This is a copy paste from a Reddit post I made, wanted to share this on dev forum as well!
Hey all! I bring this topic up because it’s very uncovered and once I get a new microphone (my old one just broke) I plan to make a video on this because I feel like this is a very uncovered area of game development that is nearly as important to a game as actually having a quality product.
What is it you might ask? Your thumbnail icon!
When you feel as though your game is ready for release the next step tends to get iffy and for me it’s been a huge setback for my years as a developer on Roblox, that step is advertising.
First it’s important to break down what it actually means to advertise your game in the eyes of a typical user scrolling through the discover page.
- The user gets their attention caught by an attractive icon that looks interesting, therefore they are prompted to click that icon.
- The user loads up the thumbnail and description of the game, they see that the thumbnail is also attractive and decides to play the game, alternatively the thumbnail does NOT look as interesting as they initially thought and decides to go back to discover.
- the player enters the game and is captivated by your game or loses interest.
The main focus of this thread is to talk about step 1, the icon.
We focus so much energy into the games actual quality that we don’t realize that two thirds of getting a new player is all focused around the cover of your game, it kind of makes sense if you consider books as a kid, you never chose the plain covered book, always the prettiest looking cover.
Lets consider my most recent advertisements for my newest game I recently finished for beta, Boss Fighters. I ran an ad last Monday and had the worst CTR I have ever seen.
Now when I first had this thumbnail commissioned I thought it was super attractive and bound to be super successful but despite that my CTR was a measly 0.007% (for reference, a decent CTR should be about 1% and a good CTR would be around 1.5-2%). In essence, my ad was about 143 times less likely to attract people than an ad with the average 1% CTR.
Now I’m a college student, I don’t have the budget to be spending money this inefficiently, If I invest a little more time and money into an ads quality, I can make my ads 143 times more effective for the same cost on average, so how do I accomplish this feat?
Well recently I’ve been studying concepts like this and went down a rabbit hole on color theory.
What is color theory? It is in essence the study of color pallets that psychologically trigger brain activity. The human brain looks for patterns, and that includes in color scheme. By understanding how we perceive color, I can make logical predictions on what certain color schemes will attract users.
My ads biggest issue is how the colors work together, I use warm colors that don’t have stark contrast and the biggest issue is how it actually blends into the Roblox discovery page’s background itself! I have no idea what percentage of users use dark vs light theme on Roblox, but what I can say for certain is that my ad in particular is abysmal at contrasting with the typical light theme and therefore does not indicate nearly as big a reaction to the brain as a more contrasting ad might be.
Lets consider the color wheel, in order to accomplish proper contrast we want to follow the color theory’s “complement” color harmony, this means we should pick 2 colors on exact opposite ends of the color wheel (for example, green and pink are complements). By doing so our brain see’s stark contrast while also finding a sort of harmony. I’m not gonna say I fully understand the science behind this so if you’re curious I encourage you to do some research yourself on color theory. My guess is something to do with survival instincts throughout evolution.
Another good color harmony is analogous colors, that refers to colors or shades that are adjacent on the color wheel (for example, green and light green and yellow).
Then I started to wonder if successful games followed this concept so I did some looking:
Blue - Complementary | Red - Analogous
tons of ads follow this principle! (whether the icon creators realize this concept or not). So it came to my attention that finding these fundamental principles is a fantastic idea for any future ads I decide to commission and then sponsor my game with.
Conclusions:
I plan to test my theories this coming week and will give updates on what I discover and hopefully my results end up much better!
In the end, developer stats is a POWERFUL tool to use when you starting to get your game noticed, follow the trends, put just as much effort into these steps as you do with designing your actual game because we as smaller developers cannot afford the money that this seemingly simple step can waste. Seriously, hire someone on fiverr if you are not an artist nor know someone who can commission for you. The cost for commissioning will pay for itself if you are smart about it 
NOTES:
- I also noticed a trend in discovery page icons having emojis and brackets in their titles, I don’t understand what benefit the brackets may have nor could I find any information about it online, but if something works, it never hurts to follow the trend so put that into consideration when naming your experience.
- Obviously I understand that there are a plethora of factors that can affect your CTR, such as the games previously existing reputation, days of the week etc… I can’t guarantee that this is the fix-all to advertisement issues, in order to find the optimal ad, you need to experiment yourself, be willing to spend some money just to test out what works and what doesn’t.
Thanks for reading, I hope you guys found this inciteful, and listen when I say don’t underestimate the power of having a good front cover!
If you have any comments or questions, feel free to let me know