Fri 27 Nov 2009
Quality is taking a beating!
First, I accuse developers of focusing too much on their ideas, and not enough about the business and marketing aspects. But, then Erin reminds us that all of our ideas suck anyway.
Then Jesse from EEDAR reveals that marketing spend has a much higher correlation to sales than quality (as gaged via review scores). And, more recent research from the Cowen Group reveals that review scores are the least important factor for game purchases.
So, is the best strategy to just put whatever crap in a box and market the hell out of it? Of course not. This is a complex system and it is hard to predict the effect of any single factor… Maybe publishers put more marketing dollars behind the games they believe will sell well to begin with. Perhaps a quality game is what’s needed to drive word-of-mouth referrals. Etc.
Thus a key challenge is finding the right balance. It’s not just about making an awesome game, and it’s not just about salesmanship.
November 29th, 2009 at 11:51 am
One interesting question: is it a bad thing that salesmanship matters?
Sure, pumping any bad product with marketing hurts consumers, who might end up with beautiful crap boxes. And in the medium/long term hurts the publisher’s credibility as well.
So you are probably right when you state that “maybe publishers put more marketing dollars behind games they believe will sell to begin with”, which might be roughly translated to “they put dollars behind the best games”.
However, from a business perspective, “best games” acquires a new meaning. We cannot replace it by “games with best scores”. It is probably a concept highly related to the moment. What games are currently selling well, what kind of game and artistic style carries the biggest fan base, etc.
What I suspect is that this is not so far away from “games people want to see”, as long as the quality is not so bad.
So isn’t a marketing driven title, in the end, offering what most people want? I don’t know. I have to think more about it.
What do you think?
November 30th, 2009 at 7:44 am
The EEDAR report appears to be making the all-too-typical mistake of mistaking correlation for causation. The fact that higher marketing expenditure correlates highly with higher sales doesn’t necessarily mean that one factor causes the other. There are several independent factors that could influence both, eg. having a publisher with lots of resources could mean wider availability to stores or the ability to schedule competing releases more effectively, as well as meaning they’re able to spend more on marketing.