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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

My experience with marketing comes from games. In games, if you show marketing a new game they'll tell you it won't sell. They only want clones of the last hit. Where-as, IMO, their job is to get people to want your new game, not to ride off the coattails of the popularity of a previous game.

This one thing I've always admired about Nintendo. AFAIK (totally my imagination), the game dev team makes whatever they want and then they tell marketing "YOU WILL MARKET THIS AND MAKE IT A HIT!"

Examples might be Splatoon, Animal Crossing, maybe Smash Brothers, Pikman,

Where as I've been at plenty of companies where marketing effectively says "This is not a Call of Duty/GTA clone therefore it won't sell, therefore we will not waste time marketing it".

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In some ways, this is like asking lawyers what you should do for a situation to be successful and avoid court.

Some of the best can, but it’s not the way they’re generally wired - similar to Engineers and art. For lawyers, you’ll usually have more success giving them a concrete contract or scenario and asking them for all the things that could go wrong.

That, any competent lawyer will do well at. You can then go down the list, ask questions re: risks, etc. then.

For marketers, you’ll often get better results (as noted by a peer comment!) giving them something already and asking them to market it.

It’s less unbounded that way, less analysis paralysis and you kick things into the gear they are used to using all the time.

Knowing what is marketable is a different skill than marketing, in the same way engineering design and systems architecture is different than writing code.

In my experience, most lawyers don't want to go to trial. Billable hours are billable hours and going to trial is an incredibly exhausting process, no matter how mediocre of a lawyer you are or how "evil" you are. It's incredibly physically demanding and one slip-up can cost you the whole thing. You're often living out of a hotel (away from family and friends) and just living and breathing the trial for sometimes as long as 3 or 4 weeks. Much better to drag it out (assuming you're a lawyer who doesn't care about the client as long as you get paid) and reach a settlement.

Successfully avoiding a trial while undertaking a new not-yet-well-defined endeavor, like defining a new marketable product, is a LOT harder than taking an existing concrete contract and making it less contentious or settling/driving an existing case to a conclusion. That's all I'm saying.

Fair enough

> In games, if you show marketing a new game they'll tell you it won't sell.

And they would statistically be right, as most games don't sell.

On a serious note, though — there's plenty of marketing specialists in game industry that have a lot of experience with new and indie titles; some companies like indie publishing houses are built upon this. I've worked in one and seen this first-hand. Generalising negative statements like this about a whole profession seem like a product of arrogance.

After decades in the industry, I'd say the arrogance and lack of professionalism is in the marketing side of the industry.

Arrogance and lack of professionalism is 80% of every profession on the face on the Earth.

Arrogance and lack of professionalism are what half my industry (security) works on.

Arrogance in the sales process (yes we can break your shit), and a certain level of in unprofessionalism in the delivery side (we with actually break your shit) tends to convert to repeat business with competent clients.

Everyone wants to be associated with success.

You can't sustainably market a product users don't find valuable.

Based on the above two, people would rather focus on pattern copy / incremental improvements vs big risks.

Sometimes, something IS extremely valuable that breaks existing patterns.

It's important that marketing is bought into why it's breaking the existing patterns. If they are, they will market it.

To your Nintendo example, I don't know anything about how they work. But you may be surprised that seemingly-disparate games may actually fit a known success pattern internally. They know their audience and what they value, and new XYZ game fits that pattern.

> You can't sustainably market a product users don't find valuable.

Tell that to Oracle.

The quoted part above needs a slight modification:

> You can't sustainably market a product customers don't find valuable

Oracle doesn't care about users. It cares very much about its C-suite customers who pay the bills.

Does Oracle really need marketing? I thought their cash cow is exploitive contracts and markets they've captured through onerous certification requirements, such as for government work.

Oracle is a master of vendor lock in, and has so many products that almost every large enterprise has them somewhere in their stack.

Nintendo is kind of the exception to the rule though. By the very nature of a game being a Nintendo game they can put out new IP and get a lot of attention organically. They can also pin it to the top of their storefront or, in the old days, force retailers to carry it and promote it.

If you are average publisher you have none of those options, so you have to either sell your game on merit or on following trends. Unfortunately most publishers choose the later as it is more perdictable.

It would seem to be the opposite in practice, though. All the major publishers who should be able to push a weird and experimental game by the cachet of their brand alone just end up making safe and derivative games. And then because indie devs don't have the funding to compete with AAA studios in the space of safe and derivative games, no-name companies end up making all the weird and experimental games.

If you're the CEO of a AAA game studio, you really just need to have a handful of tiny two-person in-house teams where you just give them 1/10,000th the budget of the most recent Far Cry 516 and tell them to make something weird.

Kind of a side tangent, but yes. I am baffled by the AAA game publishers. It is not just that they are making safe bets, it is that they cannot execute upon them to save their life. The games are objectively bad.

Every once in awhile they buy a studio and it remains uncorupted for awhile, but slowly but surely they lose their ability to make games that are fun.

AAA games before launch can be seen as high-risk speculative assets. The game gets a few rounds of investment and then when it's still not done, they go begging. Sometimes one publisher pawns the game off onto another, but internal politics equally acts to create horse-trading situations. There are attempts at cost control but they get overridden by the desire to hit every possible marketing bullet point. As the budget creeps up the desire to make back sunk costs rises, so further escalation acts as a way to stop cancellation. There's a lot of executive hot potato causing design changes, but the team's getting funding. So, in theory, at least, the game is shaping up to be "bigger and better".

Finally, the game launches, after passing through so many hands and getting a drop-dead deadline. Crunch is mandated in hopes of getting it somewhat release-worthy, but really, it's just a pile of assets that have been given little time in the oven. Reviewers marvel at the graphics and animation. Individual pieces of the game are polished to hell. The engineers get to give talks about their cool rendering optimization strategy, and the art directors and design leads likewise can talk about how they made art style or design decisions. But it's not representative of a holistic vision - it's enterprise software.

When a studio is bought, it often starts from a point of some coherence. And then the horse trading starts, and the original studio heads leave. So it just becomes another team. And it's hard to avoid that because the whole idea of AAA is to build up the assets and IP, not the teams and their ability to execute. You sacrifice the teams to get an IP, and then find a new team.

When the first PlayStation came out, I worked at a feature film VFX studio attempting a game industry gamble: all, and I do mean ALL, early PlayStation games were aimed above the age range a typical Nintendo title targets. Their/our strategy was to make a game targeting younger gamers who were being left out of the PlayStation more mature push. Well, once we had the game created (which looked amazing at the time) the PlayStation and game industry marketing firms we met were simply useless. They were the target market, they only cared to work with games they'd play themselves. In fact, I found the game industry overall to lack the ability to work on projects they'd not personally purchase. There is a huge amount of immaturity in the game industry.

In general it is a bad idea to let sales/marketing types control the direction of a company with complex internal operations. They are only outwardly focused and act like they're running a magic widget factory that makes whatever they want regardless of how the business is managed.

I am genuinely interested in this, please excuse my naivety.

My expectation would be that new Product work would, at some high-ish level, be sanctioned by company leadership. Or you wouldn't be spending weeks/months/years on it. Ideally Marketing would be involved in that leadership decision, and this is where they could raise that kind of concern. But even if they are not, Marketing's "boss" (CEO) could/should tell them they need to market it or go pound sand.

I gotta tell you though, there have been a few co-op games where my friends and I simply wanted more levels. Don't change the engine. Don't add more character items/guns.

Give us more story and levels to play in. The novelty coming from applying well known stuff to new scenario.

In non-co-op land, Half Life 3? Just finish the damn story Valve!

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