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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.'"
An article about how the engineers should listen to the marketing department more. This one's going to go over GREAT on slashdot.
Actually, yes, better marketing can make a better game.
An important part of marketing is understanding your audience and applying that information to the product to, well, make sure that it's a product that people will buy.
There are several obvious ways to do this, of course. One is to make a game that offers the, well, the experience the targeted users want. In other words, to make a good game. For some markets another approach is to base the game on an already well-known character / universe / whatever.
That the latter is marketing driven game development with a crap result doesn't mean the the former isn't marketing driven game development creating a good game.