SilverStuddedSquirre said:
hentropy said:
Yeah I thought you already sorta knew all this stuff, Jim... I don't work in games but I am a student of the broader IT systems industry, and they TEACH this stuff as part of the business curriculum. Appeal to large audiences, appeal to demographics with money, growth is everything and if you're not growing you're losing. Whole assignments based around trying to sell unpopular monitoring and other features as important services. In information systems in general, there have been quite a few situations where I've been asked with new and creative ways to collect data from people. Social media is not viewed as a tool, but as the most direct way to collect information to tune business and marketing strategies.
The reason why those three are the models for success is not because they are good games, but because they've done everything "right" when it comes to marketing, growth, and siphoning as much money out as possible.
To be fair, my school does teach a variety of approaches, and niche audiences are taught to be just as potentially profitable, but you're also basically taught "look at the rest of the industry and do what works."
Just for fun, could you ask your Teacher's opinions about whether or not teaching outright Deception and methods for draining the Soul out of any and all Industries is personally satisfying? Is there a set amount of income at which it is considered appropriate to just toss all integrity out the window and utterly shit all over the customers whose very dollars are providing your supper? I would LOVE to hear an answer to that at the Teacher's level.
Also, could you ask said teacher's opinion of what directly amounts to plagiarism? I hear that Plagiarism is a bigg NO NO in academic circles.
Again, to be fair, it's not so much about what the teachers (keep in mind that there are multiple business classes and they all focus on the aforementioned aspects), it's about what
businesses are looking for out of big-picture IT employees and marketers. It might seem strange or superbad that a marketer or CEO in the games industry has never worked in games before and know little about them, but that's the way it works in every industry. If you're a marketer for a produce company your job is not to know about every intricacy of the produce industry, your job is to market the product to the people the higher-ups want you to market to.
This is why executive decisions and the "tone at the top" is so important. Some companies just turn their marketing over to the marketing department and let them drive marketing, using a lot of employee and industry expert feedback to craft the best message. Some CEOs will try and direct marketing themselves and not bother to involve anyone who actually know the audience at the ground level, which is how you get Dead Space's "your mom is going hate it" commercials. You might hate what Clash of Clans stands for, but you have to admit that the commercials (which play quite frequently) are quite effective at appealing to multiple audiences. Your job as a marketer is not to make the game or even care about the quality of it, your job is to get people to download and buy it.
The difference between a disconnected, "soulless" company like EA and a company most people love like Valve is that Valve simply knows its audiences much better because the people at the top are gamers and experts themselves.
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