Innovation or incrementalism?
(Visited 6623 times) Game talk
Mar 182006
Lost Garden: Never innovate halfway an interesting post with cool data on what makes more sense: innovation, sequels, or incremental changes.
To cut straight to the chase:
Danc cites a study from 1991 that says that low innovation products are dramatically more likely to have a high ROI, but actually have a lower market success rate and slightly mower market share than highly innovative products.
More importantly, the incremental “medium innovation” products are the clear losers in all three categories: market success, ROI, and market share.
9 Responses to “Innovation or incrementalism?”
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Um. Was this study produced before or after World of Warcraft came out?
It is from 1991, but it’s about products in general, not games per se.
I’ve never played WoW but it doesn’t sound like it’s “moderately innovative”. It sounds like it’s EQ’s PvE + AO’s instances + DAoCs quest system and RvR (with maybe a splash of SB’s class design).
At any rate, even if the above chart isn’t accurate, it’s accurate with respect to my opinions on games in general.
Let’s be careful wih the innovation bit.
The theory of relativity truly was a synthesis of concepts, ideas and theories developed by many scientists, when Einstein put it together.
There is a purpose for games that gather the best of previous attempts in one shiny package. In fact, these games are stepping stones for further evolution and hopefully progress.
I don’t think this is valid inside the MMORPG market. You could argue if a game that is a MMORPG could ever be “innovative”, because – well – as long as it remains a MMORPG, there is nothing new to that. EQ1, UO, Meridian etc. have been innovative, all MMORPGs since then haven’t.
“moderately innovative” would be if you cross an MMORPG with another known genre. “Time of Defiance” for example, crossing MMO and RTS. Or MMO sports games, which, if I remember correctly, Brad McQuaid once forecasted a great future.
Truely innovative would be a completely new genre that has only the fact that it’s played online by a massive ammount of poeple in common with an MMORPG.
It’s the same with Point and Click adventures for example. Have there ever been an innovative point&click adventure except the ones, that found this genre? How would that be? There has just been some evolution, like added videos, 3D and so on.
We see the same evolution with MMOs to some degree, but I wouldn’t call anything I’ve seen so far an innovation in the sense of this article. And as with point&click adventures, I doubt I’ll ever see.
Innovation/evolution inside the MMO market is something different, and it’s essential to the growth of the market. Even more than to any other games market I could think of. You have to offer something to the players if you like them to move on to your game. Even if it’s just fancy graphics.
Btw. I ever wondered, If SOE would make a new EverQuest 1(!), would it be successfull? Identical zones and gameplay to EQ1, just with truely highend graphics, combined with full marketing as a new game, not just an update to EQ1. I’m not sure what to think.
Two current favourites for discussion are EVE and Second Life. Both are extremely innovative. Both seem to be following slow-burn models.
Innovation can certainly work inside the MMO market. It’s a matter of staying in business long enough for anyone to notice.
It’s hard to say how valid a non-video game specific study done 15 years ago is to today’s video game market. Even had the study been about video games, the market has changed so much for video games in the last 15 years that its validity would be highly questionable.
It’s hard to know how to classify games in these 3 categories. What is God of War, for example? A lot of people would like to say that it is highly innovative but I think it’s probably more moderately innovative. It’s a member of a family of console action/adventure titles but with very high production quality. I’m not even sure that EVE would be “highly” innovative — it’s really a genre blend. It really depends on how you define your terms. Do terms defined for other markets even really work in the video game world? Probably not. The computer market at large, with its inherent innovation already defies a lot of marketing wisdom. Say what you will about Halo 2 being just more of Halo 1, the difference between Halo 2 and a game 15 years ago is vast compared to the difference between soap today and soap 15 years ago.
So I suspect that if we really want to make some better qualified judgements about innovation and video games we need current data, specifically on video games, including data, of course, on failed products that never even launched.
I’m not sold on the reasoning behind Psychonaut’s failure. First of all, its judgement as moderately innovative? Again, by what terms? That term does seem right to me, but compared to the rest of the market it is pretty darn innovative. You can bet that 40% of the market isn’t more innovative. While moderately innovative titles share some of the problems of both low- and highly-innovative titles they don’t have them to such a degree. You don’t have to risk as much on R&D, you end up with something that isn’t completely unfamiliiar to gamers, instead of learning completely new mechanics it is more one-step removed (if that) from things that gamers already know and play. It has a partially built-in audience. Not the audience of Halo players, for example, but the audience of platform players.
In the casual market, where I’m more familiar with numbers, it seems fairly clear that the market is dominated by low-innovation titles, that some moderately-innovative titles make it and very few highly-innovative titles make it (but when they do make it, they often define a new niche or genre which then gets filled with a number of low- and moderate-innovation titles). It is occasionally even the case that the original, innovative title isn’t even the one that makes the big profit off its idea but instead it has moderate success, and demonstrates a viable market, and then a more polished product comes along with a lot of features of the past product and fully captures that new market.
I tend to think that the EA strategy of 1-4 small innovations per title (which seems to be moderate innovation even though a lot of sequels would be in this category?) seems to be pretty successful for a risk-averse company and that higher degrees of innovation work far less often but can lead to far greater successes than the more moderate innovations. High degrees of innovation pay off when new and wildly successful brands are created that define a new genre and go on to own the audience for that genre for some time.
It’s a fairly bogus study. You could come up with an inovative product, like selling milk in cow-shapped containers. It wouldn’t show up in the list unless it got to market, and it wouldn’t get to market without overcoming major hurdles. This tends to imply either an obvious new idea that will clearly break thru, or cash backing such as advertising.
Well supposedly the study accounts for “success bias”. However it is hard to believe that innovative games have anywhere near a 78% “success rate” and so the products described by this study don’t seem to have much correlation with the games market.