SelectivelyEvil13 said:
to put in the investment without bothering to advertise properly the final product. Not everyone follows game releases (myself, for instance), so when a game slips under the radar, be it actual advertisements or just positive word of mouth, that's it for a portion of the market.
There are two reasons for doing so.
One is the concept of "throwing good money after bad". A game might look like a good risk when it gets green-lit. Later, that decision may change: market conditions may be different, the product may not turn out how the publishers expected, management at the publisher may change. The forecast for the game is reduced, and it is estimated that more marketing spending will not make up for the shortfall between the old and new projections. In this case, you release the game and get what you can, but you don't invest more money in it-- you don't throw the "good money" (more new money on marketin) after the "bad money" (the cash invested in development of a project that no longer has a good projection.
The other reason might just be that they believe the product lives in a niche that it will fill, and has no appeal outside that niche no matter how many marketing dollars you throw at it. Properties that have extremely loyal fans, but not mass market appeal, are like this. Think about Firefly and Serenity. I love the show myself, but I can easily see that it's not nearly as easy a sell as many people allege. People would like to think that shows like this fail to get great ratings because of time slots or marketing, when it's just as likely that it got all the fans it was ever going to get, and they do enough evangelizing for the show themselves that money on marketing is wasted.
EA may have reasoned that the market for a new Oddworld game was existing Oddworld fans, and that all that was needed to sell the game to them was for them to be aware of its existence. I think they may have achieved that. You'd have to be able to compare the sales of various games in the franchise over time, on various different platforms, and with various different marketing expenditures, and see whether or not spending more on marketing Oddworld games resulted in higher sales.
Something tells me that whether or not they used it, and however they made their decision, EA probably had access to that information-- and so did the developer.
If the developer's allegation of sabotage was backed up with an assertion that a previous game had higher sales as a percentage of the addressable market with a certain level of marketing expenditure, and that Stranger's Wrath failed to achieve or exceed that mark because it had a proportionally lower marketing expenditure, then I'd be inclined to think they're right.
The claim here seems to be something more along the lines that they think Stranger's Wrath was a better game, and that a better game would of course have sold better, and that since it didn't, the lack of marketing expenditure was at fault. The false assumption here is that good games always sell well; sometimes bad games sell well, and sometimes good games sell poorly, and sometimes marketing expenditures don't influence either situation negatively or positively.
. The 360 doesnt support my version of strangers wrath from the xbox, the oddworld games (oddysee and exodus) still arnt out on xbla, and hand of odd I really HAVE to get!! Oddworld is the best platforming game (although munchies oddysee sucked a little)
