This makes absolute complete and utter sense. People buy perceptions, not reality. And people are far more concerned about peer pressure than they are concerned about their own judgement.
There is a make of car that is distinctly average. In fact some of the smaller models are not very good at all. Yet it manages to sell extremely well despite selling at a premium price. Because people want to be seen behind the badge. They will pay thousands of dollars in premium to buy just a few dollars worth of chrome and enamel badge. And most people buy silver and grey ones, because that is what everyone else does. All due to the power of marketing. The brand is presented as sporty which is just the image every housewife wants when she does the school run. Customers just don’t realise when they are victims.
If you are a game developer and you tell your mum about the game you are working on then that is marketing. Marketing is any communication. So it is a fact that a game with zero marketing will have zero sales.
Over the years I have never seen a game get the sales that it deserved just for its quality. Yet I have many times seen a game get far more sales than it deserves because of its marketing. And I have also seen many good games fail because of bad marketing.
Just look at the five games I was writing about yesterday. They are virtually identical yet they have massively different numbers of players. The difference is just the marketing. Marketing is more important than the game, this is a self evident truth.
Yet still there are very many game publishers who do not understand this. Many self and small publishers on the iPhone App Store, for instance. There you can see that marketed games sell well, non marketed games sell badly. It has precious little to do with the quality of the game. (Unless it is a total dog).
Now EEDAR has done research in the game marketplace from which they say “Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores”. And actually the difference is even bigger than that, because the scores form part of the marketing!
So there you have it. If you want to sell more games and make more money then send me an email and I will come and sort it out for you!
We have at least five games originating in China now that are remarkably similar to each other. Evony you know about, Kingory I have written about before. Fog of War, Napoleonic War (Nap War) and Lords Online are pretty much the same game again. OK the maps and story are different each time, but much of the rest remains the same. Empire Craft has also been written about here.
Nap War “is owned and operated by SOHO Union International Ltd (SOHO Union)”. “We started our business as a small enterprise in HongKong, making our first product called Fog of War: Napoleonic War. Now SOHO has approximately 100 employees worldwide with each one showing great passion, remarkable creativity and efficient teamwork in their efforts to achieve our goal.”
Lords Online is an announced and reviewed game from IGG Inc (I Got Games) who are well established and already publish a range of games. And once again it is pretty much the same game. IGG are substantial, well established and well funded and seem to have offices in China, Hong Kong and the West.
So that is five iterations of pretty much the same game that I know about. So there are probably more, with even more to come. All come from China. All allow you to buy game achievements instead of earning them by playing the game. And several of them are marketing by using the high profile, high cost, Google advertising route.
One wonders where these games are coming from. Who actually wrote what is the original game and how it ended up in what seem to be so many different hands. Also the business model they seem to be all adopting. Is that imitation or are they working to a template?
And what are their chances of success? People are not stupid and the internet allows a flow of information so the gaming world will quickly realise that these are all pretty much the same game. At Evony most players have deserted the game once they have sussed it out, after this will they even bother with the others? And then there is the small number of players willing to pay a considerable amount of money to play these games. Are there enough of them to go round and so finance the high risk Google advertising strategy?
30 years ago commercial videogames for home computers arrived in Liverpool when I brought a pile of Apple 2 games to Microdigital that I had bought at Computer Components of Orange County in California. A couple of years later, in Liverpool, Bug Byte software was set up, one of the very first British video game publishers. From this, also in Liverpool, there came Imagine, Software Projects, Psygnosis, Denton Design, Jester Interactive, Bizarre Creations, Rusty Nutz etc
Then in the mid 80s I worked at Codemasters, just outside Leamington Spa in the centre of England. From this there are now has a whole pile of gaming companies in the area. This is not something unique to the gaming industry. It happened with shoes in Northampton, with bicycles in Coventry and with pottery at Stoke on Trent.
There are now lots of game development clusters around the world, usually created in the fallout from just one pioneer. In the UK we have cluster in Dundee, Guildford, Brighton and several more. In China there is one in Shanghai of at least 20 companies as a result of Ubisoft being there. In America there are lots of clusters, Austin, Texas has very many game companies as do Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston. In Canada Toronto and Montreal have grown quickly as the locations for many companies. And Seoul, Korea has around 60 companies.
From the point of view of a developer there are many advantages doing business in a cluster. The human resources and services are all there, geared up just right for running a gaming business.
From the point of view of an employee there are many advantages to working in a cluster. Job mobility without moving house and security of employment being significant advantages to anyone.
But a further advantage of clusters can be found in the pages of Adam Smith’s 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations. A cluster will support the division of labour with specialist companies forming to service the industry. For gaming this could be sound, QA, translation, motion capture, marketing and other technical services which make doing business in the cluster more flexible and effective.
This is just one reason why companies within a cluster should co-operate, even if, as is often the case, there is previous bad blood arising from business dynamics. The businesses have many areas in common that can be addressed more effectively jointly. There should be CEO level meetings of every company within a cluster every month.
And, of course, government can leverage these clusters to generate national wealth, something we have seen the Canadians do with startling success and something the British government has failed abjectly at. The game industry is already worth many tens of billions of pounds in economic activity and will grow to be a lot bigger still so this is of critical national importance.
So there we have it, if you want to start a game company then do it in a cluster, if you want to work in the games industry then you are best off in a cluster and, if you are already part of a cluster, ensure that you leverage it for your maximum advantage.
The game industry turnover at retail revolves around a small number of blockbusters. October this year was very light on these, as is the whole of Q4 this year. A lot of this can be put down to the industry running scared of Modern Warfare 2. People don’t even want to launch in the same quarter as this.
Music/dance games were largely a fad and that is now over. Sales have more than halved in this sector.
Another high value sku, Wii Fit, is tapering off in sales compared with the craze that it was last year.
I would like to say a big thank you to all the many people who have contributed to this fund, I have been more than pleasantly surprised by the response. Every amount, no matter small, will help, it all adds up. And whilst I am truly appreciative of everyone’s generosity I have actually been shocked at how much some people are willing to donate to this cause.
The third issue is just plain freedom of speech, the foundation of our democratic society. What I wrote about Evony was the truth and fair comment. This supposedly American company has not acted against me in America, they would be laughed out of court because of the Constitutional protection of free speech. However British libel law was designed to protect the rich from the gossip of their servants. And it is an extension of this British law that is in force in Australia. What this means is that Evony can make many strange and outrageous claims against me and I have to go to great lengths to disprove every single one in court, to the satisfaction of a jury. This obviously puts me at a massive disadvantage in the case.
And the amazing thing is that I have actually caused them no harm whatsoever. When I wrote my article less than a million people had joined the game. In the few short months since that has risen to over ten million. Admittedly most of those have since left the game, for obvious reasons. So it looks like the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity is true. It seems very likely that my writing has driven more people to go and try the game. In other words I have had the opposite effect that they are claiming.
There are now many hundreds of millions of people playing video games. It is inevitable that many millions of these are great gaming enthusiasts and that many of these want to work in the video game industry. My advice, based on 30 years in and around it, is don’t. And here’s why:
Playing video games is fun, it is entertainment. So you might think that making video games is fun. It isn’t. Not more or less than other jobs. Because that is what it is, just another job.
People who are industry wannabes always say that they want to be game designers. This is because they don’t know how a game is made. In fact there are very few game designers involved. On any development team the main sort of people are artists (of different sorts) and programmers (of different sorts).
Being keen about video games is no qualification whatsoever for working in the industry. Being a good computer programmer or artist is a much better basis. Even better is to be very good at maths. Game companies want people with the skills to make games and being an enthusiast isn’t a skill.
The competition to get into the game industry is fierce because there are so many wannabes. So the industry can be very, very choosy. When I was at Codemasters the minimum degree to get in was a 2.1 and you had to score over 130 in an IQ test.
Because so many people want in the wages are terrible. Similarly qualified graduates going into other industries will typically earn a lot more.
If the wages are bad then the working conditions are worse. Crunch is a widespread practice in the industry. Huge numbers of hours of unpaid overtime.
Career advancement is typically very, very slow. This is because most of the jobs are at a similar level, programming and creating art.
The work itself is often tedious, repetitive and boring. It is a hard slog to create all the dots that you see on the screen. There really are lots of better and more interesting jobs in the world.
Job security is awful. Companies routinely get rid of people as the work flow fluctuates. No matter how good you are it is ridiculously easy to find yourself out of a job.
The training industry has jumped onto exploiting the wannabe. Lots of colleges and universities have jumped on the bandwagon. There are now hundreds of supposed game industry courses in the UK. Yet amazingly only 6 of these are accredited by Skillset! There are now more people in training for the video game industry than there are in the industry. The vast majority of these people are wasting their time and money.
Game companies are mainly not very well run. This is because it is an immature industry and the management skills and practices are just not there. It is much, much nicer working in an organisation that is run properly. Which you are far more likely to find outside gaming.
The industry is firing, not hiring. Lots of game studios have closed, many have shed jobs. Electronic Arts alone is shedding 1,500 people. There are lots of very good, very experienced game developers who can’t get a job. Against that newbies don’t stand a chance.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. And over the years I have seen lots and lots of people leave the video game industry. They move to other industries where the work is better, they earn more money, they get promotions and they have job security.
If after all this you are still determined then I have some advice. Don’t train for the video game industry. Instead train to get a very good qualification that the game industry needs but which you could use in other industries. Maths and physics are the prime examples. There is a huge shortage of graduates in these subjects, so you would be far more attractive to a game company. Good artists and C++ programmers are more common, so less valued. But they are still both qualifications that can be used in many industries.
