EA’s Hilleman on the new games world
I know, I know, I have been neglecting the blog lately. Sorry about that. 🙂
I thought this article was well worth pointing out though. We tend to think of EA as one of the largest publishers in the games biz, and then conclude that perhaps it is slow to adapt. But in terms of how the games industry is changing, I actually think they are more on the ball than they are usually given credit for. The article is based on a speech he gave at the Stanford Hot Chips conference, apparently.
Check out these stats!
EA now typically spends two or three times as much on marketing and advertising as it does on developing a game. That’s because advertising is critical to getting a game in the top ten rankings. If you have a $10 million game, don’t be surprised if the the TV advertising costs drive the ad budget to $30 million. If a $60 game yields revenue of $35 for EA, then (according to my math) the company has to sell 1.1 million copies just to break even.
— EA’s chief creative officer describes game industry’s re-engineering | VentureBeat
Bear in mind, though, this is what they are moving away from. The rest of the article probably won’t be a huge surprise to regular readers on this blog, but it’s good to see big industry giants taking steps in these new directions. Hilleman specifically cites looking to Korea as a model, lifestyle-driven development goals, lower cost development, web models, “multihead” games (where many platforms connect to one game experience, albeit in different ways)…
9 Responses to “EA’s Hilleman on the new games world”
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The problem is, the EA advertisement department is evil.
So that $60 game would be $20 if they didn’t advertise? (Is that how economics works?)
More like the game wouldn’t exist if they didn’t advertise…
Sad to see such clear cut numbers on the priorities, though. It really doesn’t seem like a sustainable model.
What Bryan said. “Sleeper hit” might as well mean “failure”; a good game that doesn’t sell copies isn’t good for the creators or publishers, and a game just won’t sell if people aren’t aware it exists or don’t know why they should desire to own it.
Sad, unfortunate, but true. And really, I’d say it has more to do with marketing being so expensive to begin with than companies spending “too much” on it (objectively, anyway… subjectively, I’m all kinds of bitter about those numbers, but let’s not go there. 😛 ).
@Peter, yeah. Which is part of why there’s such a huge push to go digital, and why the MMO market is such a good place to go even at the smaller scales. You can actually go viral when you don’t need to confine your sales to the first 3-6 weeks due to the aftermarket, and having a long term service is even better. I mean, look at EVE. Launch was frankly horrible, but they managed to make things work out pretty well for themselves over the long term.
I really think it’d do the industry good to be thinking about smaller products that are extensible, rather than giant products that are one offs. Monetizing content additions is probably a safer bet than trying to make a splash with a higher priced but expensive to produce large scale project. Even for more traditional games. This does mean that your initial product needs to be compelling in a very different way than they tend to be now though.
EVE? Heck, I’m continually amazed that Anarchy Online is still around. 😉 I was in the beta for that one, and saw just how bad its launch got. Truly, it rose from its own ashes.
hah! You’re right. But AO was forced to go free to play wasn’t it? At least partially. EVE managed to do it while maintaining the sub fees. That aside though, yeah, AO is a good example too.
Oh, though there was that other bit where EVE has roughly the same range of paying customers as WAR. 😛 I think AO’s playerbase is much smaller.
Eve Online is an interesting case study. They did have a multi-million dollar marketing push… but the biggest part of it came years after the game launched (and coincided with the first release of a retail box). That gave the game time not only to refine the rules, expand content and quash bugs, but to develop a loyal and intricate player community. As a result, players brought into the game by the marketing were brought into a mature, rich environment, not one with a “launch” level of content and no existing player institutions.
Was this approach a success? I don’t know — even with the vastly improved tutorials, Eve is not the most newbie-friendly title (understatement), and there is friction between old hardcore players and new players with different expectations of what the game should be.
But I think it’s a valid and viable approach, and in the future we may see more games that evolve to AAA status rather than launching as such. Consequently, I think it’s vital to design and code a game in a way that makes it possible and practical to evolve it, on as granular and fundamental level as you can.