Time for a thread on USPs!

But wait, hold up, what's a USP?

A USP refers to the 'unique selling proposition'. What this means is the thing that is unique about a product that makes it different to competitors and therefore, a reason to purchase it over something else.

Every commercial product likely has these, whether they are publicly communicated as a sentence or motto, or woven into the fabric of the branding. One of my favourites is M&Ms - "melts in your mouth, not in your hand." It's specific, makes a claim, & communicates an experience.

99% of you won't have heard this sentence - it was from the 1940's and is rarely used now - because they've built an audience where their USP now can come from different things - but in the beginning, this was their selling point.

At its core, a USP is how you answer the question of "Why should I buy this game over another game?"

You wouldn't respond to this with your elevator pitch. You shouldn't say "because it's fun!" because that's an opinion, rather than a defensible fact.

A unique selling proposition has a few jobs - for one, it needs to communicate something of value to your audience that is unique - & what is unique & valuable changes depending on that audience!

Just because something is valuable, doesn't mean it's valuable to YOUR audience.

It might be a selling point that you have a lot of proc-gen levels in your game for a rogue-like lover, but it likely isn't valuable to an audience that is there for story. You need to communicate what's important to your key audience, then secondary/tertiary.

Part of this is understanding your design in the first place.
Marketing at it's core is placing art in the hands of people who want it most - shared experience - which informs design & vice versa.

Why are you making this game?
What's important about it existing, as art?

You need to be able to say "You should play this game for this SPECIFIC BENEFIT." As in, this game will provide you with X value that you CANNOT get from this other similar game. If you're a Battle Royale, you better have something that's different - like a silly, cute art style.

It doesn't mean they won't play your game and another BR - but WHY would they play yours if they've already had the same experience elsewhere? You need to be able to show the difference in experience - like absurd physics and bright colors, compared to the normal 'gritty' BR.

USPs often build on each other - if you have a different experience and that does well, suddenly a USP is that you're part of a zeitgeist - people like to be part of something. Now though, each follow up BR title with absurd physics/bright colours needs to find a new USP.

Maybe it'll be the amount of people that can play - maybe you network up to 300 people at once. It might be that every player is a dinosaur. But this is where basing your USP on trends as an indie is so dangerous - because to differentiate is REALLY hard without a track record.

And this is where a lot of independent developers stumble. Instead of considering what's valuable to THEIR key audience, they end up trying to communicate everything they can think of to cover as MANY audiences as possible. "Lots of levels!" "Beautiful, vibrant art!"

These don't tell your key audience anything that's different about THIS game. So ALL your potential audiences move on, because there's nothing that stands out about this game compared to the next one, and you haven't given them enough information to interest them.

Or you throw a mountain of information at your audience - "150 levels with animated environments", "Unlock 300 different stories" - all of which don't communicate anything unique other than volume & can overwhelm your audience with information that's not relevant to them.

Which brings us to the next important thing about a USP - it needs to be SPECIFIC & DEFENSIBLE. You need to find those couple of really unique things about your game for your key audiences, find specific value statements, lean into communicating them - & be able to back them up.

Take a sentence from Celeste - they could easily have said "brave hundreds of difficult levels!". This is a generic statement. However, they instead say: "Brave hundreds of hand-crafted challenges."

I've talked about connotations before, but let's examine.

By using "hand-crafted", they immediately distance themselves from procedurally generated platformers. They speak to a sense of carefully attended to & attuned levels, that when added to the rest of their pitch, elaborate and combine USPs to make an overall valuable proposition.

Finally, it needs to be understandable to your audience - it's useless to say you're using say, Megascans, to a player who is excited for your casual farming game. However, Epic themselves might be REALLY keen to hear how you've used and implemented it.

Your USPs can come from a lot of places - it can be people involved on the project, previous projects of success, different art styles, technical achievements, interesting story hooks or approaches to story-telling - anything that is a 'new' or unique combination of doing things.

Your USP is NOT your hook or elevator pitch. Your USP is used to inform your hook - ideally, you want to be able to communicate one or two unique selling points in your elevator pitch to pique interest, and then be able to expand on them and provide more supporting material.

This becomes especially important when talking to publishers, press, or platforms. You have maybe a single email to communicate your USP - so if it's in your art, you better front load with a visual that shows that. If it's specific people or achievements, you better bold them.

A USP is NOT:
- a generic statement that just means it's a game e.g. "it has 10 levels"
- marketing offers e.g. 40% off - this is an incentive to purchase, not something that makes it WORTH purchasing
- a laundry list of everything in game
- a homepage motto you post & forget

Sometimes your game WON'T have a USP - and that's okay! Sometimes what's valuable about creating art is purely about learning, process, enjoyment. If you're not trying to make money off your game to make more games - you can ignore this for the most part!

If however, you're working as a business that makes games, learning how to identify USPs in a crowded market, being active and critical of how they measure up against other games, and being able to communicate that value is integral to strengthening your chance of success.

A good USP or three does not instantly equal a million dollars - but it's one step closer to a game people can understand, identify, and be excited by.