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[Video Game Industry Thread] Nobody is Buying Anything.
Allforce
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Hi and welcome to the Video Game Industry Thread, a place for discussing the business side of the games market. This includes sales figures, happenings with publishers and developers, goings-on with important people in the business, interesting development trends and similar things.
To keep things civil, informative and (most importantly) unlocked, here's some mod-enforced guidelines:
This is NOT a general new game announcement or date change thread. There are a few exceptions to this that are on-topic for us -- unexpected collaborations between companies, games that mark unusual new directions/risks for a company (like Nintendo announcing a microtransaction-based dating sim or something), delays of games so big they cause quarterly reports to be affected and stockholders to freak out, or scheduling conflicts with other big games that almost guarantee someone will fail. Beyond that, don't just post that a new game exists. There are plenty of people on this board who would like to talk about Game X in its own thread without us rambling on about financial crapola.
That said, have fun! We ain't stodgy accountants.
To keep things civil, informative and (most importantly) unlocked, here's some mod-enforced guidelines:
- Stay on topic. Don't just randomly chat about your day, don't post things that are just stupid images or memes, and don't get too distracted by talking about how much you personally think Game X is awesome or sucks. Though pointing out a game sucks due to publisher mistreatment during the development process and sold horribly as a result is fair game.
- No System Warzz. This includes keeping calm in the face of bad news. Just because someone points out that a system/game sells horribly doesn't mean he's saying it's poop from a butt. Sometimes great stuff doesn't sell; this is the nature of the beast.
- No posting random fluff articles. We don't care about poorly thought-out lists or gaming sites doing reviews of cheezy poofs, or how awful those articles are. We're not really the general games journalism thread, except for big stuff like publications going out of business or getting sued.
- Don't cite VGChartz. Ever. They literally make shit up. Read more here.
- NEW:Take care when citing Forbes blogs. Yes, Forbes the magazine is a highly respected business publication. But Forbes blogs are completely different -- they'll allow any gibbering diseased simian that can pound on a keyboard to contribute, and it's quickly become legendary for garbage. So if you see an article saying stuff like "Sony will kill the PlayStation division next month!" don't assume it's likely true because it has the respected Forbes name attached to it.
This is NOT a general new game announcement or date change thread. There are a few exceptions to this that are on-topic for us -- unexpected collaborations between companies, games that mark unusual new directions/risks for a company (like Nintendo announcing a microtransaction-based dating sim or something), delays of games so big they cause quarterly reports to be affected and stockholders to freak out, or scheduling conflicts with other big games that almost guarantee someone will fail. Beyond that, don't just post that a new game exists. There are plenty of people on this board who would like to talk about Game X in its own thread without us rambling on about financial crapola.
That said, have fun! We ain't stodgy accountants.
Allforce on
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There's a neat discussion Jeff and Patrick from Giantbomb had with Ken Levine where he talks about the business side of things and said that basically 2K has a habit of finding talented people ( like Levine and the Housers) and pretty much lets them do their thing. And for the most part it seems to work for them. Both GTA IV and RDR had enormous mega budgets ... but both sold like crazy and are pretty well regarded.
It's not something every publisher can do but it's not altogether crazy.
Something that might be a good idea to add to the stuff on the OP (feel free to change the wording):
As I've said before elsewhere, 2k is perfectly happy to hand out money as long as GTA continues to keep them afloat. One mis-step from GTA would be a total disaster though. Although I've come to doubt Rockstar would do that.
Heck, I starter playing Diablo (2) when somebody in a Disney f'ing Channel recommended it.
The demo hooked me.
I've had, like, uncles and grandparents and shit who I didn't even know could use computers be like "Did you hear Diablo 3 was coming out? That's gonna be awesome!" That game has the weirdest market-penetration ever.
Starcraft, for all it's fame among gamers, is kind brutal and is kind of a niche genre (especially these days) and just doesn't have any non-gamer market-penetration in my experience.
That fucking blows my mind. This game better be well received and sell like a motherfucker because if it doesn't earn back what was spent on it, things are going to change for a loooooot of people who worked on it.
I thought so to, and almost said as much, but then went and looked up marketing budget for some relatively recent big budget films...
Oz the Great and Powerful, as an example, has an estimated marketing budget of $125million.
So $100million on Infinite might not be that out of the question.
Yes, that is a fucking stupid amount to spend on marketing; but it just seems to be the norm these days for this stuff I guess. :rotate:
I get that they need to get the word out sometimes, but when a low budget film is considered a 'flop' even when it makes more than its production budget because they spent as much on marketing as on production it's just...the system is just dumb.
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Do you mean for this industry or in general? Because I've got some Super Bowl commercial spot time values to show you.
marketing executives use a LOT of hair product.
Depends. There's two means of paying actors in films - a flat huge rate, or a scaled rate based on film success that could end up being more than the flat amount. Agents are the ones that negotiate this.
... Off topic.
But double that is still pretty shocking.
How much money did Blizzard spend on that WoW ad campaign that had every celebrity ever claiming to be a class?
What channel(s) do you see the commercial on? If it's a network non-cable/satellite channel the price is gonna be fucking huge.
Yeah AMC for the Walking Dead. I imagine that's not the only channel. But it still boggles my mind that it takes that much dough for that kind of exposure.
Edit: Xeno just covered the whole shebang
If you see the ad during the Daily Show or other demographically appropriate show ala The Walking Dead; they spent a lot of money on it.
If you see the ad during a championship game; they spent A LOT of money on it.
If you see the ad before a big hollywood blockbuster; they spent a lot of money on it.
If the game wins a major award on Spike TV or is featured on their shill program; they spent a lot of money on it.
If the ad has licensed music that may or may not even be in the game; they spent a lot of money on it.
If footage of the game is actually in a movie; they spent a lot of money on it.
When you see all of those: It's either a big Activision release, a numbered AC game, GTA or Halo.
And I know I've seen a few commercials for BI...and yeah, it was probably when I happened upon Walking Dead.
Well to extrapolate on the ad funding to exposure ratio, remember how Microsoft put a billion dollars into Kinect's advertising? That was when I was seeing it advertised in physical ways in Wal-Mart and such. It has hard to not notice.
I live in NYC and there are Bioshock Infinite ads literally on the side of buses. I'm pretty sure there are also ads in the subways (there were for previous high-profile 2K games that weren't GTA games, such as Borderlands 2 and Mafia 2)
I am idly curious if $100M is the marketing budget for all the markets they're releasing Bioshock Infinite in, or just North America.
Pffff, screw this industry I'm selling brownies.
I mean fuck. The last game that has a 100M development cost? APB. Made by Realtime Worlds. You might remember it as the MMO that didn't even last 90 days.
Assassin's Creed is doing the bold move of advertising a game what, seven months early?
Shenmue in 1999 was $70million
Tera Online was $431 million
http://www.sooperarticles.com/art-entertainment-articles/tera-online-gaming-worlds-most-expensive-76974.html
I think Final Fantasy VII was $45 million development in 1997
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Just seems like massive overkill to me; doubling the cost of the game thanks to the advertising budget isn't going to double the profit. On the upside, at least a franchise that's got a solid chance of being a big hit with a new game is having this done, as opposed to dropping an insane amount of money on something like Star Wars MMO with no idea of whether or not it would take off.
But I've only seen a single CGI commercial for Bioshock Infinite, and it's pretty standard "this is what we want you to think the game is like even though it isn't really just like this because this is all prerendered stuff" business. If that's what 100 million dollars buys for advertising, it seems like a big, big waste.
Video game advertising on the other hand... doesn't. It seems only once in a blue moon will I see regular commercials for one game. One game, over the multitudes that are released in any one month.
I mean, show of hands people. How many have seen ads for The Hobbit? Or The Avengers? They were all over the place. Now how many have seen ads for Bioshock Infinite?
They're 200 million in the hole. This needs to be an insane blockbuster to have a hope of a prayer of turning a profit. So they need to advertise the fuck out of this. To everybody. So then... where are the ads?
Also I have to wonder how much of that 100mil was spent literally years ago and has been utterly forgotten by now.
Marketing is ridiculously expensive, yeah, but the ad exposure doesn't seem to add up to a cool hundred million.