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The Almighty Buck Entertainment Games

Marketing As Part of Game Development 28

Posted by Zonk from the scary-world dept.
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.'"
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Marketing As Part of Game Development More

Marketing As Part of Game Development

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  • Umm... No. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vertinox ( 846076 )
    Better marketing does not make a better game.

    • Re:Umm... No. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SSpade ( 549608 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @07:25PM (#14215282) Homepage

      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.

      • Re:Umm... No. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Trister Keane ( 811045 )
        Because we all know that a "better game" and "a game that people will buy" are the same thing. It's well known that "Deer Hunter" is one of the best games ever made.
      • 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.

        Regardless if you know your audience, if you make a bad, buggy, rushed out the door, hard to use game that isn't fun then it doens't matter how well your marketing team is.

    • Re:Umm... No. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @08:45PM (#14215787) Homepage
      " Better marketing does not make a better game."

      Why am I not surprised that this got modded up by Slashbots. Of COURSE better marketing makes a better game.

      You see, marketing is NOT just responsible for letting consumers know about your product...they are also responsible for conducting research to let the designers know what their target audience wants. This is crucial for any game on the market today.

      Now what the parent probably meant was...MORE marketing does not make a better game. And that may certainly (although not always) be the case. And I'm going out on a limb and assuming that when they use the term "marketing" they really mean advertising.

      I really wish people thought things through before they modded.

      • "...they are also responsible for conducting research to let the designers know what their target audience wants..."

        So what happens when the target audience doesn't have a clue what he wants? Most consumers -and most people in the game industry- had no idea that computers were capable of generating games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, or Quake until after John Carmack found ways to make playable 3D games on consumer hardware, so they couldn't even express those desires. The same can be said for the two-player f
        • "All marketing can find out from consumers is what they want to see more of the same of."

          Spoken like someone who has never sat in on a gaming focus group. Believe me, people have no shortage of new concepts that they wish they could see made into a game. I swear, it almost seems like everybody fancies themselves as a professional game designer these days.

    • It sure can help.

      How much fun would World of Warcraft or any multiplayer game be if nobody else was playing it?

      It'd be pretty damn boring, if you ask me.

  • I cannot argue with this mentality from a business perspective, but there will be reprocussions. You cannot expect to be taken seriously as an artform if your precursor all design decisions with "In regard to the target market."

    • 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
      • 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
      • 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,
        • 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 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.
  • 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.

  • Hmmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sugar Moose ( 686011 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @07:08PM (#14215156) Journal
    An article about how the engineers should listen to the marketing department more. This one's going to go over GREAT on slashdot.

    • Re:Hmmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 )
      Unfortunately, its the truth. As is the reverse. What happens typically is that both sides ignore the other because they think they always know best, and what happens is an utter lack of communication that results in promises to customers that can't be kept, thus, a disappointing product.

      • Here's the thing - marketing is not R&D. Marketing markets stuff that R&D and programmers make. I make something and you sell it. If you oversell it or tell complete lies (I see this ALL the time) then that's your problem. If you sell a v6 sports car as a v8 muscle car to a customer - it's not MY fault you either didn't know what you were talking about or bullshitted the customer. And if you knew what made a good (fill in the blank product) then YOU would be making or designing it rather than market

        • Re:Hmmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by helfire57 ( 33888 ) *
          Sorry, but this is a common error: you are confusing Advertising and Marketing. Marketing is full life cycle and includes advertising the finished product to the potential end users. In this case, Marketing also contains focus groups (of all sorts), research into the desired market segment, AND brainstorming what should be developed.

          Good marketing is done rarely because it is so difficult to determine what the market will want prior to the product being determined.
          • If Im a game developer in a brainstorming session and the guy in marketing opens his mouth with some great idea about "adding FPS dynamism and blablabla" to my carefully thought out, beautifully balanced CRPG Guild Wars ripoff Id be charged for murder in a few days.
  • 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 m
  • "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

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