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MIGS: Is Good Marketing Better Than A Good Game?
Jesse Divnich, Director of Analyst Services at EEDAR, offered a compelling statistics-based argument at the Montreal International Game Summit to claim that the recently formed (but now deeply ingrained) industry concept that a higher Metacritic rating equals higher sale is ultimately meaningless in the face of a more prevailing truth—that a higher marketing spend equals higher sales.
Using a simple correlation scale comparing marketing spend and sales against Metacritic rating and sales, Divnich found that marketing influenced game revenue “three times more than game scores”.
“We did dozens of back-checks that all found the same,” promised Divnich, “over 1300 games across the 2007-2008 year.”
“We didn’t use 2009 as the holiday season hasn’t happened yet,” he continued, before using further damning statistics to prove his point, such as that review scores trend very close towards no correlation to game sales on the Nintendo DS in particular.
“Review scores don’t matter on DS,” he argued, before forecasting that 5th Cell’s Scribblenauts would not see the kind of sales a critical darling would be supposed to, due to low marketing spend. “There is no compelling reason to focus on quality, you should literally just spend that money and time on marketing.”
Of course, but what about games that feature both high quality and high marketing spend? Don’t they skew the stats? Divnich admitted that while of the top 25 games of 2007/2009, 23 were in the top 5% or marketing spend, thirteen were in the top 5% of game quality.
He however proceeded to counter the hypothesis of a greater value in higher quality plus higher marketing by presenting the different median revenues from games across high quality/high marketing, high quality/low marketing, low quality/high marketing, low quality/low marketing, noting that in all cases high marketing alone won out.
“If you need to sacrifice, quality is the first thing you should sacrifice,” he argued, chillingly.
Divnich’s words intriguingly called to developers and publishers to actively discount the critic’s role—be it’s importance perceived or not—as part of the consumer’s decision making process.
“Sixty percent of consumers became aware of a game purchase through advertising,” he stated, before using the film industry as an example.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
I am sorry but I don't entirely approve this perspective. Sacrificing quality? You may have success on short term but once the customers are realizing you don't give them the quality they expect you are doomed and it's almost impossible to change that. So I think good marketing should complete good quality if we want long term "commitment" with the customers.
Jon Stromberg
Scribllenauts shouldn't be selling well anyway, as it is without a doubt the most disappointing game of 2009. I had it pre-ordered for about 6 months, and managed to convince myself to play it for about 3 hours before ebaying it in frustration at the absurdly flawed controls. Absolutely hugely disappointing title.
I've only played it for about 3 hours as well, SB, but it was among my favourite 3 hours this year. I thought it was outstanding. Diff'rent strokes :).
Spider sense is tingling here - I can see so many problems with the conclusions that this guy has reached.
First clanger - Scribblenauts hasn't received brilliant review scores. It's an 80 on Metacritic, which is barely respectable.
Secondly, it's very dangerous to start measuring previous titles that have had a marketing spend, because it doesn't take account of the decisions of the companies involved. Giving them even the merest credit for knowing what they're doing, you should realise that they are very unlikely to start marketing a game that they know will fail. So no wonder games with more marketing sell more, because companies are more likely to market games that they think will sell well.
In his top 25 of 2007/8 I'm sure there are many that exist as special cases in terms of the market. Need For Speed games, the yearly Madden release, PES - these games have their own histories and reasons for their performance. You can't start making general rules based on their examples. While marketing spend is crucial to retaining their sales each year, I highly doubt that a competitor could just steam in with a bigger marketing budget and steal their audience.
Spoken like a true accountant, but I do agree, with the first part anyway. Whilst a good Metacritic score certainly doesn't do any harm, it's not the be-all-and-end-all. For example, to get any reasonable accuracy from the User Score, you have to take into account trolls and fanboys, etc.
Also, political stances. For example the extremely low score for the PC Modern Warfare 2, probably a vote against the lack of dedicated servers. It doesn't mean it's overall a bad game, though or will sell poorly.
Then there's the case for Beyond Good & Evil. Despite excellent Critic / User scores, the game floundered through lack of marketing.
I don't agree at all with sacrificing quality over marketing, even though BG&E would be a good argument for it. But look at the turnabout EA had to do, with years of churning out the same bland rubbish year on year, started to produce decent games again. So the marketing over quality would only work for so long.
60% of consumers become aware of a game purchase through advertising. That still leaves 40%, so surely it's silly to discount quality entirely?
And you also have the problem that people may buy your low quality game based on the marketing, but then not buy the next based on their experience of your last product. It's definitely a balancing act, but as much as marketing does count for a lot, if you have a long term strategy, you can't discount quality.
You're right that quality should not be discounted, and largely it is not totally discounted, however your initial statement is key - the disproportionate importance of marketing means that a lesser percentage of effort is placed into quality as a result.
In games, as in film (and music), an attitude is starting to dominate: Why spend extra millions making the game/film better when you can make it average, and spend a lesser amount on marketing, to give you the same sales? This is why we see the ever increasing trend of subtle, but usually more important, features losing out to flashy and easy to market features - c.f. increasing proportion of high spectacle yet shallow blockbuster games/films. It's all about profit margins and is a basic example of the ever increasing shift towards economics dominating artistic integrity.