Marketing and Development: a match ought to be made in gaming heaven

Keiji Inafune may have implied, quite bluntly and painfully, too, that Clover Studio’s primary failure was the bottom line. It was a failure of marketing, not of development. That (though not Clover) was the theme of an MI6 Conference workshop headed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and Insomniac Games marketing chiefs Torrie Dorrell and Ryan Schneider, Next-Gen reports.

If Clover and Capcom had done what SOE does, would the studio not have met its demise? Torrie revealed that in each of SOE’s projects, the development head is “married” to a marketing head, and the two are expected to work together to get the game to market.

This means that we see less of, say, the very aggressive developer who pushes away everything that marketing says. But it also encourages marketing to understand the point of view of developers and the challenges they face. It makes the relationship much less adversarial.

Same thing at Insomniac: Ryan describes it as “bringing everyone together,” an all-hands evolution. Sometimes it even involves outside people: Torrie mentions focus groups (no matter how devs may hate them for… cramping their style, like).

Does it really have to hurt development and creativity? Torrie points out that Marketing’s job isn’t to tell the developers what to do with their games, but “only to recognize the facts that we need to know to make the best game that we can and sell as many copies as we can.”

Again this goes back to: with better marketing support, either insisted by Capcom or insisted by Clover, would Okami have been a bestseller that knocked everyone’s socks off? Loved the game, but the sales don’t do it justice. Perhaps the solution to bringing creative and inspiring games to market (and not just more clones) doesn’t only lie in creative games production, but in excellent marketing as well.

Gaming is a business, after all. But who says business had to be stagnant?

Keiji Inafune may have implied, quite bluntly and painfully, too, that Clover Studio’s primary failure was the bottom line. It was a failure of marketing, not of development. That (though not Clover) was the theme of an MI6 Conference workshop headed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and Insomniac Games marketing chiefs Torrie Dorrell and Ryan Schneider, Next-Gen reports.

If Clover and Capcom had done what SOE does, would the studio not have met its demise? Torrie revealed that in each of SOE’s projects, the development head is “married” to a marketing head, and the two are expected to work together to get the game to market.

This means that we see less of, say, the very aggressive developer who pushes away everything that marketing says. But it also encourages marketing to understand the point of view of developers and the challenges they face. It makes the relationship much less adversarial.

Same thing at Insomniac: Ryan describes it as “bringing everyone together,” an all-hands evolution. Sometimes it even involves outside people: Torrie mentions focus groups (no matter how devs may hate them for… cramping their style, like).

Does it really have to hurt development and creativity? Torrie points out that Marketing’s job isn’t to tell the developers what to do with their games, but “only to recognize the facts that we need to know to make the best game that we can and sell as many copies as we can.”

Again this goes back to: with better marketing support, either insisted by Capcom or insisted by Clover, would Okami have been a bestseller that knocked everyone’s socks off? Loved the game, but the sales don’t do it justice. Perhaps the solution to bringing creative and inspiring games to market (and not just more clones) doesn’t only lie in creative games production, but in excellent marketing as well.

Gaming is a business, after all. But who says business had to be stagnant?