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."

Comments

3 Reasons: Marketing, name and quality

[Opportunist]

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...