A love story or a quick one? Games and their players

A preliminary note: while studying the problems and stories concerning videogame marketing, I sometimes find an interesting perspective under which your game or game idea should be examined. The game marketing field is complex and immature, and does not seem to be approachable in systematic ways. So maybe the “lens” approach used by Jesse Schell for game design:

Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses.

can result useful also in video game marketing.

One such a lens has just been published by Tadhg Kelly on What Games Are, and is introduced by

Forget everything else for a moment and consider that your game is just a graph of users over time.

There are several factors that influence your game’ users/time graph, one such graph from the post:

Several factors and resulting graphs are in the linked article. What matters is that when planning your (our) game marketing, we consider it through this lens and make the game design and planned marketing coherent with the curve we want to obtain. If for example you are planning a game for free-to-play and for virtual items sales, you should indeed ensure that the imagined graph is not like the one above, so game design should include enough content to get users to return to the game.