Game marketing is three times more important than product quality

This makes absolute complete and utter sense. People buy perceptions, not reality. And people are far more concerned about peer pressure than they are concerned about their own judgement. There is a make of car that is distinctly average. In fact some of the smaller models are not very good at all. Yet it manages to sell extremely well despite selling at a premium price. Because people want to be seen behind the badge. They will pay thousands of dollars in premium to buy just a few dollars worth of chrome and enamel badge. And most people buy silver and grey ones, because that is what everyone else does. All due to the power of marketing. The brand is presented as sporty which is just the image every housewife wants when she does the school run. Customers just don’t realise when they are victims. If you are a game developer and you tell your mum about the game you are working on then that is marketing. Marketing is any communication. So it is a fact that a game with zero marketing will have zero sales. Over the years I have never seen a game get the sales that it deserved just for its quality. Yet I have many times seen a game get far more sales than it deserves because of its marketing. And I have also seen many good games fail because of bad marketing. Just look at the five games I was writing about yesterday. They are virtually identical yet they have massively different numbers of players. The difference is just the marketing. Marketing is more important than the game, this is a self evident truth. Yet still there are very many game publishers who do not understand this. Many self and small publishers on the iPhone App Store, for instance. There you can see that marketed games sell well, non marketed games sell badly. It has precious little to do with the quality of the game. (Unless it is a total dog). Now EEDAR has done research in the game marketplace from which they say “Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores”. And actually the difference is even bigger than that, because the scores form part of the marketing! So there you have it. If you want to sell more games and make more money then send me an email and I will come and sort it out for you!

 

If this is you advertising yourself then I can't imagine anyone would want you to advertise their product.

White space, man, white space!

 

The forum software here is reformatting what I write.

 

I think the problem is that it doesn't like stuff you cut and paste in from elsewhere a lot of the time. It doesn't seem to understand normal carriage returns.

 

I've always found that it handles stuff cut and pasted from elsewhere just fine, but that in Chrome, if I preview before I post, then it eats all the line breaks and the post is messed up when it gets submitted. The only solution I've found is to edit elsewhere, and cut and paste in each time I want to preview. If you just want to preview what you've written, then select all of the text and copy it before hitting preview, then select all of the broken text and paste before making any further tweaks or submitting...

 

Experiment



This makes absolute complete and utter sense. People buy perceptions, not reality. And people are far more concerned about peer pressure than they are concerned about their own judgement.

There is a make of car that is distinctly average. In fact some of the smaller models are not very good at all. Yet it manages to sell extremely well despite selling at a premium price. Because people want to be seen behind the badge. They will pay thousands of dollars in premium to buy just a few dollars worth of chrome and enamel badge. And most people buy silver and grey ones, because that is what everyone else does. All due to the power of marketing. The brand is presented as sporty which is just the image every housewife wants when she does the school run. Customers just don't realise when they are victims.

If you are a game developer and you tell your mum about the game you are working on then that is marketing. Marketing is any communication. So it is a fact that a game with zero marketing will have zero sales.

Over the years I have never seen a game get the sales that it deserved just for its quality. Yet I have many times seen a game get far more sales than it deserves because of its marketing. And I have also seen many good games fail because of bad marketing.

Just look at the five games I was writing about yesterday. They are virtually identical yet they have massively different numbers of players. The difference is just the marketing. Marketing is more important than the game, this is a self evident truth.

Yet still there are very many game publishers who do not understand this. Many self and small publishers on the iPhone App Store, for instance. There you can see that marketed games sell well, non marketed games sell badly. It has precious little to do with the quality of the game. (Unless it is a total dog).

Now EEDAR has done research in the game marketplace from which they say "Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores". And actually the difference is even bigger than that, because the scores form part of the marketing!

So there you have it. If you want to sell more games and make more money then send me an email and I will come and sort it out for you!

 

Err... exact same text as your original but with a picture of three averagely attractive females included?... Was I supposed to pay more attention to the latter? I didn't.

 

Perhaps that is why it is clearly labelled "Experiment". I C&Ped the HTML. It kept the picture and the links, but it lost the formatting.

 

I do like how using attractive women for advertising is apparently wrong for Evony but fine for Bruce to whack them on his blog posts. One of the reasons I don't read his blog is because it's embarassing to have some of them images pop up when I'm at work.

Sorry, I am trying to not post in these threads but that's been bugging me for a while

 

You could just use the preview button to work all this out.

 

There we go. I have manually inserted HTML carriage returns into the C&Ped HTML text.

 

Evony is bait and switch advertising.
Newbs in the game are always looking for the non existent boobs.
In my blog the pictures have a relevance to the article content. Hence three times more = triplets.

I apologise to the other readers here for having to point out the obvious.

 

Yeah, I see it now. It's totally the context. Sorry.

 

Yeah, I get that... but this is a forum, if I were to have read your original post, are you then trying to suggest I'd read the latter "more" second time round? Your experiment does not work on a forum Bruce. I gather that you're simply copy and pasting from elsewhere... but why you're doing so is beyond me.

 

And what are your thoughts on the relationship between Metacritic, marketing spend and game sales?

 

My thoughts? Arcade machines of the 80's had flashy artwork on them for a reason, art sells, sex sells. We've known this for decades.

 

This justification is pathetic.

 

It's OK for Bruce to use boobs for advertising because he is one.

 

I think that all aspects of a games creation and marketing have an influence on its success - however its impossible to segment which has the greater effect on sales because its largely inter-related.

For instance with sequels quite frequently the quality of the prior version might have a say in the sales or similarly the distance in release from the prior version.

Similarly unrelated aspects of other media might indirectly influence sales outside of marketing and/or games quality - for instance Fantasy stuff has been very trendy in recent years partially because of popular books and films (Happy Potter, Lord of the Rings etc.); this sort of trend while easy to spot while you're in the middle of it isn't easy to predict before it happens or indeed when its cycle will end.

If marketing alone could make a successful product then you'd see a lot more half-assed titles with huge marketing spends on them, however simply put people aren't that stupid -while marketing something well will get you some initial sales, you need a combination of both marketing and gameplay in order to have a mega hit.

I'd also indicate that its not essential to have marketing or huge sales for a game to be a commercial success imho - quite often people measure things purely in terms of sales or revenue; but at the end of the day its customer satisfaction and profitability which is the most important thing imho.

(sorry for the on-topic post )

 

I thought bait and switch means to advertise a product or service and a price that a business couldn't justifiably maintain, then when a customer comes in to purchase that advertised item or service the company says that it isn't available any more but a very good substitute is, for a higher price.

That's very different than putting females into ads. I'm trying to think, but I can't recall any industry that hasn't tried using females to sexualize or make their product 'look cool'.

Maybe you are using the wrong set of words? Because I don't see on their advertisements anything which would reasonably make me think they are selling women. Likewise on their castle adverts, I don't think a reasonable person is going to play and say "Where is my castle, I thought I was getting a real castle!".