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EA Spends 3x More On Marketing Than Development
G3ckoG33k writes "According to Electronic Arts officer Rich Hilleman, 'the price of producing console games has rocketed, with marketing costing up to three times more than the development of a title.'" Sounds pretty insane, but does anyone know how this compares to the film industry?
Often one heards that research costs drive the price of drugs high, but in fact a similar ratio between marketting and research costs exists in the drug industry.
While this is true -- it seems that a lot of the problems with games today is that they are given excessively tight deadlines to get them out, say, by Christmas. To follow the woman/baby analogy -- it takes more resources for a woman to have a baby gestating in her for 9 months than for 5 months. If you can just get that baby out in 5 months, you could save some resources, but the quality of the product (crappy video game vs. good video game/dead fetus vs. live baby) will differ greatly.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
While I agree with your point on "suit monkeys" ruining games by adding in-game marketing to skim off the top, you seem to have entirely missed the point of the post. "Marketing" in it's basic form is simply building awareness for a product so that, if people like it, they can go buy it. Believe it or not, people who are unaware of products may not buy them, and while a few people may follow the likes of /. or IGN and already know everything, that small handful of people isn't going to support a game release. For this reason, marketing activity is very important to let people know that mass-appeal games are out.
One example where this worked well is the new Batman game. Batman has huge appeal, cost a fortune to make. If you just put it on shelves, only a few people will walk by and pick it up. Millions more non-hardcore-gamer people would love to play a Batman game, but don't always walk by game shelves. With $x million in marketing to drive awareness, they can make $2x-10x million selling that game.
Game developing is cheap compared to what it costs to buy enough TV airtime to make everyone aware of your product.
I've been working in games for 10 years, and I really, *really* wish I could agree with you.
Did you know that it's only been in the last few years that review scores and sales started to correlate? Until recently, there was virtually no connection between the review scores of your game and how well it sold, and it's still somewhat tenuous.
(see http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/05/29/does-game-quality-translate-into-better-financial-performance/ and http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/features/sales_vs_score.php for some backup on that.)
If I could show you a graph of marketing budget vs sales, you'd see that the correlation is much stronger. Making a great game doesn't immediately make people aware of it, and the public isn't the most sophisticated video game consumer.
Remember Daikatana? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana (I can't believe I'm posting a wp link in case people on Slashdot don't know what Daikatana is. No one click that.)) It was famous for being over-hyped and a total mess. It looked good once, but by launch anyone who knew about games knew that it would not be good. And it was still a top-10 seller for 3 months on the back of name recognition. Because the majority of game buyers don't know much about games (just like most industries). People had heard of the game, and they forgot that what they heard was a joke, so they bought it. Oh yeah, it had a big marketing budget too...
The reality is, sales (and therefore income) are better correlated to investment in advertising than the game itself. That pains me (as a game designer) deeply, but it's true. Things like this article used to peg my rage meter, but there's no point in getting upset at EA for realizing the way the market works.
Luckily, that's changing. The market is becoming more savvy, and quality is finally becoming important to publishers. I'm not spilling inside secrets when I say that WB is very excited about the high quality of Arkham Asylum. They knew it would be good, but you can never be sure that a game will be great, and their faces light up whenever they talk about it. It's very encouraging to me to see executives this excited about quality; that's new.
It's now common to hear people say things like "They're an 80+ developer" or "We're targetting 85+", which is also really encouraging. People used to talk about making good games, but now it's important that you be able to clearly establish that. It used to be only sales that mattered, but now people are more willing to accept that if you make quality games, the sales will come. That's huge, and you can expect to see it shift more resources from marketing to production, where they belong.