EEDAR reveals higher marketing spend more influential than review scores
A higher marketing spend can increase a game’s gross revenue three times more than positive review scores.
That’s according to new research by EEDAR, presented at the Montreal International Games Summit by the firm’s Jesse Divnich. During the presentation, Divnich explained that poorer quality games will a bigger marketing will perform better than better titles with less financial support.
“You can make the greatest game and it won’t even matter,” he said. “I know that’s discourage to developers at first but it’s very true.
“Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores. There’s a giant myth out there that reviews scores are the most crucial to a video game.
“The reason why that is is the information is readily available – we can go to Metacritic – and we see games like Grand Theft Auto and Call Of Duty succeed and we see they have a high quality score and we make that correlation. But the truth is, marketing actually has much more of an influence to game sales than high scores.”
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More marketing budget, means less money to develope and possibly stricter timelines and bad design choices. You might sell more of the title but your perceived company quality level and reputation will go down. Blizzard, Bioware, THQ are companies that score high on the quality radar for me, not because of any marketing but because of the quality of the games I've played. They've secured me as a repeat customer.
I know I am in the minority as I don't watch TV, or read magazines/newspapers but being remembered for quality when you ship your next title counts for more in my book.
Marketing and Quality go hand in hand. I mean how would any good marketing person substantiate for all the marketing acrobats the guy does?
Both go hand in hand to make a product sell effectively.
Short term sales can be pushed up for low quality excellent marketing and vice versa but in real terms both are required.
