You’ve been dreaming of building a video game for years. But how do you build a successful video game? A good idea isn't enough. It might be the least important factor in your success. To make money (and lots of it) you need to consider these 5 tips before you get started on game design.

1. You need a game idea that’s easy to play and hard to master

When you’re creating a game, you need to make sure that you’re creating a game that’s easy to play but hard to master. This is a really important concept in game design. Fantastic games do not come along once in a blue moon.

These are the five basic tips that you need to understand to build any successful video game. Get your full list of tips in The Search Engine Optimization Workflow.

So You Want a Video Game

1) Create a Ridiculously Cool Concept

The coolest ideas come to us all the time from many places and often have little to do with what we think as an ordinary consumer may think. Consider this excellent concept about bringing animals together by creating bridges to cross the streams of the internet under the sea. This concept inspired one of the all-time great games, Tetris. I think we can all agree that the concept is very cool.

However, most of these are concepts that would be viable for a trivia game and not a video game. As a video game, you want to create a buzz of demand so that when you open your doors, you feel the enthusiastic group of buyers eating, drinking, and swearing like it’s their lives. This is particularly true with animated videos where reactions and emotions come forth in hot streams right as you’re about to play the game.

2) Choose a Non-Converting Game Concept

Non-converting games would be games that no one wants to play. This can be implied with the word “no” rather than “no one.” Crazy, I know. A game that no one wants and is therefore unprofitable, is not a good way to build a video game. Some non-converting games may work if you hide the “Offer” button until after someone has died and the game is over.

2. Make your game appealing to many different people

Tip #1: Optimize for Conversion

Consistently optimizing your website content to increase conversions helps you to gain popularity, increase customer value, and build your brand. Video games are no exception. To optimize a video game for conversions, you need to:

Be sure to use the game title field Insert a clear description Make sure that there's a way for the customer to sign up for your product/service Be sure to have calls-to-action on the purchase page so that the customer needs to register before they buy those games be sure to provide enough information regarding the game itself, its rules, monetization, and payment options be sure to have social share buttons on the page so that you can get the word out Be sure to optimize the page itself (TITLE, DESCRIPTION, etc.).

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