Hi, my name is Matthew Boyle. I’m from www.languagecardgames.com. Welcome back to my video series where we are talking about how to go from having no card game at all to selling your first card game.
In this video, we’re going to talk about the blue oceans philosophy. This is nothing new; it’s been around for a long time, but it was a really powerful idea that I encountered that helped to motivate me along when I was creating my first games to sell. I do recommend you read the book or listen to the audio book, Blue Oceans. I think that’s the name. But right now, I’m just going to paraphrase and summarize that, and I may not have it exactly right; this is just my takeaway and my feeling from it.
I need to compare what they call red oceans to blue oceans. So the red oceans philosophy is that you compete with somebody else who’s doing something similar, and you try to do it better. And when you do that, you bloody the waters of the market. That’s why it’s called the red oceans. The blue oceans strategy is you try to do something unique in a new way before other people so that you would be the leader in that field. It’s almost like you’re trying to create a new field entirely or a new ocean; we should use that word, ocean. You’re trying to create a new ocean entirely, and you swim out to that ocean, and it’s just wide open space for you.
So when you are thinking about what kind of game you want to make in design, here’s the question you need to ask: what kind of game can I alone be the best at producing? What unique skills or background knowledge or experiences do I have that I can translate into a game that is going to set me totally apart and almost create a totally new field or sphere of gaming? And because I have those unique talents and abilities to put into the game, I’m going to be able to create it faster and for a lower cost than anyone who would try to compete with me. That’s going to create an immense amount of value for potential customers. They’re not going to see that type of game anywhere else, and here I’ve got it, and I’ve got it for a good price.
So this is a very critical question to think about when you’re first starting out. How can you create a blue ocean? If you need to find out more about that, then I recommend you go and watch some videos about the blue oceans philosophy and what that is and think about that in the beginning. What kind of game can you make to create your own blue ocean, because that’s going to help you, almost by default, catch customers more easily when the time comes.
That’s it for today’s video. Thank you so much for watching. In the next video, I’m going to talk about something also very important to set up before we actually start designing the cards, and that is some of the online social media platforms. See you in the next video!
