Marketing in games vs web
One of the more interesting communication gaps that I’ve had while working on Metaplace was over the word “marketing.”
In much of the game industry, marketing is a dirty word. In fact, for a while I made it part of my personal crusade to smooth over the relationship between development and marketing both at SOE and at Origin, because there’s a historical sense of enmity there, where development feels that clueless marketers are trying to design the game, and marketers feel that clueless developers don’t care what the public actually wants.
Over in the web world, it’s different. In fact, if I had to pick the closest analogue to “marketing guy” it would be “designer.”
In web land, it is often the product marketing guy who defines features, wireframes interfaces, knows his/her audience in and out, prioritizes what gets done, etc. Their job is to be the voice of the customer, and in the web world, the customer is king in a different way, perceptually, than in the game industry. After all, it’s not unusual to hear of web startups who completely changed their product, business model, and even what industry they were in, because their customers started leading them down a different path.
Meanwhile, in games that’s not really even possible because consumers don’t get to touch the game until it’s so baked that turning back or changing direction is nearly impossible.
Part of this comes about because games are an artistic medium, whereas most web companies are providing services. Games live and die by things like central conceit and strong vision. Well, successful web companies also need a strong vision, but it isn’t necessarily an artistic one; my sense (which may be wrong) is that it’s more often a cultural or business vision.
On the web side, this is all a hugely metrics-driven process. Here at Metaplace, we have A/B tested the login sequence for literally three months now. Should character create really come first? Or should you go into a world first, to show you what lies ahead if you register? There’s a assumption from games (and elsewhere) that of course you should create a character first, but how do we know? After all, in a web setting you haven’t committed to the product in advance by buying it off a shelf, so you have only a few seconds to persuade someone to stay. Is character create “keeping them from the good stuff” or is it the good stuff itself?
Other questions we ran into and A/B tested: start in a big world or your private world? What’s the private world like? Private world with grass or with interior? Interior large or small? Over and over and over… and it’s hardly the only thing that is metrics-driven in this way. In the web world, all sorts of decisions are made in this very mathematical way. As we interviewed marketing people frmo the web world, half the time what we found was almost “creative director” types, and the other half of the time it was Excel spreadsheet jockeys!
Now, this is not to say that games aren’t metrics dirven — heck, they are made of math, right? — but the metrics historically tend to be around game balance, advancement, maybe simple usability; not overall product strategy.
As a result of bathing in this stuff for a few years, I now tend to think of games marketing as staid and uncreative as a result of circumstance. Not enough has changed over the years in terms of how games are sold, to force more evolution, but it is starting to now. What we call marketing in games tends to get called “outbound marketing” in web, and it includes a lot of thinking over distribution channels, something which is a relatively new problem for the games industry to solve. Getting your web app or tech through Facebook versus your own site, the virality of it, what partnerships get it spread around, etc. Almost like directing strategy around biz dev, as well as owning PR and the like.
I’ve always thought that the best designers should learn to code, draw, model, compose, do Foley, and otherwise learn as many disciplines as possible. I also now think that they should dive into marketing even more than I used to, even if they are the creative type.
29 Responses to “Marketing in games vs web”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I’ll come back to this later. Just wanted to say that I’ve read this post. 🙂
I’m not very knowledgeable about marketing in the game industry beyond game ads that I see as a consumer. However, not only in the web world which is very explicitly a service, but also in the commercial software world marketing and product change are driven by the customer. The initial product might be a good first approximation, and then the nature of the product is driven by customer demand and market desires. Everywhere I’ve worked, product development beyond the initial first version changes radically – will it be worth it to develop a light version and charge less and still keep an enterprise version? and so on. One way that it sounds similar to the games model is that when you have a multi-thousand dollar piece of software, A/B testing is not all that practical.
Other than the MMO space, games are one-shot deals. The response to customer demand seems to still be extended over the lifecycle similarly, except new iterations are entirely new games and expansion packs, which have their own drives, changes, and problems.
The exceptions I’ve seen are:
1) MMOs. This is self explanatory, as the live team responds to customer feedback continuosly and must also produce new content. This is similar to a commercial software lifecycle.
2) Games with large, nearly public betas – I’m thinking particularly of Stardock here. They get customers involved when it’s barely out of alpha, so customers have a chance to give feeedback.
I also agree to making people as multidiciplinary as possible – my application architecture, code, and overall thinking are affected greatly the more things that I learn – even something as simple as ‘when you are the expert on the software, saying that you don’t know is far better than getting the wrong answer’ or doing some bad programmer art helps. The other key is to know everyone’s workflow – when I worked for an animation company, understanding the animation process and methodology helped me know what we could and could not do easily, as well as where I could help in unexpected ways.
I don’t think the historical sense of enmity is unique to games development, but more to selling package or completed software.
In my area, marketing and sales are notorious for making promises that are just impossible for the developers to keep.
As a consumer of games, it seems to me that the games industry has very much the same problem, more and more so as the industry matures into the mainstream. Marketing is talking up the game, making flashy advertsing, basically telling the consumer the buzzwords and ideas that will see the game, which the game to often fails to be able to achieve. Gamers in general are becoming more distrustful of marketing because of this.
I’m thinking of Age of Conan in particular here, as the marketing team seemed to have been talking about a completely different game than was actually being made. During the beta, features were simply “not there yet”, they were never talked about as “not going to be there”. So the beta community is fairly forgiving, because it’s beta, and your being asked to test only a piece (surposedly) of the final product.
To add to this mess is the case of publishers rushing product out the door – KOTOR 2 is the prime example of a game that probably would have been hailed as one of the best games of the year had it been finished with polish.
With that being said ‘finished with polish’ can cost a lot of money – look at all the titles Blizzard has canned over the years – but sales and customer trust probably would make up for the lost revenue.
Raph, do you have any hard numbers on successful games and their not-so-successful sequels? Do the failures make just as much money, thus partially justifying the publisher who pushes them out early?
On the subject of marketing being a dirty word, I’d say it’s a word like “lawyer”, where there’s just too much stuff it encompasses and some, indeed, is quite dirty (or can be done quite, uh, dirtily). It is definitely a shame the dirty stuff ends up tarnishing the whole thing, but it’s not the first or only word (or field) like that.
Amen to that. As the Product Development manager, I actively dislike being the guy to tell the guy with the drum to beat faster and the guy with the whip to whip more while the guy holding the tiller is being told to find a new target while someone having drinks in the captain’s cabin is thinking up his next score.
No one wants to be THAT one.
Marketing with a realistic plan is design, I agree. Too often marketing is predatory and opportunistic and worse, sometimes that is what they have to be because the times shape the opportunities instead of a plan shaping the times. It comes down to cash reserves. How much can you afford to spend to realize a vision?
On the other hand, how often do you go to a development group that is fascinated with the technology but seldom thinks about the application of the technology? It’s an old old story: something about campaigining in poetry and governing in prose.
In one case, the first that I had heard about one of our products needing to be translated into German was an outraged customer demanding to know where the German version was that our salesman had promised him.
Luckily this was a long time ago… and we managed to eventually deliver the German version (I believe about a year later).
I’m writing a fairly lengthy blog post in response, Raph.
A few quick comments…
I think you all need to start reading Peter F. Drucker’s works. In case you don’t know who Drucker was, he invented modern management for both commercial and noncommercial enterprises. Drucker was one of the most significant figures of the 20th century.
Drucker once wrote that there are only two functions of business: marketing and innovation. Everything that a corporation does serves one or both of these functions. Design happens to bridge the gap between both.
Richard Boehme:
There’s a difference between market-driven and market-driving. Those who are market-driven make decisions based solely on research. They shuffle forward while facing backward. (Visualize that for a moment and you’ll see what I mean.) They’re followers, not leaders. They’re the folks at the back of a horse parade.
Being a jack-of-all-trades is nice, but specialists are far more valuable. Specialization, however, does not preclude an interdisciplinary approach.
Zagzyg:
Bad practices are bad practices. Simply because there are practitioners who make mistakes for whatever reason does not mean the entire discipline is somehow screwed up.
By the way, you seem to be lumping marketing and sales together. They’re not the same things. Marketing and advertising are also not the same.
Most consumers (and even most non-marketing professionals) don’t understand what marketing is or what marketing does. They confuse advertising with marketing. They confuse sales with marketing. They confuse pure evil with marketing. Marketing gets a bad rap for a lot that has nothing, or very little, to do with marketing.
There’s also a tendency to use the word “marketing” to mean “a marketing department”, which is not how I use the word. Marketing is a process, a discipline, a function; marketing is not a group of people who differ from corporation to corporation, from industry to industry. If you have specific people in mind, blame them, not their profession.
Peter S.:
Committees are like that (e.g., “design by committee”) as is Machiavelli (e.g., “Machiavellian”.)
len:
The real problem with marketing is that everyone thinks they’re an expert. *sigh*
Among us shareware developers there is no such division, as you mention, because the marketing guy is the programmer most of the time. I probably spend almost as much time marketing as I do making games, it’s a full time job in itself.
Much of your post would still work if you substituted “games” for “tech products” and “web” for “anything else”.
To some degree I think this is from the video games industry being so steeped in the tech industry, where marketing is viewed as something you do to sell the products the engineers dreamed up, vs at say a P&G, where marketing is something you do to understand what you need to direct the engineers to build.
People have evolved away from that to some extent, but it’s crystal clear how much of it remains when you do as you’ve done here. Step outside and look at the view of another industry.
Raph: I’ve been pushing along similar lines myself for a while now, of course. Part of the thrust of “21st Century Game Design” (beyond its framing message that game design can be done in many different ways) is that professional game designers need to understand their role as being advocates for their players – that they have to consider the audience in the way the marketing department of a competent organisation would if they are going to design games responsibly.
But then, here is my problem: most of the marketing departments of most game publishers are really not very good at their jobs. They all too often presume the audience for games is entirely male, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, they continue to deliver marketing materials based on the way the market was (say) in the 1990s and don’t seem to have kept abreast with the changes in the market for games. There is often next to no understanding of the mass market – both in terms of which games can reach out to it, and also how to market to it. The number of people who were shocked at the Wii’s success underlines this gap in comprehension.
It sometimes feels that our industry is full of people who “know” everything, yet this “knowledge” doesn’t appear to match the behaviour of the marketplace at all! 🙂
Best wishes!
At heart I think is the conflation of marketing and advertising – the latter is a subset of the former and in my view will be an increasingly less important one.
While I do not think this misunderstanding of marketing is limited to the games world -it exists in abundance within the marketing world itself, I had noted the tech world aversion to it and consequently wrote a post a couple of years ago entitled Geek Marketing 101 that got a lot of traction.
Point 1 Marketing is not a department.
Anyone interested can read the rest here
http://makemarketinghistory.blogspot.com/2006/08/geek-marketing-101_115529822564302037.html
Morgan Ramsay:
I admit I know nothing about marketing as a discipline, but the subject is about why Marketing is such a dirty word. Wide spread bad practices do mean the entire discipline is somehow screwed up, that’s the point.
Advertising is often a subsection of Marketing, which is often a subsection of Sales or vice versa, so yes, I am lumping them together, because they often are.
This may be bad/wrong, but it is a fairly common set up, at least from an external point of view.
Most consumers don’t really care what the definition of marketing is, they care that the company is preceived to be untrustworthy, to make empty promises. Recently a lot of that has been blamed on the “marketing”, whether or not marketing is actually at fault.
As a developer, I only care that “those guys” are making free with promises that I then have to keep. That I have to deal with customers who are hugely disappointed in me because I have not met the expectations set up by the sales/marketing department.
“The real problem with marketing is that everyone thinks they’re an expert. *sigh*”
Define marketing. What expertise is required?
A complaint I hear often from development is ‘I wish they would market what we have built instead of finding a sales opportunity and marketing that.’ The problem of product crab-walk because of opportunism is real. It’s the ‘just this one extra feature’ that is in the overlap of two product types. As I understand your categories, that would be ‘sales’ and I agree that sales is where that problem originates. I usually think of marketing as the ‘image makers’ but not designers per se. They seldom have the technical chops so I need a better definition.
“Here at Metaplace, we have A/B tested the login sequence for literally three months now.”
The login sequence was also a huge concern for Sherwood. With the knowledge that a very high percentage of web players are lost during the registration process, I ran the game for quite a while with no registration. Type in a character name and your in. In 2004 when the game was launched, this was relatively unique. We have guest and member access now, with membership required to support our virtual pet sales.
“There’s a assumption from games (and elsewhere) that of course you should create a character first, but how do we know?”
Character creation is fun, but you don’t know which players want to dive right in and who wants to customize their avatar for a more extend period. In Sherwood the avatar and character stats are not interconnected in the same way as other games. You can go back and change the visual appearance of your avatar at anytime. So whether your a male viking or female ranger is more of how you feel at the moment than some choice you made back at XP level 1. There are downsides to going this way, but to the lightly committed web player who isn’t sure if this is their game, it allows them the freedom to change their mind and gives you a little more time to increase their commitment level.
Keep in mind, folks in sales will tell you, in all sincerity, that they’re marketing the product when they approach a potential customer.
I’d bet it’s the overlap between marketing and sales that contributes most to the bad taste of the word, as most of the negative images conjured by a meditation on “marketing” could easily, if not more accurately, be described as sales. Folks don’t mind being shown cool stuff about a product. Folks do mind being tricked out of their money. Bad, but effective sales practices abound, too, which would taint that word except we’ve come to assume it to the point of having no remaining emotional impact.
Or maybe it’s just me that’s that cynical. 😛
Usually but not always true. It does help to have someone in a position of having broad knowledge to act as an intermediary between all of your divisions. I suppose you could consider this being a specialization in “interfacing” though. Designers also need, out of necessity, to be able to broadly understand the thing they’re building, and dividing that task up among designers with various areas of focus only sorta works.
[…] the game, and marketers feel that clueless developers don�t care what the public actually wants. via Views: 0 Comments: 1 Posted on : elbandito on 22 August, 2008 10:38:22 Daca ai […]
One major caveat here from Mr. Professional Lifelong Marketing Schmuck… Unless you are marketing a service that is available on the Web, the purpose of your Web site is to get users to information, opportunities or activities as quickly and logically as possible. Often that is a sale or a sales-forward event; ie, even if I don’t buy, I now know something that may lead to future purchases. If the Web is being used for support… same deal. More clicks = bad. Hitting the back button = very bad. Leaving before you encounter the appropriate info/sale/oppo = fail.
In games, when you click more, you’re having more fun. When you spend more time in the game, you’re having more fun. When you’re being deliciously frustrated, you’re having more fun. An “efficient game” is, I think, oxymoronic.
One definition I give my advertising/marketing students for marketing is: anything that decreases friction in an economic process. You can have a great product, but it can be hidden or unknown or difficult to buy or priced wrong or named confusingly, etc. Marketing attempts to remove those frictions. The easier it is for a customer to discover, understand, desire, find, buy, enjoy, repeat… the better the marketing.
To those who find marketing to be evil (as some of my programmer friends do), I would reply: yes. It can be. Anyone who has seen some of the ads for cigarettes from the 40’s and 50’s (or for weight loss schemes today) can feel that the marketing is evil. But guess what? It is almost *never* a marketing guy that comes up with a crappy, evil idea for a product. We’re hired to sell them, yes… but we don’t usually make ’em. Doesn’t excuse it, but… there you go.
As far as the tension between marketing and development in almost any industry… it’s a good thing. It’s a “checks and balances” thing. I know developers who would gladly tinker and code for weeks, months and years beyond what is reasonable before making their efforts public. I’ve also known code jockeys who couldn’t understand why they shouldn’t be allowed to adjust a deadline after everyone had agreed on it and it had been communicated (once in a contract) to a customer. “If they want it right, they need to be told to wait,” said programmer told the sales department.
Waiting is friction. We told them to wait, they canceled the contract, went to a competitor, and the software company I was consulting for went bye-bye.
So… bad marketing is bad, and good is good. Good code is good, and bad is bad.
Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
Andy Havens:
The tension is good and bad. When there is too much, marketing and development shut themselves off. They start doing their own things, and that’s when they start playing the “they overpromise, we underdeliver” blame game. The truth is that under these circumstances, there’s plenty of fault to go around. This is more of a lack-of-leadership issue.
When there aren’t enough checks and balances, as you said, marketing and development converge into a Hollywood-esque monstrosity, where product innovation takes a backseat to pumping out products that get acceptable margins (i.e., just enough profit to be sustainable.)
In the games business, we have a set of problems that compound with that tension. One of those problems is that we’re not getting a lot of “new blood.” There’s a lot of recruiting from within and not much outreach. Because of that, many game developers throughout the pipeline have software development backgrounds, even chief executives. They bring with them (but not all of them) preconceptions and stereotypes about the marketing-development relationship.
Making matters worse is the attitude that “games are an artistic medium.” The reason why that’s a bad thing is that developers tend to develop games that they like, that they enjoy, that their colleagues and friends enjoy; unfortunately, that works in the hobbyist world, not in business. (When I think of “art,” I think of children sitting in a circle painting with watercolors because they enjoy the activity, not the graffiti tagger who risks life and limb to send a message.)
Although many games are products, they’re also services. That’s the idea that folks need to get behind, especially as we continue to move forward to a day and age where games are purely digital and intangible and what’s sold are not games in boxes but rather access to game worlds and online features.
Despite Raph’s insistence that games are art, I think what’s cool about Metaplace is that the platform really encourages a services orientation. With the advent of serious games, we also have that orientation. Games are about solving problems, which can be societal, cultural, or personal. Games are about fulfilling the needs of the audience, not just the creators.
Morgan, I think there’s room for art and services both. It doesn’t have to be one or the other for the entire medium. Games aren’t about any one thing, but about everything and anything. Just like… pretty much every other medium of expression. If a dev can afford to make something for just one sort of person, more power to him. If he has something to say rather than trying to fill a need, and he can survive through doing it, he should go for it. Really you need both the money makers built as services and the crazy artistic expression that has limited but powerful appeal.
And yeah, the industry as a whole will go where the money is, and in that respect seeing things more as services is incredibly important, I agree… but it’d be a shame if it was all reduced to that. Sometimes it’s more important to find a different perspective or a deeper meaning in something than it is to have a good time doing it. Sometimes it’s better to have someone else’s voice be in complete control. Sometimes you *need* friction. And sometimes it’s important for problems not to be solved, for questions not to be answered, but for them to only be explored or illuminated. You can’t get there if you’re designing for the end user and not for the message. And while it’s perfectly okay for most of the games we get to not go there, some of them really should.
Eolirin:
I won’t be drawn into yet another “games are not art” vs. “games are art” debate. We’ve had one too many of those around here. I’ll simply repeat what I’ve said many times before: games transcend art; they’re games. Likening games to art simply due to feelings of inadequacy is simply ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with embracing games for what they are.
…and I’ll say “Art is what you can get away with.” So there. 😛
The most of the audience are conventional, in theory people likes innovation but in practice are hostile to anything new, especially if that requires some effort to learn or adapt. If the only reason for create games is “fulfilling the needs of audience” you can say goodbay to any innovation or originality or deep in games.
Except in some niche games.
Marketing = give to people what they wants, in results you have the current MMOs culture, WoW 11 millions demostrates what people want see in a MMO: leveling, questing, kill, kill, kill for loot and xp, in the end all current MMOs are no more that WoW clones with some spice.
I understand that games need be more oriented to the needs of people, an intuitive UI, clear game concepts and mechanics, etc. be services in some degree, especially online games and MMOs. But, what is the limit? Must the “easy use” dictate the content too?
Ingrod:
I used the term “needs” in a general way. There is a distinction between needs and wants. Needs are baser instincts. Wants are needs that are shaped by cultural forces. As culture evolves, so do the wants.
I think the recent election of the first black President of the United States, named Barack Hussein Obama, serves as an effective counterargument. Averseness to change seems to be affected by culture, too.
That assertion is entirely too simplistic to be useful.
“Wants are needs that are shaped by cultural forces. As culture evolves, so do the wants.”
And as culture devolves, so wants become baser and that degrades opportunities to meet needs. The phrase, “may having be as good as wanting” comes to mind. The marketing of unsafe products in the 1950s was met by a counter culture of marketing the 60s and then that ran head long into the free-market deregulation frenzy of the 1980s. The CRA ran head long into the financial crisis of today. I don’t agree that the election of Obama reflects a change of culture. It reflects a change of style and a shift of culture to a different but existing pole.
Otherwise, I agree. The techniques of marketing are well-known. Are the values of marketing independent of the wants and needs met by a product or coupled to them, or sometimes both or neither? I suppose the short form of that is does a marketeer ever ask the question “am I my brother’s keeper?”?
For me web desing is important for marketing, an simple and elegant self-explanatory desing, with clear objeves or functions, can do marvels for, in example, give selling information about a product o service. Easy access for the audience is a key concept for marketing. People likes clear things, a good writer is somebody that can explain things in a concise and clear style, in some degree is a need.
Translated to games and the WoW example we can said that WoW is one of the best designated MMOs for a marketing point of view. Have a simple and elegant desing, all game elements are interconected around only one variable: combat. Combat is the main page in World of Webcraft. With combat aka. kill mobs or players you can leveling, access to best items and rewards, access to resources for craft, explore new areas when you reach the necessary level for kill the monsters that guard these zones, have fun with other players in dungeons or BG where kill things, etc. The objetive is clear and self-explanatory: reach the high end content and obtain the best items and rewards killing things. All the game is based in fullfill human needs, small pleasures around effort/reward relations. After hours of grindfest you obtain that precious purple object or reach last level, that is orgasmic. Easy access is a key for explain the WoW success.
The problem is that a MMO is not only about give easy access for users, you cant appoach to MMOs or games desing with only a marketing mentality, an elegant and self-explanatory desing are key for things how a good UI or create clear and accesible game mechanics, but that is the limit imo.
The whole concept of a MMO how a world with divergent game mechanics can be see how a disperse and excessively complex design for satisface player needs, and actually MMO desing tend to forget that their main feature is the potential to be worlds.
An easy learning curve, ok, all the game based in only one variable aka. “elegant desing”, no thanks. Or in other words: not all in games must be designated only with an marketing point of view.
With Barack Obama people voted for hope not for the “change” retoric.
Is "Marketing" and "Product design" the same thing?…
I guess what I’m confused about is: who could have ever thought it could be different? Has anyone ever met a product designer or a marketing specialist who didn’t at least claim to understand who the customers are and what they want?…
[…] Marketing in games vs web "In much of the game industry, marketing is a dirty word," says Raph. "Games are an artistic medium." The game designer tries to come to terms with the weird world of the web. (tags: web media marketing games business advertising) […]