That title is pretty out there and dramatic, I admit it. However, I won’t back down on that.
Big budget titles are nice, they’re very polished, but the problem lies when a title that is already a massive budget spends as much as they did on creating the game on marketing it. There are inevitably going to be games that will not make back marketing plus development costs.
With the state of the gaming industry, we don’t need to put out millions of dollars on national TV for games. The internet is so massive that running ad campaigns are not all that expensive in comparison to, say, a Super Bowl ad. Letting a game’s quality speak for itself is becoming more and more a thing of the past, and it gets companies in trouble.
Gearbox would have not been in scalding hot water (as opposed to hot water) over Aliens: Colonial Marines if they had been honest from the start. All of their marketing went into building up a game that simply did not exist. Combine this with rumors Gearbox funneled Sega’s money into their own projects, which is unscrupulous as all hell, and there was a perfect storm of “DIE AND GO TO HELL GEARBOX” all over which still lingers.
Marketing can indeed pay off pretty well, but the other side of the coin is just so terrible. A publisher already spends so much money on getting the titled developed that they’re pinching pennies out of customers with DLC over and over. Downloadable content would be fine if the game were amazing and the fans were clamoring for more. Take Fallout for example, both Fallout 3 and New Vegas had great DLC support that was not squeezing money from people for the sake of making money back from marketing costs.
If a company has a title of transcendent quality on their hands consumers will want to buy more content that is substantial. Not once did I buy $3 skin for a character in a game and think “That’s money well spent!”
The simple fact of the matter is that development costs are already exorbitantly high and marketing can double the cost of a game. With not spending the marketing money a game can afford to do less nickel and dime post-launch content and end up with both a better relationship with consumers as well as a better profit margin.
Smaller budget marketing is a win-win for companies and gamers. Think about the titles that will take out Super Bowl advertisements. Call of Duty is so big they could just release teasers online that is a release date and the title would still sell. Activision does not NEED to go as big as they do with marketing and probably is not making a proportionate amount of money from their huge marketing investment.
Independent games manage to make money on selling quantities of titles that are considered failures by big companies. Indie games have a smaller budget, but also they have to be smart with marketing. There is definitely something to be learned from marketing smarter, not harder.
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