Lessons learned from MIGS

I'm out of the country at the moment to attend the Montreal International Game Summit, which is a game industry conference going on today and tomorrow. Since most people on this forum are aspiring game developers, I thought I'd post my experience and thoughts here. The talks were all given by people in the industry and they all had interesting things to say.

Spoiler for Day 1:

The Morning
I woke up to a pounding on the door at the ungodly hour of 7 AM. After quickly getting dressed, we were off to the conference. The conference was held in the Hilton Bonadventure Hotel, a venue so oozing with class that I'm sure I'd never be able to afford staying in.

Everything was very professional. We were directed to elevators, where there were attendants waiting on us that sent us up to the conference, where registration took place. Because the first keynote was to be delivered in Japanese, we each had to pick up a translator and headset.

With about 10 minutes to spare, we all decided we wanted coffee and scoured the hotel for a Starbucks or at least some place selling coffee. Andrew, Chris, and I decided to give up on the pursuit of caffeiney goodness in order to make the first keynote on time.

Keynote: Fostering Cultural Diversity in Game Development (Yoichi Wada, CEO of Square-Enix)
After an introduction delivered in Canadian moonspeak, Yoichi Wada took the stage and discussed Square-Enix's business plan with regard to game development worldwide and the challenges posed by being a global developer.

One of the points he touched upon was how Square-Enix now holds offices across the world, which all work on different titles. He spoke about how they must balance simultaneously broadening their market while not losing sight of their target audience. Games made in America tend to appeal to an American audience, and Japanese games tend to appeal to a Japanese audience.

"There is no such thing as the 'global' community; there's no place in the world called 'Global.'"

Having little experience or knowledge about the corporate end of game development, I didn't find his talk as interesting as I had hoped. It was interesting to hear his take on the future of the gaming industry, especially as game development companies begin to spread out and distribute development across the world.

After a quick question/answer session, the keynote ended. Our group split up to go to different sessions, as multiple were going on simultaneously. Andrew and I went together to a seminar on the importance of marketing in game development.

Why You can Make the Best Game Ever and It Won't Even Matter (Jesse Divnich, EEDAR)
This conference set the mood for the rest of the day. It presented stark facts on the status of the game industry that woke me up from my having-only-gotten-2-hours-of-sleep daze and made me look at the state of the industry in a new way.

The speaker works for a company called Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR), which has reportedly played every video game in the past 10 years and catalogs all relevant data on it--marketing budget, total sales in a given country, main character's gender, main character's hair color, et cetera. EEDAR collates this data and licenses it out to studios that pay (a lot) for it, for use in collecting marketing data.

His point was simple and backed up by his company's data: the quality of a game doesn't even hold a candle to the amount of money that goes into its marketing budget.

Jesse touched on several case studies, including why Transformers 2 was a commercial success in spite of being one of the worst-rated movies of the decade (indeed, it's apparently the worst-rated movies in the list of top-selling movies of all time).

Most striking (and depressing) was the fact that on average, the amount of money spent on advertising had three times as much of an impact upon a game's sales than its review scores.

There were a couple anomalies in his data, for example the case of Rock Band versus Guitar Hero. In spite of having spent the same amount of money on advertising, Guitar Hero continues to outsell Rock Band more than 2 to 1, which he attributes to how Guitar Hero's ads all target a general audience (including the family), whereas Rock band's advertisements target the hardcore gamer only.

In addition, he attributed the PS3's initial failure to launch not with its high cost, but with the subpar marketing it received. He showed us the traumatizing baby commercials that aired when the PS3 first launched, videos I had long since purged from my memory...
(Note: If you haven't seen these commercials before, don't look them up. Seriously. Not even just to see how bad they are. They're terrifying.)

In the following question/answer session, I asked him what advice he has for aspiring game developers now that we know that the amount of effort we put into making a game good is nearly irrelevant when compared to the size of the game's marketing budget. His response was to connect with the community, to get to know the players, the target audience, and other developers. It might have a small impact on sales, and you might help it spread by word of mouth.

It wasn't the answer I was hoping for. I left feeling rather bummed out, but it was a reality check that I suppose was coming eventually. He was a friendly guy and gave out his business card, inviting indie designers to email him if they needed help with anything. I just may in the near future.

(I'll finish up day 1 asap!)

So that this isn't just a topic about me rambling on about my experiences, I'll start with a discussion topic:  How does it make you feel as a game developer knowing that, in the grand scheme of things, the quality of a game means almost nothing when it comes to how successful it will be?

That was an interesting read. Thank you for posting this, the bit about marketing was quite interesting.

However I don't think that RB only targets the hard core crowd, it seems like they're trying to appeal to the same type of people that Guitar Hero is, except that Guitar Hero had its brand established three (two?) years before RB came out.
If you look at Modern Warfare 2, which is what it initially was called with its original teaser and subsequent promo images, it sold like over 2 million copies day one. Its name was changed back to Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 after they decided that the brand awareness wasn't there. If you look at the original's cover, Call Of Duty 4 is in a much larger font than Modern Warfare.
And again, it didn't have as big of marketing campaign (the controversy probably played the biggest factor in getting the game out there to people who had never heard about it before) as something like the GTA4 or something, but still sold faster than anything else.
Walking around in San Francisco, in a single day I saw like six bus stop ads for GTA Liberty City Stories, I saw at least 1 billboard for it and that was only within the North Beach/Fisherman's Wharf area. I saw no Modern Warfare 2 ads.
I don't know the whole story, those are just observations and could be entirely incorrect.

...*shivers*...I strongly disliked those PS3 Baby-Doll commercials.

That was a pretty cool read actually - thanks for posting that.

Game design is a rough business though, it's true. It will inevitably take a long time before anybody entering the field will get any recognition or even be allowed to create games with a more than miniscule budget. I guess you have to really love it and stick to it. I don't think I could ever do it professionally, even if I had the skill to.