Marketing and video development - A match made in hell?

Preface: This is also an attempt to practice writing in english. Any criticism on grammar and spelling is actually appreciated.

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The latest scandal caused people to question how marketing (or PR) influences video game journalists. I think we should go one step further and question how marketing influences video game development.

At the Codex, gamers call the increasing production of games that have uninteresting gameplay "the Decline" and blame it at consoletards. Although new buyers with different tastes can change an existing market I am not convinced that this is really the core of the problem.

My hypothesis is that interesting gameplay is hard to promote and boring gameplay is easy to promote.
Imagine you have to create a 30 second trailer for a video game.
Take any game requiring strategy (meaning interesting gameplay) and imagine showing it for the first time to someone who is not a devoted fan of this game's genre. There are two possibilities. If the game is realtime it will look confusing, because the unintroduced observer will be unable to understand at all what is happening and why. If the game is turnbased it will look boring. Whatever you do, you loose.

On the other hand, take something without any interesting gameplay at all. Or even go one step further. Take something with no gameplay at all. Take a movie. That is easy to promote. Take an attractive member of each sex, some explosions, some witty dialogue, and you are done.

You think this only works in theory? Let's talk about examples. Take any infinity engine game. Either you film combat which will look like a weird clusterfuck (melee combat) or like a night club for ants (spell effects), or you film someone clicking through dialogue trees. No matter how much fun playing either of them is, watching it impresses no one. The first one is confusing, the second boring.
Now take Mass Effect. The dialogues feature collar-grabbing Commander Shepard whose visual appearance is based on a model. The combat is basicly whack-a-mole with some twists. Not originial, not deep - but easy on the eyes. And the mind. And the marketer.

This should come as no surprise if you leave the realm of computer games for a second. Showing people having fun playing whack-a-mole is easy enough. Showing people having fun playing chess? How do you do that? Make them grin while moving a piece? They will look like retards!

In conclusion: Shallow gameplay makes more money than good gameplay because successful marketing improves sales.

If the above is true, I see only a few possibilies for new games having interesting gameplay:

1. Sequels that require less marketing or even no marketing. Their gameplay needs to be similar to the game they are a sequel of or people will be disappointed. So the room for innovation is limited before development has even started. See Sid Meier's Civilization.

2. Games that don't have any marketing. Chances are they also have no money for development.

3. Developers that cater for niches. Chances are they are lacking money for development.

4. Games where marketing has no influence on development or only late in the development cycle.

Of those four only the last one seems to have any chance for improvement.
One example where I think marketings influence can be easily identified is XCOM : Enemy Unknown. This game has day and night cycles. Those day and night cycles have no effect on gameplay. But this game - although turnbased - has a dramatic camera perspective showing your characters running. Even if there is no enemy in sight.
So at one point in development some guy must have decided that having this retarded camera perspective was more important than soldiers having reduced visibility at night.
Although this game is also full of examples of console-oriented game design, I don't think console gamers enjoy seeing their characters running that much, that they would prefer it over more varied gameplay.

So who would want that camera? I guess someone who has to give a demonstration of this game long before it is done. Who has to make a 30 second video of gameplay. The same guy who will prefer to have fully voiced dialogue because they look better than a complex dialog tree when shown as a video.
This guy needs to be stopped.
Which would only happen if gamers did not base their decisions on previews. And not on reviews describing the gameplay instead of wasting lines describing the first parts of the story, the epic soundtrack which was composed by famous composer whatshisname, the effects on anti-alising on frames per second, all the other games the developer created, and all the other information the writer will find interesting enough to mention although they don't affect gameplay at all.

In that light, I think a loss of respect for "game journalists" could lead to a loss of influence for marketing people which could lead to a win for game design.

Wishful thinking, but who knows the future?

On a related note, this leads to a funny idea regarding kickstarter: Maybe games that lack any gameplay videos are more likely to end up as fun games than those that don't.
That would make supporting games rather counter-intuitive.

 

Everything is shit.

 

Simple, don't put out gameplay videos at all. Just do pre-rendered CGI shit completely unrelated to the gameplay. You'll trick the sheep into buying it since redding about the game is teh hard but the CGI looks awesome, and those that actually want the game have already read about how it plays and will buy it despite the CGI trailer.

 

Yes, that's been standard procedere for a long time. Marketing students are teached that way to not look outside the box, but rather just to apply a successful template to *any* genre no matter whether it fits the particular game or not. I call this laziness.

Why bother doing appropriate marketing for, say something like a Thief-style game, when such game doesn't even have cutscenes? Solution? Let's not greenlight such games at all! Cutscene-heavy games however are easy to market, and since the average Joe does not want to actually do proper research (like reading) about a product, instead he/she just wants to be swayed into buying shit 'cause that gives you that short-term fix.

The more undermined the education system gets, the easier it becomes for marketing to gain the upper hand in everything, including if and how a game gets developed.

Marketing is really just a sub-branch of psychology, but with profit making.

 

When I hear about marketing and advertisement, my desire to kill people increases exponentially. EVERYTHING. IS. SHIT.

 

I was a Marketing student and approve of this message.


You guys have no ideia how jumping the bandwagon is used & taught as marketing strategy... I was in college when twitter launched, all our teachers agreed that EVERYTHING had to be on twitter. "I don't care if you run a canned beans company, enter Twitter and tweet some shit to people, GET CONNECTED!!" I can easily imagine mr. marketing guy shouting at RPG developers, asking for online season pass for Dragon Age 3...

 

I used to go to an advertisement school and stuff like psychology of advertisement and marketing always left me bitter and angry.

 

Yeah, those are the most disturbing classes; Maslow's Pyramid of Need, how to force a person into impulse purchases, how some marketing GENIUS made lamps last less so people would buy them more, why retards will buy the new car model just because you changed the headlights... scary stuff bro.

 

I think these two years spent in that school is when my worldview became permanently coloured black. I remember that it was also then when I became rabidly intolerant to TV, radio and advertisement in general. This shit is simply evil.

 

Yeah, the day learned about Planned obsolescence was terrible. Here I am, at a college, with a man openly teaching us how making stuff that breaks & get old fast is a great marketing strategy and should be adopted whenever possible to improve profit.

From that day beyond, everything. was. shit.

 

All you can really do is to ignore the mainstream, and only play games that aren't shit. I much rather play decent game with low production values then games with horrible gameplay. Good games aren't any less popular then they were in the past, if anything they are more popular but now we also have mainstream crap that is even more popular so publisher will rather finance that, but with crowd funding model we can get more good games then ever before.

They shouldn't be respected because they aren't critics who can appreciate good deeper gameplay, and express what is fun about it, but they are part of the marketing machine. If video games will ever get real critics then it can only happen if people will not read, and support shitty "game journalists" that we have today.

Huh? Why would that be the case?

 

Agree with erl. It's pretty apparent when marketing budgets eclipse development budgets of AAA or AAAA titles that big business thinks marketing is more important than product for sales. I've also heard in an interview a developer talking about how he saved a project for a WW2 flight sim that was horribly behind schedule and over budget from being canned by the publisher by making a 'awesome' view mode that showed all the action from cool angles. There was no game to speak of, it was a buggy mess, but because he had this cool, video friendly camera mode the project was able to go on. It's pretty apparent that being able to make videos like that is important for a games survival on the publisher end, not just selling to the public.

 

Marketing people could be bros if companies would just make actual good, deep games and then rely on marketing slime to sell them to idiots.

 

And how would you sell Planescape: Tournament with 30 sec video, or with a pop up add.

 

That exact game released today could never be mainstream and is of course not what I am talking about. We can have good old RPGs that look pretty.

 

I admit that this idea is a little bit far fetched. My assumption is that if people have a working gameplay video at that point of the developping process, that makes it likely they have spent too much time and money on things that look cool on camera but don't add fun to the game.

What I did not think of, are kickstarter games that have confusing or boring gameplay videos. Maybe we should cheer them. But this is not any less counter-intuitive.


Raapys: Problem is, cgi is expensive.

DalekFlay: How would you market a pretty looking Planescape Torment to the general audience in a 30 sec video?
And why would they go the hard way to create a good game and use extra effort to market it and not create a worse game that is cheaper to make and easier to market?

 

If looking pretty is the selling point, then why bother with making more complex bigger game? I did mean how would you market what makes Planescape: Tournament good?

 

We were talking about this in another thread recently. I was a SNES gamer and occasional PC shooter kid until I started buying RPGs because they looked cool. Then I learned how to play them. Dragon Age Origins sold like 4 million copies based on marketing, certainly not on everyone wanting a tactical PC RPG ported roughly to consoles. Marketing is powerful and can get people to buy shit they might otherwise not be interested in.

 

Aren't you just proving my claim? To convince you to buy it, marketing needed cool looking gameplay. Not deep, complex gameplay. Now look at the path Dragon Age 2 has taken. More cool looking gameplay, less interesting gameplay.


Marketing is indeed powerful. But marketing ist not almighty. It needs certain tools for its work. And I assume that in order to provide these tools to marketing (think of the "awesome view mode" mentioned by Destroid) more interesting things are cut from the game or never even thought of at all because they provide no marketing benefit.

 

Dragon Age: Origins did it with CGI totally outside the gameplay. You can also use cutscenes, environment shots, whatever. Acting like a game needs consistent popamole action to be sold to action fans is giving consumers way too much credit.

 

So they used everything but actual gameplay?
Ok, so they just needed anything cool looking. Point is, the imho above average gameplay mechanics of Dragon Age: Origins did not help sell the game. Or would you say it did?

Exactly my point. Whack-a-mole action is not part of video games because people find it so much fun. It is there because it is easy and cheap to do and most people don't hate it. If the gameplay has low influence on purchase decisions developers do not need to focus on particulary interesting gameplay to make a profit.
So what incentive do publishers have to pay for work done on the gameplay system?

 

Fair enough.

I guess I am more making a P.T. Barnum point of being able to sell anything.

 

Sounds like you haven't seen the trailer.