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Why Do Games Sell?
simoniker writes "Game designer Pierre-Alexandre Garneau has published a new article compiling a list of factors that make games popular, and although he notes: "The test assumes that the game is good — if it's bad, chances are it won't sell no matter how high it scores on this test," his comparison of GTA 3 and Psychonauts tries to apply common-sense reasoning to why one sold well and the other did not."
Being open about being a pirate isn't an opinion, it's an admission of apathy.
You can thank Jack Thompson and Hillary Clinton (among others) for high GTA sales. Tons of publicity, making it the "maverick" game to play. I bet if a Senator had asked for a probe into Psychonauts, it would've sold a few more copies.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
And in exactly that order.
You can pump a mediocre game into the heavens by throwing a truckload of money into its marketing. It's even enough to hint at what you would probably play, as long as there is action and as long as there is ground shaking graphics. Whether that would need a 10 GHz machine with a graphics card that becomes available somewhere in late 2010 doesn't matter. It looks great. And the marketing spin does the rest.
Name is another reason. There was a good game that sold, so this will too. Civilisation IV would have bombed without the Civ-tag to it. Duke Nuke... ok, ok, no bad jokes, I promise. Everquest 2 is a very average fantasy MMORPG, really vanilla and bland, but it has the EQ name. Generally, you can sell a game that has a great name, even without too much marketing spin. People will even preorder it, without even having seen a single screenshot, the game can already sell its first batch of copies before you started coding.
And finally, quality. Quality is the poorest seller, and it's amazing how many high quality games collect dust on the shelves simply because nobody ever heard about them. Quality is a seller once someone starts a hype around them, starts recommending them and thus it sells. But this kind of "marketing" is getting more and more out of fashion. Studios prefer to pump their money into marketing instead of programming, and squeeze out yet another "graphics enhanced" version of the same old game to trying something new.
Well, people, we get what we buy...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Microsoft Windows, and TV with its crap "unreality shows" is proof that good is not equal to popular. Popular is (almost) all about marketing. SOMETIMES they overlap, aka the iPod.
NOW, if you want to know what constitutes a _good_ game, then EVERY game has 1 or more of these properties:
* Acquisition
* Communication
* Competition
* Cooperation
* Creation
* Destruction
* Environment that is interesting
* Execution -- how well the game executed its principles
* Exploration
* Fun
* Navigation
* Organization
* Pattern Recognition
* Strategy (Problem-Solving)
* Tactics
* Trade
Bridge is a popular card game because it is one of the rare card games that has both Competition & Cooperation at the same time, amongst Acquisition, and Communication.
Tetris is a good game because it has: Strategy, Tactics, Navigation, Pattern Recognition, Organization.
Counter-Strike: Competion, Cooperation, Destruction, Creation, Communication, Navigation, Exploration, Organization.
World of Warcraft: Every single property!
But what do I know, I'm just a game dev.