Developers Lead; Marketing Bods follow

By Nicholas Lovell on August 20, 2012

In an interview over at the Guardian, four games journalists gave their impressions of Gamescom. The full article is definitely worth reading, but this summary from Dan Griliopolous leaped out at me

“The paid MMO is dead. No-one’s doing it. The developers who have MMOs in development now tend to say they haven’t decided what the business model is – by which they mean, what flavour of free they’re going for. There’s still a lot of room for price experimentation in both the mobile and MMO space, and someone’s going to find a model that’s not just not-intrusive but compelling and also a fun way to pay.

Lots of developers are still confused about their route to market. Lots of them have instinctively crass tastes, and the increasing preponderance of booth babes at GamesCom is hardly redressing the public’s negative impression of computer games. Making an analogy to politics, developers need to lead the public, like the Indie developers do on Kongregate, iOS and Steam, not follow like the marketing bods do at GamesCom. ”

I love the idea that developers lead while marketing bods follow. I look forward to seeing GAMESbrief readers continue to lead.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and forthcoming Penguin title The Curve.

http://twitter.com/emeraldsong Emmeline P L Dobson

The more I’ve read about what marketing can be like (meeting your target market, listening to them, finding out what they really want and why and how your team can meet those needs and desires) the more it sounds like good user experience design. Shouldn’t there be a lot more teamwork between design department and marketing department?
http://www.gamesbrief.com Nicholas Lovell

I totally agree (and it’s great to see people saying it).

The type of marketing that is less useful in 2012 is the type that took a finished product and made people want it (i.e. launch marketing)

The type of marketing that is more useful is that which helps identify wahat customers want, that helps the design team understand that, and work in an iterative loop.

Sure, there is room for Apple-style launches, but generally, marketing and design are now very close together. I think what Dan was saying is that Gamescom was full of old-style marketing.
http://www.gamesbrief.com Nicholas Lovell

You may want to read some of the original discussion on this topic: http://www.gamesbrief.com/2010/09/to-those-arguing-about-marketing-vs-creativity-marketing-is-creativity/

and a great follow-up/counter-argument on the Escapist

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/first-personmarketer/8199-Making-Sausage
Nick

yes they should be closer, and are in many cases.
Yet it is also up to developers to have user experience experimentation at their level.. else everything becomes market driven and nothing new is created.
http://twitter.com/RICSTER101 Ric Williams

Nick can you provide the link to the Guardian article please sir?
http://www.gamesbrief.com Nicholas Lovell

Thought I’d added it. Here it is: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2012/aug/20/gamescom-reactions
And I’ll amend the post.
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