few months ago, they introduced a new feature called Google Ads. Why the hell would you put ads on the website? I know why they did it, for money of course, because GM licenses don’t make them that much. But why would you place them right on the LEFT side of the main page? Why? It screws up the alignment, and it looks as if someone pooped on the side of the page. YYG needs to make smaller ad areas, and place them around the site, not just on the left of the page. No one likes ads, not even me, I ad block them. But they least you can do for the people without Ad Block, or IE, is make them look a bit better!
Advertising also has another segment, this time for the website, not on the website. I have yet to see any kind of YYG advertisement on anything. No web ads, no podcast ads, nothing (though Masked Media is looking for a sponsor, YoYo :P). What they need to do is launch a two week long web advertisment crusade. The goal should be to try and get as many people as possible to the YoYo site. Why? Not everyone wants to make games. If they did, you would have people buying Game Maker licenses every day. Drive traffic to the site, advertise the hell out of Instant Play. Do it. Now.
Game Maker -
Game Maker is a good catalyst to bring people to your website: ‘Make your own games using Game Maker!’. But the thing is, we still have the same version of Game Maker 7 that came out earlier this year. Its November already. I am waiting for something new to make me want to go back to Game Maker, at least even open it. If you want people to want your product, bring it up to date. The news on the Mac version is great, YoYo just needs to show us that they are serious about the program that keeps them afloat.
How can they do this? Make some sort of built in tutorial system for Game Maker beginners. Chances are someone doesn’t want to go to some site and download a print tutorial. Make some sort of video system that shows them the basics.
To YoYo: This is what you will need to do to really kick off the new fiscal year.