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Marketing As Part of Game Development
Gamasutra has a piece looking at Incorporating Marketing into Game Development, how business demands can shape games. From the article: "As a game designer, it's easy to forget about improving the experience for the target market in favor of making a 'better' game for yourself. Small developers like Reflexive usually don't have this luxury, and in countless ways, the increased focus on the consumer streamlines the game design process. This focus can scale to larger teams as well: we argue that every element of commercial game design should be prefaced with the phrase 'With Respect to the Target Market.'"
Better marketing does not make a better game.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I like how the article makes a point of distinguishing between well-reviewed games that make money and well-reviewed games that lose money.
It's pretty comprehensive. Because as we all know, no game ever gets anything less than a 7/10 from critics.
Except for Daikatana.
An article about how the engineers should listen to the marketing department more. This one's going to go over GREAT on slashdot.
Yeah, it might be fair to focus on target market when designing a purely functional product, but when designing a piece of entertainment, the factors you must weigh are completely different.
The success of a piece of entertainment often has a great deal to do with how novel it is, not how faithful it is to past forms. We like art that's refreshing. You can't get stimulation by repeating the same process over and over again.
For example:
Super Mario Brothers
Pac Man
The Sims
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Tetris
Doom
Civilization
Myst
Gran Turismo
Many of these games had no prior target market to rely upon, because they were fairly novel, at least for their chosen medium.
You're fooling yourself however if you don't think they knew, or at least think they knew, what their target market was and aimed for that at every step. It doesn't mean "rip off competitors" or "rip off previous ideas" it means figure out who you expect to play your game(boys, girls, small kids or adults, etc) and cater to THEM. For example, you wouldn't make an adults only Mickey Mouse game. I mean, that's an extreme examble, but everyone knows that would be a bad plan...
*note I'm aware mario bros, pac man, and tetris might have had no thought to such things given.
This talks about video game design as if it was just a means of making money.
What about the game itself???
The way I see it, marketing has its place, but video games used to be works of art. This new "revenue-optimizing" approach has killed the artistic side of VG design. When the driving force behind the design of a game isn't entertainment, expression, or innovation what are you creating? A "product" with no direction other than its "target's" wallet.
The music industry is killing creativity in popular music, the movie industry is killing innovation in movies, and now the VG industry is removing the art in VG design.
If it wasn't for the underground/independent scene in video games now, I wouldn't bother playing new titles.
I just pooped your party.
I'm with you, man.
:)
I thought the game was boring as could be.
Makes me glad I was only playing on someone elses system. I would have been pissed if I had actually payed for it.
Pretty Pictures!
"we argue that every element of commercial game design should be prefaced with the phrase 'With Respect to the Target Market.'" YES! This is exactly how great art has always been made.
Marketing is a very strange beast to deal with as far as game development go. In many cases, the budget to market the game is much greater then the budget to develop the game.
Marketing can make sure that the people who would actually like the game manage to buy it. It cannot make a crappy game better, but it can make an average game profitable.
The problem, as I see it, is when the Marketing for a game forces the game to be released at an arbitrary date. The TV and Magazine spots must be purchased well in advance, and the hype machine needs time to spin up. Games ship with bugs because the marketing requires that the game launch on time. Once the marketing campaign starts, in many cases, the game must ship. Especially if the marketing is more expensive then the development of the game.
In a perfect world, the game would be finished, or at least finished enough that its a very stable late beta. But that basically only happens for companies that can get away with saying the game will ship 'when its done'.
The only company I have known to delay a game after the advertising geared up was Nintendo, and that was for Twilight Princess. In every other case, the publisher will either ship and patch, or they will go into "game design with an axe" mode, and just ship a piece of crap that satisfies the "Technical Requirement Checklist" or Lot check tests.
And if a game is low profile enough that it does not warrant a big marketing campaign, they may just axe the title if they dont think they can turn enough of a profit to justifiy marketing the game.
Marketing is important, but not so important that it should dictate the development schedule.
END COMMUNICATION
The success of a piece of entertainment often has a great deal to do with how novel it is, not how faithful it is to past forms.
Most of the biggest hit games tend to not be groundbreakers, but rather great implementations of something that has already existed.
Super Mario Bros - platformer game like Donkey Kong (market existed)
Pac Man - Maze game Rally-X came out same year (market existed)
The Sims - Novel
GTA Vice City - 3rd person action/adventure (market existed)
Tetris - Tile puzzle game (Market existed, just not on computers)
Doom - FPS Wolfenstein 3D (market existed)
Civilization - God/strategy Game (market existed)
Myst - Point + Click adventure ala *-quest (market existed for a long time)
Gran Turismo - Racing car game (market existed for a long time)
The key to the success of these games was not that they brought something completely new to the table, but they added great new ideas, characters, and/or implementations. These titles excited the already existing market, and extended the appeal, but they did not necessarily create completely new markets.
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Good response.
Some of your corrections I agree with; while I feel others undermine the scope of the new markets that emerged based on these games. Almost every one of these games' success could not be anticipated in terms of the existing market. That was my main point: feeding the existing market what it seems to want is a recipe for disaster in content creation. It's a mistake people make in film, music, television... but video games serve the point just as well.
The most illustrative example is probably Gran Turismo.
Gran Turismo was novel not because it was a racing game, but because of it's meticulous emphasis on real cars and physics. It may not have been a ludicrous and unheard of idea, but it was a novel enough departure from the existing market that the idea was repeatedly passed on by game producers until Yamauchi built up enough credibility in the company that he couldn't be refused. The producers represented the "target market" philosophy, and Yamauchi represented designing something interesting for the sake of itself, to follow his inspiration. Yamauchi was right, the producers were wrong.
Now, I'll concede that completely disregarding what games work and which don't is a bad idea. If no one wants another tennis game, then don't make another tennis game without bringing something new to the table. But if you're checking your inspiration at the door because you don't have 100% surety that a market will support your product, you should stop trying to create things, and just go be an actuary.
Gran Turismo was novel not because it was a racing game, but because of it's meticulous emphasis on real cars and physics. It may not have been a ludicrous and unheard of idea, but it was a novel enough departure from the existing market that the idea was repeatedly passed on by game producers until Yamauchi built up enough credibility in the company that he couldn't be refused
Actually that is probably the least novel of ideas. The licensed car market existed with "Test Drive", long before Grand Turismo. The fact that management passed on GT, was most likely because racing car games were saturated (it would be difficult to differentiate a product to make it sucessful). Ultimately when it was published it was successful not because of new ideas, but that it executed existing ideas so well it set itself apart from the competition.
You can create great games without inspirational ideas, by simply polishing an existing genre. Doom polished Wolfenstein 3D, C&C/Warcraft polished Dune 2, GT polished racing car sims (and not by providing 100% realism).
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