

The Games Industry Is Driven By Marketing Stories - kurtable
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/30/the-games-industry-is-driven-by-marketing-stories/

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mbenjaminsmith
This article is full of hand waving and I after reading it I still don't
understand what a "marketing story" is. To focus on the stuff I did understand
(but took issue with):

>> The odds are increasingly stacked against any developer who’s unable to
pull a Peter Molyneux and attract a whole lot of press attention to a zany
idea. Their problem is that most often their games look and act very similar
to others’ games, have the same look, gameplay and overall dynamic as
competitors’ games.

No, two things are going on here: Peter Molyneux innovated _and_ "most often
their games look and act very similar to others’ games". Peter Molyneux's cube
was a publicity stunt and it pretty much worked. But you don't need to do the
same thing to attract attention for a decent game idea _provided that it's
somehow innovative, polished and fun_.

>> That’s why Apple has all the power on the App Store, why Google is sort-of
getting there with the Play store, and why Zynga has all the power within the
sub-ecosystem it has developed on Facebook. In commodity markets, visibility
is everything.

This is the real core of what we're talking about. It was the case for a brief
period that an indie could sell a game in the App Store with little marketing
and have it become an App Store hit. Then the market filled with both
established publishers and hobby developers and -- holy shit -- started to
resemble just about every other low-barrier-to-entry market and the gold rush
was over.

When people say the sky is falling on mobile they are lamenting the end of the
gold rush. Those are different things.

>> This year the tablet space in particular has had a marked increase of
graphical polish, and that trend shows every sign of continuing. In some
respects it’s like watching the console and PC games industry play its story
out all over again, but with good reason: Graphics, in particular a stylish
look, can really push a game forward into the market in ways that innovation
rarely does ... However this does not give much solace for the developer who
cannot afford to spend a fortune.

It's surprising to hear something like this out of someone inside the
industry. Art costs for mobile games, including many of the top earners, are
not particularly high. Compared to marketing and programming costs art won't
cost a fortune for nearly any mobile game.

Also, polish isn't just about graphics. It's really an all encompassing
effort. The developer who isn't willing to invest the time and money polishing
something created solely for pleasure is probably doing the wrong thing.

>> This newfound tribal funding and evangelism model has appeared at a time
when the official industry finds itself in a deeply troubled state. Nobody’s
really sure whether they even want a new console anymore, or a gaming PC, or
whatever. Developers have no idea which market will be the hot ticket, or
which might at least allow them to survive. The metrics simply do not track
fast enough for anyone to have a firm grasp on what the hell is going on
anymore.

New consoles: Nintendo has put out one incrementally advanced new console of
which the sales were OK and now the console industry is dead? We don't have a
choice about new consoles because the important ones -- Xbox and PS -- aren't
out yet and no one knows how much of a step forward they'll be. If they make
us go "wow" they're likely to go quick. If they're less thrilling they'll
still do fine because they're new and the AAA gaming industry continues to
produce high quality content that people enjoy. On the other end of the power
spectrum, OUYA was a mega-success in terms of people voting with their
wallets.

This type of sky is falling article is unfortunately very common in the game
industry. I read a couple a week though many of them are postmortems and
therefore have more value than this article. The main themes are not the
market conditions themselves but: 1) companies that failed to acquire the
necessary knowledge or 2) companies that did acquire that knowledge but failed
to act on it.

[Edited]

~~~
eropple
_> It's surprising to hear something like this out of someone inside the
industry. Art costs for mobile games, including many of the top earners, are
not particularly high. Compared to marketing and programming costs art won't
cost a fortune for nearly any mobile game._

It depends on what sort of game you're looking for. If you're looking to build
a _simple_ mobile game, sure, art costs are pretty low. It doesn't take much
to build a physics game for casuals or a Skinner box like _Tiny Tower_ , for
sure. It takes a lot more if you want to build something for anything even
remotely approaching the "core" audience--the people who play games as games,
who normally don't play many games on mobile because the games by and large
aren't very good and aren't very engrossing. And it's not because these games
are for shallow people (though many could be accused of that), but rather
because if you aren't making a game with ten elements and a bunch of generic
reusable pieces, it's just gonna cost money.

Like, I'm working on a 2D RPG in my spare time. I've sketched it out with an
aim toward 25-30 hours of content (something almost unheard-of in mobile
games, though I'm also aiming towards Windows as well so I'm cheating a bit).
I've looked extensively, I've scrimped where I could, and the inescapable
rolling boulder of _needing stuff_ means I'm still looking at $20K or so in
terms of asset creation. That's not expensive for the game mills like
Gameloft, but it's pretty brutal for a one-guy show, and unless I can do
something to alleviate it[1] is going to result in a worse game that doesn't
reach what I'm aiming for. (If I was making this to make money I'd be a lot
more worried about it. I'm making it because I love games. It will break even,
eventually, if I port it to enough platforms--but it may never finance a
second, even with my day job soaking my personal expenses. I'm okay with that,
but it constrains what I can do.)

But, yeah, if you want to roll with people making games for gamers, you are
_going_ to be spending a large chunk of cash. He's not wrong here, you're just
assuming he's looking at the "top earners" and not, y'know--stuff that people
normally called "gamers" want to play.

[1] - There are some great games out there that rely on "space savers" like
procedural generation--Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft--but there are
itches they can't scratch. People jonesing for a Narrativist game, if I can
slightly misuse a term from the Big Model, are going to want a game where they
can see what they're doing and are not going to want to look at the same five
wall textures and ten palette-swapped enemies everywhere they go. It's just
the way it is.

.

 _> On the other end of the power spectrum, OUYA was a mega-success in terms
of people voting with their wallets._

The other I wanted to poke at: OUYA has succeeded in getting a lot of people
to buy an undergunned Android set-top box for something at or very near cost.
It has not succeeded in getting them to re-buy a bunch of games that they
probably already have on another platform, especially given their super dodgy
practice of polling for games people want to see and then "which do you
_really_ want?" with a list of AAA games[2]--it's not an illegal practice or
anything by any stretch, but the way they've played this has explicitly tried
to set expectations that have little to do with the actual machine or the
games it's going to get.

I personally can't see this ending well, and I say that with an eye towards
developing for it--because I can't see it making a dime for me because I'm not
hawking _Mass Effect_ or _Skyrim_.

[2] - <https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ouyatop20>

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kitcar
I think the thesis of this article can be expanded even further to, "The
Entertainment Industry is driven by marketing stories", and as gaming is part
of the entertainment industry, it therefore abides by many of the same themes
and customs.

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shmerl
Not always. Some dare to make something unusual and succeed:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24qJXgiuO1E>

The industry seems to get healthier now. More interest in cross platform
games, OpenGL, SDL and etc. and less lock in into DirectX.

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moultano
This all rings true, but it's a little cynical to elide the fact that these
marketing stories were _real_.

