What should you do for your official game websites? What tools should you use, how should you design them, and where should you start? I can't throw a rock on social media without hitting a group of indie game developers asking these types of questions, and pitching in to help each other out.
There's a hundred ways you could make a website for your game, but I believe I've got the absolute best.
And the only reason I believe that is because I've spent most of my career building official game websites, as well as coaching indie game developers on how to optimize their websites to sell more games.
This is my signature blueprint for how to make the most effective official game websites as fast as possible. And bonus fry, it's cheaper too.
Official Game Websites Are Kind of a Pain in the Ass
Your game needs a website. That, we know. And getting one is relatively easy, right? You design and develop games, surely you can throw up a website. And since you're just getting started, there's no way you're going to spend thousands of dollars to hire someone else to do it.
And if your games aren't generating revenue, I don't think you should either.
But what starts to happen after you throw up a website is you start diving into customizations, tweaks, and trying a bunch of things. An hour turns into a day, a day into a few days, a few days into a few weeks. Creating your own website starts to become a bit of a pain in the ass. Still, it's not enough to make you pay someone else to do it, but enough to send you to game developer forums asking other people what they think.
So technically, you can make a website. What slows you down, what turns building one into kind of a disaster, is not knowing exactly what you should do, if what you've done is good, or if it's even going to work.
And let's face it, time is money. Every hour you spend on your website is another hour you're not spending to finish your game.
Official Game Websites Should Make You Money, Not Just Make You Look Good
I was helping a small indie game studio head optimize their marketing. They had launched a handful of games in the past year, each with its own website. When I asked what those websites cost and how well they performed, they clammed up. And when pressed, they finally admitted they felt websites were worthless.
But the one thing they did stress over and over, was that every time they made a game website it didn't "look like every other game website out there." And that these types of custom designed websites sometimes took weeks to complete.
So that's where all their time and money went, on making sure their websites looked cool, because they genuinely believed that effort would help them sell more games.
Unfortunately, they were wrong.
The truth is official game websites are just marketing pieces in a bigger marketing puzzle. They should be pointed towards a certain set of goals, and work in tandem with other pieces of game marketing, such as social media or public relations, to accomplish those goals.
But don't get me wrong, I fancy myself a beautifully designed game website. After all, I did help design the official websites, microsites, and experiences for many blockbuster films and AAA games.
However, even I admit looks alone don't sell games.
The "One and Done" Website Strategy
So your games need websites, but you can't afford to waste time and money on what doesn't work. You need an effective game website that you can stand up relatively fast, and with a relatively low cost of ownership. Furthermore, it's to your benefit to create a system out of what you do, so that building game websites becomes easier and faster, which is a long-term cost-savings.
Here's my signature system for building game websites that way:
1. Always Start with a Goal
Before building a game website, it's important you ask yourself what's the one thing, above all else, that you want potential players to do.
That's your game website's primary goal.
If you've ever built a game website without first asking yourself that question, you probably just copied what other game developers were doing. And while that's not necessarily a bad thing, their goals might be based on undisclosed business initiatives that don't really make sense for you.
A good rule of thumb for figuring out what your primary goal is when you're just starting out, is whether or not you've released your game. If you haven't released your game, then your goal should probably be to build up your audience before launch. And if you've already released your game, then your primary goal is simply getting traffic to your marketplace pages.
As your game grows with DLC, sequels, or spinoffs, that rule goes out the window. But it's the right place to start for now.
2. Give Your Game Websites Their Own Domain Names
The overarching goal of a game website is to sell your game to players. And the overarching goal of a game development studio website is to sell your company to business partners, employees, and the media.
That's why I never recommend using your company website as your game website, because it muddies the waters.
When you're just starting out, potential players don't care who you are. And so they're far more likely to follow your games. In fact, even when you're a popular developer, most players still don't care.
Infinity Ward and Treyarch are the two studios who develop games in Activision's Call of Duty franchise, but when asked who makes the games, most players will probably say Activision.
We would know to say the development studio, but that's because we live in the game industry bubble and speak developer.
Give your game websites their own domain names (I use Namecheap).
Launching game websites on their own domain helps keep your messaging and goals laser-focused, it helps to attract more players with entertainment, it gives games their own soil to grow into brands, and all that combined helps you sell more games in the long run.
The only time I would likely deviate from this strategy is when a game brand becomes pop culture, and needs a hub website.
3. Use a Website Builder
This is how most indie game developers build game websites:
They buy their own hosting, install the WordPress software, spend a few hours hunting down and buying a theme, and then they spend the following days and weeks mulling over custom design and content creation.
By the time it's all said and done, it's taken weeks to build what they consider a basic game website, not to mention all the hours they'll continue to spend with tweaks, plugins, and so on.
And I totally get it, because I've done that too.
The reason we've all done this is because we believed that it was the fastest, cheapest way to build a website that would give us the greatest amount of control. Basically, we did that because it's "god mode" for website. But it's also cost us countless time and money that would have been better spent just working on our games.
So it's time to try something new.
I highly recommend using Squarespace to build your game websites. In any case, use a website builder. The reason I recommend Squarespace is because for $12 a month you get a website that would cost upwards of $50,000 to build from scratch. I would know, because I've built those.
The objection is always that the templates look the same. I'm a designer and I don't think so, but even if you do, drag and drop functionality gives you the power to change your layout in seconds.
A good rule of thumb is to spend a maximum of 1 day building an official game website, especially if you're just starting out.
In fact, you could build the official website for Hay Day in just 1 hour using a website builder, and that's a million-dollar game. If Supercell wanted to waste $50,000 on the Hay Day website, I'd actually be okay with that (maybe more) considering how many sales it drives, but they obviously haven't.
And neither should you.
4. You Only Need One Page with a "Buy Now" Button
Style alone doesn't sell games, but design does. You can have a really crappy game website, and still make money. In other words, a great-looking website is a want, not a need.
I've planned, designed, developed, optimized, and measured the performance of official game websites in all shapes and sizes. The only thing your game needs is a one-page, responsive website with a "buy now" button, very similar to what Supercell, and other popular indie game studios, do for most of their games.
And here's my wireframe for how I design those pages:
A wireframe for an official game website design. (Click to enlarge)
Overall, this is pretty self-explanatory. But there are a few things I want to point out. Everything I've done here (and didn't do) is by design, so let's walk through why this works so well.
1. HEADER
First of all, notice that there's no navigation, and very few outgoing links overall. This is an attempt to remove all distraction from your primary goal. The last thing we want is to get players ready to buy, have them click away somewhere else, lose that desire, and never come back. All we really need up top is the one-liner that makes them want to click the "buy now" button, and the button itself.
Once the potential player clicks to buy the game, it should open a new tab to your game marketplace, if not add it to their cart automatically.
If the potential player cannot be convinced, they will begin to scroll, if they haven't already by instinct.
2. TRAILER
The next step is to have potential players experience your game through its trailer, the next best way aside from playing the game itself. Do your best to keep trailers fast-paced, hitting all the beats, effectively communicating it's best features, and ending on a CTA to reinforce purchase.
This section could also have pagination if you're cutting teaser, gameplay, and official trailers
3. DESCRIPTION
The next section is basically the description. If they can't gather what your game is about from the trailer (they should have), then they'll literally read that here. Keep this section relatively short, as free from development language as possible, and highlight a handful of your game's best features.
Complete this section with a beautiful character shot, or some other primary break-out visual from your game.
4. SCREENSHOTS
Screenshots are pretty straight-forward, which also means they can be boring if you're not careful. Select the best screenshots to sell the game, not necessarily for the development of the game (there's a difference). Also, be free to experiment with how these might look if you used treated type or captions to highlight features.
I recommend a minimum of 3 screenshots, but 5-10 (max) with pagination or modal overlays is optimal.
5. NEWSLETTER
If at this point they're still not convinced to buy, they're probably very interested. And that's a great thing. So we're going to ask them to sign up for our newsletter. This enables use to (1) build our email list, and (2) win the opportunity to nurture them towards purchase. And we're going to entice them to opt-in by offering them a highly valuable, free incentive (e.g. comic book, strategy guide, playable level).
I've seen the best results with one-click for the "subscribe" button and then a short form (name and email address) in a popup or modal overlay. Otherwise, putting form fields right on the page works too.
6. FOOTER
Finally, the footer should stay as minimal as possible, only consisting of a few social links, a press kit link, and your studio's logo (unlinked). Again, we don't want users clicking away and never coming back.
Unfortunately, analytics prove time and again that once a potential player clicks away from your game website, they're probably not coming back.
THIS IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR NOW
In conclusion, this is the 20% of work that yields the 80% of results. The big design idea is to focus entirely on the primary goal, keep distractions to almost zero, and hit the secondary goal if we can't nail the primary one.
Don't get me wrong here, there's a time and place for a multi-page website experience with all the bells and whistles, but not right now. And I know exactly how fun it is to work on those projects. But right now we need a website that's 100% focused on driving sales, so that you can keep making your own games.
You need a good enough website, and this is good enough for now.
5. Install analytics and tracking
Every visitor that comes to your website tells a story with their actions. And those action can be measured with analytics. Where did they come from, how long did they stay, and did they click to buy your game?
Analyzing all that data for trends will help you optimize and improve your game websites moving forward.
For example, if most of your traffic is coming from Twitter, then investing more time and money in Twitter could be a great idea. Or if most of your conversions happen on mobile, then investing more time and money on optimizing the mobile version of your website could be lucrative.
To start taking advantage of all that data, I recommend installing Google Analytics, even if your hosting plan or website builder comes with their own set of analytics. In fact, I would turn those native analytics off if possible, and only use what you get through Google.
This is what a Google Analytics dashboard looks like.
In addition, I recommend installing tracking pixels for Facebook and Twitter. Tracking pixels will help you begin profiling an audience for use with social advertising experiments in the future.
Making Game Websites Should Be Low Cost and High Value
You now have a foundational, replicable system for building effective game websites as fast, and as cheap as possible. This is going to help automate standing up game websites, and start giving you back the hours you've spent away from working on your games.
But most importantly, they're going to perform far better.
You're going to see more traffic going to your marketplace pages, and more email opt-ins now that you're laser-focused on hitting goals. And that means, maybe for the first time ever, your game websites will actually be a valuable marketing asset, rather than a visually-stunning nebula that potential players seem to go missing in.
How has this strategy helped you think differently about your own game websites? Or what have you been doing beyond this strategy that seems to be really making a difference? Post a link to your own game websites in the comments, I'd love to see what you've done.