Comment by m3mnoch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m3mnoch | Hacker News Reader

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> So how do you differentiate?

> Marketing.

again, no.

while i feel your pain and the cognotive dissonance associated with "it can't be that i don't make decent games! it has to be someone else's fault!" -- i have hard, objective data that disagrees with you.

i have assembled the funnel-and-churn data. i've put together the reports greenlighting games because the ltv has exceeded the cost of acquisition. i've used average instead of median so our whales inflated the reports. and after all of that, i've seen their 30-day retention numbers still stagnate.

i lived that for two years.

then, the retention bottom fell out. we burned through all of the naive and all that was left was a cadre of seasoned "me too" recognizing gamers.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

complain about clash of clans' business model all you want -- it's a quality game.

also please note, i'm not saying marketing isn't important, it's just not even close to "the most important" especially depending on the situation. if you have a giant budget with a ton of developers, it's pretty important. if you are a small shop where everyone has day jobs and you can endure slower, organic growth? it's not worth the money.

> i have assembled the funnel-and-churn data. i've put together the reports greenlighting games because the ltv has exceeded the cost of acquisition. i've used average instead of median so our whales inflated the reports. and after all of that, i've seen their 30-day retention numbers still stagnate.

In other words, you were managing promotion. Promotion is an important part of marketing, but it's not the entirety of it [1]. If the game objectively sucked, then you failed at the "Product" piece of marketing. This is the part where you listen to your customers and make changes to your product to make it more attractive to your target market (you did identify target markets for your games, right?) Product development should be squarely a marketing function; otherwise you'll end up building a product that nobody wants (like the original author did).

> if you are a small shop where everyone has day jobs and you can endure slower, organic growth? it's not worth the money.

In other words, it's only not important if you're not running a business and don't expect your app to be successful. Otherwise, marketing sounds pretty important to everyone. "Organic growth" doesn't happen in the app economy; you need explosive growth to hit the scale at which you can even begin to start recovering your costs (I recall reading one of these where the guy bought an iPad to develop his game with, and didn't even end up covering the cost of the iPad).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix#McCarthy.27s_four...

seems to me you're lumping everything into marketing. i can understand that from a scholarship perspective, of course.

however, i would bet that if you told game designers (product development) they were marketing schleps and not part of the dev team, well... let's just say cliffyb might bring back bulletstorm.

oh, and it just occurred to me that i might not be clear on describing the bridge that's joining the gaps you're talking about.

the reason i bring up the promotion parts (ltv! k-factor! arppu!) is that i have stanford friends who were knee-deep in that business (you should see the multi-variant testing we could do) and spoke very much like you do with the "marketing is everything, just measure, adjust the product for fit, promote!"

it was very, very objective.

they were frustrated with the creatives telling them "no!", so they left and started their own gigs (more than one person, not singling anyone out here) where they could launch and iterated -- all of them were abject, bankrupting failures.

marketing (promotion, as everyone reading this is thinking) is important, yes, but having the right creative is more important to an astounding and unbelievable extent.

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