So, in game development, there tends to be a somewhat adversarial relationship with marketing. Sometimes, it’s just wondering WTF they’re thinking asking for a particular feature, sometimes, it’s outright hostility. I tend towards the latter camp, and frankly, my experience thus far with game marketing departments hasn’t really left me holding them in high esteem.
Of course, there’s a natural tendency to be at odds, simply because the marketing department are the ones that tell you that you can’t just make whatever you want, you have to make something that will sell to someone. Nominally, they’ve got some capacity to do research, and listen to the supposed consumer.
I think the thing that bothers me is quite simple. As a designer, it’s my job to create something interesting. Maybe fun, maybe thought provoking, whatever – something compelling. And if I can’t make myself genuinely interested in it, it’s very hard for me to do a good job. But more than that, it’s *also* very hard to make something interesting for someone that’s *not me.*
Why? Well, I only occupy my own headspace – I can only judge what *I* find interesting. I can’t tell you what a 12 year old girl wants, and frankly, it’s stupid of me to try. I can make something I think is compelling, and ageless, and might not overtly say, be hostile to 12 year old girls, but I can’t get into their heads, and understand them. Never gonna happen.
And frankly, neither can marketers. They can listen to them speak, and they can relay what they say in condensed form, but in my experience, they don’t know any better what a 12 year old wants than I do. And I know what makes a compelling interactive experience a hell of a lot better than they do.
Am I biased? Oh, hell yes. But the thing is, their job is to nominally study a demographic, and determine what they want. I would say that most real acheivements that further a medium are things that the market doesn’t know they want until *after* they’ve seen something radically new.
Show me a marketing person who did a focus group that showed the Sims would be the commercial success it was. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
…
…
Right. So, there weren’t any. And the marketing genius who really got behind Katamari Damacy? Hmmm.
No?
I don’t harbor delusions that great art comes from creative freedom. Great art often comes from trying to get around crushing limitations. And I’m sure the schmoes that commissioned the Sistine Chapel ceiling were as ignorant and shortsighted as any current-day marketing drone.
And I think that that’s also my major problem with democracy, and the current political climate – political strategists, and the like. Leadership isn’t done by the masses. Ever. Leadership is done by leaders – people who are willing to break the status quo, not people who sit there and ask their pollsters what the public wants. What the public wants is stability, and the status quo, whether it genuinely benefits them or not.
Consider the wave of malaise that swept the Democrats after Kerry started to crumble as the polls closed. How many people really *fought back*? I certainly didn’t. I didn’t want to say, question that the entire electoral system was broken, and that the election was possibly stolen. Instead, I gave up. I figured the public was stupid, and that was the way it was. Because *I* was willing to settle for the status quo.
How easy it must be to placate the public. How utterly trivial and banal. Leadership comes from the purposeful resistance to the status quo, in politics, life, and game design.
But there *are* people who know what children want, if for any reason, because they *tell* them what they want through advertising. Having a successful product is as much about telling the consumer what they want as it is following what they say.
Do you think, for example, the creators of shows like Teletubbies *really* thought they were creating something super awesome? Likely not… It’s likely they saw the trends with Barney and Bananas in Pajamas and did something of their own.
Or, take Sega’s own “Love and Berry” in Japan. They created a new market with 6-8 year old girls in the arcades, and it was a game driven primarily by marketing.
Game development (large-scale development, at least) can’t be done without PD or Marketing. Hell, even Katamari Damacy, which started with a creator’s vision, could not have reached the levels of popularity without the marketing guys behind it (who do you think was handling the big “grass roots” PR push?). Without PD, your game won’t be finished. Wihout Marketing, nobody will hear about your game.
It’s a give and take.
It depends on how much time and money you want to spend on marketing and research. Read the book Freakonomics (or was it The Tipping Point), and you will quickly learn that Sesame Street is extremely formulaic using focus groups and finding the correct “recipe.” Blues Clues took Sesame Street research to the next level — hours and hours are spent in research before an episode even hits the airwaves. And if you don’t know how popular these shows are, just ask your local toddler (or parent of said toddler).
If you have a target audience, and you have sociologists that can ask the write questions, you can develop a game that will be successful. It is an iterative process that is very expensive. I believe marketing these days fails to catch onto trends; marketers try to hit a broad range hoping something sticks or, better yet, takes off.
Back to Tipping Point: some fads may start at a the grass roots. If so, there are key factors to this recipe, but no assurance that the process can be successfully duplicated.
In conclusion: you should do as much research as possible, but in the end be happy with the product you produce. If you spend too much time thinking about the wants of other people (or the public in general), you’ll lose your mind! And none of us wants that.
Not being able to get into the mind of someone else: I strongly disagree with your sentiments here. The point you might have been making is that it’s not possible for you to get into the mind of someone else, but I am refuting it on the basis on it being a more generalized statement. If that is an incorrect impression, ignore the next paragraph. 😀
Great writers throughout the centuries have been able to produce lasting works precisely because they do speak to people that they are not. Take a book we’ve both read: Ender’s Game. Card was not a child when he wrote that, yet there is a voice that speaks to children and to children-about-to-become-adults, because it vividly portrays sibling conflict, children’s cruelty to one another, parents’ cruelty to children, and a feeling of being too young to handle the responsibilities that are put upon their shoulders.
As a designer, it’s my job to create something interesting.
I can only partially agree with this. It’s your passion and desire to create something interesting. But as a paid position, it’s your job to create something interesting that also helps the company to stay in business enough to sustain itself and to exist in the way that it hopes to exist. There may be specific positions that you can get hired into where they operate more like a think tank and have external funding that allows potentially unprofitable games to be created, but other than that, it does not seem to make sense to assume that there should be freedom to create something if the rest of the company actively believes that it will just be a money pit, because it puts everyone else in the company at unnecessary risk. If a company goes out of business and can no longer operate, it doesn’t matter if they were in the process of making the best game on earth, because they won’t have the resources to ever get it finished.
This risk could be mitigated if the project takes very minimal resources or if the people responsible for the making of the game have a known track record of producing amazing, creative, and successful products. Until this type of situation can be arranged, it doesn’t make sense to assume game designers (or anyone else who makes a living) should be allowed complete creative freedom.
I find it explicitly harmful to view the marketing-versus-development relationship as necessarily adversarial. It always, always depends on the individuals, on what the focus of the company as a whole is, and to demonize a group based on their job description (which is to make sure the product can sell so that the company can stay in business, which is honestly a positive thing for everyone’s jobs), just because they have to make unpopular decisions is to cut off your own nose to spite the face.
As I’ve said, it depends on the individuals involved. The culture at a given company might be so strong that it actively discourages innovation and encourages homogenization. But blame the company culture, the corporate outlook, the specific individuals involved; there is no need to paint an entire branch of industy with the same brush.
I’ve worked with people in various departments that I felt were completely unqualified or did not belong in their positions. I’ve also worked with incredible people who had a passion for the company and the products that we were all using and selling.
I meant “right” not “write.” 🙁
The gaming business is interesting because you _ARE_ your target demographic – you’re male, you grew up with games, and you are willing to devote significant resources to buying and playing games. So developing games that will be interesting to you works great for a significant portion of the potential customers.
However, if you’re not your target demographic, I think there is a lot to be said for finding out more about your potential customers. Focus groups are a stupid way to do it, but following them around and figuring out what attracts them is a valuable task. In the case of more generalized software, one of the things I try to do is figure out what problem my customer has that I’m trying to solve. I always ignore the solutions they propose, but I take note of the problems that the solutions are meant to solve, and design my own solutions to those problems.
I don’t know if it’s of use in gaming development, but I always found that rapid prototyping was an effective way to get real feedback. Focus groups suck because people can’t get their minds around new concepts. It’s only when you have something in your hands and play with it a bit that you have a sense of whether you’ll like it. I like the example of Get Bass, which you evangelized for a while, and which everybody mocked you for until you stuck the fishing rod in their hands, and they went “ooh, this is fun!”
I agree with ei-nyung about not demonizing all marketers. But that’s probably because I’m having vague thoughts of moving in that direction myself. Scary, eh?
re: Ender’s Game – I think the issue there is that Card *chose* to explore a particular mentality, and it’s one that he could internalize, and understand. But that’s his choice, as an artist – it *is* what he finds interesting.
Bill Watterson was the same way, I think – he could clearly communicate what it *meant* to be a kid – that’s the message. But he wasn’t trying to inhabit the mind of a 10 year old consumer, and figure out what they’d like to buy. He wrote what he loved, and he fought hard against the limitations of his syndicate, and against what the marketers told him would be good for his product.
And in the end, that integrity, and control *helped* Calvin & Hobbes, because it never became trivialized or cheapened.
But the point, basically, is that those people chose the general direction of their product – they weren’t told to inhabit a target demographic’s mentality.
re: Blue’s Clues, and the like – yes, focus groups help. And people who are really, really stellar at conducting focus groups may be able to get useful information out of them. But at the EA focus groups I went to, they were uniformly filled with bad data. Questioners would lead the kids towards certain answers. One series of questions appeared specifically designed to draw a response out of the group that the marketing team wanted, explicitly to contradict what the development team wanted.
And yes, I know that sounds both paranoid, and very bizarre, but I swear to you that I cannot find any other reasonable explanation why those particular questions were strucutred in the way that they were (it had to do with a product name, and marketing’s decision to repeat mistakes that have historically been very, very problematic for us).
I probably shouldn’t brush the whole industry with my negativity – I’m sure they’re useful in keeping a business afloat, and getting exposure for things that might otherwise be overlooked. But that’s very different than a company like EA, where the marketing strongly guides the creative content.
I cannot find any other reasonable explanation why those particular questions were strucutred in the way that they were
I think it’s because they suck at their jobs. My crappy old coworker had a lot of poor ideas that had to do with carrying around hardware ideas when entering software space, but she had great methodology. The people you describe seem to be completely untrained in good, useful methodology. It could indicate they were just being lazy, even if they know good methodology, but I’d tend to believe they have no idea how to gather and process good data. And definitely should learn.
I brought up Ender’s Game to address the proposed idea that one is unable to inhabit a mental space that doesn’t reflect who one is. To counter it on the basis of whether it was voluntary or not doesn’t refute that the example shows that at least one person can do that.
The willingness and desire is another issue entirely from the ability to do so, and I agree that not all people can readily engage the mental space of someone else, and I also agree with how that applies to your ability to be creative in a positive manner.
[Bill Watterson] wrote what he loved
But you would never have heard of his name if his comic strip did not in fact appeal to people, because then it would not have been published because no one would be interested in seeing any of it.
It’s not that I think that one shouldn’t creat art as one wishes — one should — and it’s not that I don’t understand how marketing influences can be suffocating at times. But the reality is that if it only appeals to you and no one else, then there is no business reason that anyone would pay you for it, so it is someone’s job to make the unpopular decisions that perhaps stifle people’s creativity.
I don’t think you’d have a problem with marketing departments if you felt that they were well-informed and were making “good” decisions — decisions that help the game get traction, that help the game reach the most people, even help the designers understand the people they hope to reach better. I think that you have a problem with them because you haven’t seen a highly functional marketing team that really works well.
You ask me for input on game ideas — in essence, you are doing your own unofficial market research. If you wanted to stay “pure” to your ideas, you wouldn’t ask your friends and trusted colleagues for opinions because it would corrupt your creative flow and take it out of the realm of a purely creative process.
If a marketing department you worked with did more than budgets and bad rearch, if instead they were able to give you great, pertinent data (like, wait on Idea X until next year because we see a market starting to build for it in two years, but go ahead with Idea Y right now because the market is ready for it now), then you’d love them. The problem is that you want to work with highly competant people you can trust, and you haven’t yet found that in your past jobs in the marketing department.
Disclaimer: All of the contents of this comment should have “I think” attached implicitly.
you haven’t yet found that in your past jobs in the marketing department.
Clarify to say: you haven’t yet found that in the marketing departments of your past jobs.
re: occupying headspace – I think the distinction is that someone like Bill Watterson is exploring *his* experience – what it’s like to be an older person thinking about being what, eight years old, and what was interesting about that experience from his perspective.
When I was Calvin’s age, I loved the strip – I even “got” a lot of it – but I don’t think I really understood the perspective it was being written from until much later. I think the same is true of Ender’s Game.
re: my perception of marketing – I totally agree that if I found a marketing team that say, showed reasonable methodology, and came to conclusions that I found justified, *even if I didn’t agree with them*, that’d be one thing. The problem is that my experience was with a group of people that made arbitrary decisions with bad methodology, and I was told to accept their decisions as gospel, despite the fact that first hand observation showed me they didn’t have a goddamn clue what they were doing.
So, yeah – I think that a huge part of why I feel so strongly negatively about marketing, as a guide for creative direction, is that they’ve seemed to me like arbitrary jackasses who don’t know their head from their butt.
But the other point remains – that people, for the most part, simply don’t understand what they “want,” until they’re shown. If I describe say, The Sims, prior to someone seeing it, they’re extraordinarily unlikely to say they’ll pay to play a game like that. And yet, once it was put into practice, the strength of the design was easily understood by people who played it, and now it seems like conventional wisdom. But EA tried to shuffle the Sims off quietly, without spending too much on it, because no one believed in it.
But the other point remains – that people, for the most part, simply don’t understand what they “want,” until they’re shown.
I agree entirely. When we used to conduct UI testing, the feedback we were given at the end were often very useless because the general populace lacked the insight and/or vocabulary to articulate why they enjoyed something or hated something. We were still able to glean information from them by observation — seeing which elements of the UI seemed to give them pause, if they would back out of a screen they hit because it wasn’t what they were looking for, if they were able to quickly find what they were looking for, etc.
In other words, I heartily agree with the third paragraph of Perlick’s comment. 😀
Gosh, interesting discussion here. I guess I’ve had a better experience with marketing than seppo did. When I was working on CellKey, we were definitely in the position of a technology searching for an application. Our engineering/science team knew nothing about drug discovery, so the ideas we came up with for how to use it were dumb. Our marketing department did some research, talked to a bunch of different labs, and figured out a niche in the drug discovery process that was unfilled that was a good fit for the technology. And now the product has been released, and they’re starting to sell instruments. So that was a case where marketing was able to use their expertise to help us.
I think the case of gaming is more difficult for the reason I cited last time – you know your target audience better than the marketing team because you _are_ your target audience. You have played games your entire life, and you know what makes a good game. So to have marketers come in and tell you how to make a good game is disrespectful of your experience and expertise. Especially if they were doing it with loaded-question focus groups. Ick.
Gaming is also different in that most of the other software I have worked on is targeted towards solving problems. So marketing is helpful at finding a problem that needs to be solved, which they can then hand off to engineering to find a solution for. Gaming fills the niche of entertainment, so I suspect it is less susceptible to being analyzed by marketing in the way they are used to. Anyway.
But, the dangerous thing about gamers in the game industry is that we tend to actually have different tastes than the masses. The current breakdown of demographics tends to be extremely simple:
Casual
Hardcore
etc
I tend to break it down by how the gamers actually view gaming. The type of gamer that we are does not reflect the tastes of what is necessarily going to be successful. Critically acclaimed, perhaps, but that does not automatically mean your product will sell (which, in the end, as a business, is the ultimate goal – it’s simply a matter of how you approach that goal, either through quality or by trying to play to the lowest common denominator).
Marketing is a great tool to reconnect with those whose tastes differ from your own. By creating things that only appeal to yourself, you are inherently creating for a much smaller market. While marketing should not lead the creative process, input from marketing (assuming they know what they’re doing) can lead to some very helpful insights into the userbase.
Take, for example, the fact that Seppo and I do not like Final Fantasy. Yet, can you deny its popularity? While I certainly would never want to create a game like it, there are definitely lessons that can be learned: why people like it, what aspects of the game can be duplicated without also duplicating the areas that we don’t like, etc.
I come at this from a completely different perspective – that of the marketer (or PR person, as the case may be). Since I’m in technology – a sector I’m not necessarily passionate about – I am oftentimes better able to communicate my clients message to its target audience than the company spokesperson is simply because I don’t really have an investment in it. My experience has taught me that when a technologist is so engrossed in his/her product and it becomes all-encompassing, they cannot speak/think about it in any way other than how they want to. That’s usually when you run into a bad review/article/commentary. You (general) didn’t provide your audience with the message they were looking for, even though you clearly could have. What I find time and time again is that these people have such a hard time separating themselves from their company/product that it becomes personal for them and that’s when the message goes down the tube. I’ve worked with some great marketing executives and some equally horrific ones and I think a company’s results are definitely tied to the job that person (group) does. Without marketing, no one knows who you are. Even with grassroots campaigns, it’s still marketing, in a sense. It’s just a different type of marketing.