So I claimed somewhere somehow that I think it is a good thing if developers not only understand but actively participate in marketing, PR and other non-development activities (sales, tech support, biz dev, etc.). This goes way beyond including functionality to allow PR people to make nice screenshots (useful as that is, hi Thad). I see this as exactly equivalent to programmers understanding how game designers and artists work – or rather, what game designers and artists do. (And vice versa of course: it helps when artists understand programming, etc.). A programmer who understands game design can achieve things another programmer cannot, simply because she doesn’t have to spend as much (or, sometimes, any) effort coordinating and communicating with someone else.

Naturally I would say this since knowing just enough about most disciplines is my thing. I am not saying it is bad for people to focus on one discipline. But game development is the most multidisciplinary art form – more so than film or opera in my opinion – and so it logically follows that dealing with the synthesis of all of these disciplines is key to getting the most out of the medium. And multi- or inter-disciplinarity is a really great way of doing that.

Anyway. Over the last couple of years I’ve come to the conclusion that this goes for disciplines outside of pure game development as well, in other words: PR, marketing, sales and biz dev (and tech support and IT but I’ll leave those out for now). Classically, as a developer, you would outsource PR, marketing and sales to a publisher or it would be taken care of by different people in a different department and floor. Biz dev was this thing your boss’s boss did and the result was someone coming in and telling you what game you were going to make next. I’ve worked like this and I think this attitude is still prevalent.

But the rise of the internet has changed all this in a mere 5-10 years. You need fewer permissions, fewer gatekeepers, fewer middlemen, less capital. You can do more with a much smaller company. But that means you need to pay attention to, and take care of, those aforementioned disciplines that are not development.

I think it is imperative that developers see their work as part of a larger whole. The odds are that, in one way or another, you are trying to bring interactive joy to people and somehow be compensated for it. (I would argue that this is the case even if you make art games, but let’s not derail this by arguing about edge cases.) ‘Compensated’ typically means making a living and staying in business. (If you’ve taken money from investors, you also need to produce a return on investment, or *shudder* achieve growth.) Anyway, to do so you need to reach people, then convince them to play your game and give you money. And that is marketing, PR and sales.

These days, as a game designer, your work has already been impacted by marketing and sales, if you’re making free to play games. (Right now, I can think of only two development companies in Austria that are not working on free to play games. Crazy.) But beyond that: what about accessibility, in the sense of people quickly grasping what your game is about? This starts way before the moment the player starts your game. It starts when they hear about it. And what do they hear? The title, and the story. Not the story in your game, but the story about your game – hopefully the one you wrote, in a press release. They read what other people are saying about it, be that press or just someone on the internet (a distinction that’s rapidly fading anyway). Then they see a logo and some screenshots. Then perhaps they read a description and some user reviews in an app store. Then maybe they download and install it.

What is that if not game development? Game design (setting, title, core concept), art (logo, style, screenshots, videos), programming (writing installers, getting the downloadable size below 50 megabytes). What are things like user testing and closed betas if not looking for market fit? And I didn’t even get into analytics.

(For years I resented being asked to explain my game in one sentence. After 21 years I finally get it. A topic for some other time.)

Somewhat paradoxically, indie developers, despite often having a certain ‘we’re not part of the industry’ vibe, are often the most savvy about marketing and sales. At least the successful ones. They run blogs and have multiple Twitter accounts (content marketing), distribute their game through multiple distribution channels (Steam, Flash portals, app stores), participate in special sales (e.g. the Humble Indie Bundles). Super Meat Boy had excellent marketing. Sword & Sworcery’s in-game tweet functionality was great for viral marketing. Etc.

To come back to the original discussion: How should a company divide its priorities between marketing/PR or product development? My answer is that a company should try to eliminate (or at least keep a concerned eye on) internal divisions, and make decisions based on something beyond this the false marketing/development dichotomy. Apple had its way of doing this (I haven’t finished the biography yet but Jobs was a master at marketing and sales. Your company needs to find its own way. As always, remember Basho: Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

Relevant blog posts by other people:

• Tech support is sales by Jason Cohen of A Smart Bear
• Most of what Seth Godin has written

Previous blog posts by me that may be of interest:

• Self-publishing is not the answer
• Marketing, sales, and other scary new game development tasks
• Outsourcing to publishers

Alex Champandard summed up my entire previous blog post as:

Essentially, making self-published games requires the skills running a business — and not everyone has, or wants, those.

He should know: He has the skills for running a business as well as deep programming skills. Just look at AIGameDev.

Here is the other side of the coin, from Cat Valente, via the excellent (not game related) Making Light:

Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?

And writers would line up at their door.

This applies to game development as well as to writing. It is basic economics.

So not everyone is going to be self-publishing. We’re just going to move away from the pure publisher-developer constellation to a more diverse situation.

And naturally it is a huge oversimplification to even talk about a “pure publisher-developer constellation”. Things are already diverse, they’re just getting more so. The future is already here, it’s just badly distributed, to quote William Gibson.

Ever notice how whenever there’s a new profitable market segment, the leaders in that segment do not resemble the leaders of the older segments? MMOs, Flash, free to play, social…

The rise of social games means more developers need to get comfortable with the concepts of marketing, selling and profit.

Seth Godin makes a strong argument in Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside that design = marketing. (In fact he says everything is marketing.)

In fact, the rise of social games is just ONE of several factors that put pressure on developers to change their attitudes to development.

Or rather, the rise of social games exemplifies several forces that have been growing over the last few years.

Lower barriers to entry. More platforms. Direct access. Disintermediation (insourcing, if you like). The common factor is the internet.

A lot of changes, and changes are scary. A lot of new skills to learn, and so a lot of new ways of failing.

(David Barnes from Facebook Indie Games, who writes about similar topics, kindly bundled these tweets and commented on them here.)

This all ties back to a whole bunch of somewhat related topics I have been thinking about over the last couple of years.

This Economist article (for subscribers only, sadly) explains that blockbusters have grown bigger, not smaller as many people expected due to the effects of the Long Tail. This was one of the most interesting articles I read in 2009. Dave Edery referenced it in his talk at GDC this year. Basically, in media these days, you want to be huge and number one, or tiny and quirky (like a tiny purple cow). You don’t want to be second best. This goes for TV, movies, music, newspapers, books – and games. There are a lot of interesting conclusions to be drawn from that.

At GDC this year, as you may have heard, there were some quite vocal reactions against Zynga and Farmville. What caused those reactions? I say it’s fear, fear for something new which is not the something new that some of us were hoping for, or striving for.

That doesn’t mean Zynga is the future of games. But everyone in the industry is now aware that Farmville’s 70 million monthly players, not to mention its revenue and valuation, are remarkable. (There are, of course, other numbers that are as impressive as that iconic 70 million, and other markets that are as interesting as Facebook – see, for example, Nicholas Lovell’s provocative post.)

This February I was at Casual Connect in Hamburg, my first time at Casual Connect. It was weird: the majority of sessions were about game design AND business. Which makes total sense in the casual / social / free to play space, but which probably confuses and scares a lot of game designers out there. Are we no longer cool? Are we going the way of the adventure game designers? (Many of my adventure game designer friends are actually doing quite well – some of them in social games.) Did I waste 20 years thinking about storytelling in games?

Changes on the internet, over the last 5 years or so, have revolutionized every single aspect of game development and publishing, and are continuing to do so. I held a presentation on this in 2007, and things have only accelerated since then. You can develop your game using open source software (itself developed and distributed over the internet), then market and sell and distribute it over the internet. Players can buy it and play it over the internet and you can converse with them over the internet.

One of the biggest changes caused by this is disintermediation. Basically, getting rid of publishers. Because from one perspective, developers have been outsourcing marketing and distribution. As I said about a month ago:

We’re in the middle of a major transformation of our industry that was essentially caused by the internet and the various disruptions it has enabled. One of the questions small developers should be wrestling with right now is whether to self-publish. I know I’ve been thinking about this a lot in 2009. Developers building up expertise in marketing, PR, financing and other business areas that we traditionally have no experience with is going to transform the games industry (in fact it’s probably happening already). I’m not saying everyone should do it, and in fact there are good counter-arguments – there is a reason why there are developers and publishers. But I think the status quo has been out of balance for a long time and that things are now moving the other way, towards self-publishing.

But that is a big, big leap for people who tend to think of themselves as artists and engineers. And you can bet a lot of institutional knowledge – the way things are done – no longer applies. And some of that knowledge is encoded in how companies are structured, in how they work. (When a older, bigger company is disrupted by a younger, smaller company, it’s the differences in company culture that cause this as much as the technology.)

Working at a small games company, I think a lot about this stuff. About my experience, about what I instinctively think is the right way to make games, about how to make big leaps. About my fears of the unknown, of failure, of being laughed at. Even though it’s not all that hard and lots of people have done it before.

Reading the two Seth Godin books I mentioned above made me realize a lot of people in a lot of industries are probably going through that. I don’t buy all of what he says, and I am not quite sure which conclusion I am going to draw from them, but I recommend reading them. Fodder for a future blog post, or a bunch of caffeine-fueled tweets.

In October 2008, Andrew Chen wrote about the cultural differences between games people and web people. Having been “games people” since 1991, but with a strong interest and even, in 2007, a brief stint in the web world, I found this a really interesting post. Especially this insight (emphasis mine):

Another interesting difference was the perspectives around content. For many of the games people I met, the content is everything. How good your game is perceived to dictate its ultimate success. I think this makes sense in an industry where distribution is essentially commoditized! The big publishers have many of the same relationships, and games developers in general have been outsourcing their distribution expertise out to the publishers for the past couple decades. As a result, it seems clear that the only place to compete is in the content of the game, rather than in the distribution.

This is a really interesting perspective – to me it was a very different way of looking at things. We’re in the middle of a major transformation of our industry that was essentially caused by the internet and the various disruptions it has enabled. One of the questions small developers should be wrestling with right now is whether to self-publish. I know I’ve been thinking about this a lot in 2009. Developers building up expertise in marketing, PR, financing and other business areas that we traditionally have no experience with is going to transform the games industry (in fact it’s probably happening already). I’m not saying everyone should do it, and in fact there are good counter-arguments – there is a reason why there are developers and publishers. But I think the status quo has been out of balance for a long time and that things are now moving the other way, towards self-publishing.

Adam Martin just wrote something about this topic. He links to a post by Nicholas Lovell, who is a strong proponent of self-publishing – in fact, he makes his living consulting developers about it. Nicholas puts the idea more strongly and clearly than Andrew: Developers outsource publishing to publishers.

I met Nicholas at Casual Connect in Hamburg and had a great conversation with him, and, if I recall correctly, I mentioned Andrew Chen’s article. I am not writing this to claim credit or say anything about how Nicholas got the idea, I just find it fascinating to see how ideas spread and develop, whether I had a role in it or not.

If you’re interested in this subject at all, I recommend subscribing to the blogs of Andrew, Adam and Nicholas.

I think many people saw the Bioware / Pandemic merger, with support from private equity firm Elevation Partners, as a bold move to create a large-scale independent developer.

With this news, it looks more like a fancy move by John Riccitiello, who worked at Electronic Arts, left to co-found Elevation Partners, came back to EA as CEO, and now this.

As usual, it is a bold move that makes sense for EA. I wonder how long it takes them to crush the soul of those two companies.

(Thanks, Mark!)

Update: Greg has some more in-depth analysis.

The structure of my presentation was:

• An overview of the ‘core’ games industry, including big players, numbers, demographics.
• The internet on consoles.
• The internet as a community platform: past and current trends (think small moves into integrating the web and web 2.0 – I showed WWS stats of a recent boss kill by my World of Warcraft guild).
• User-generated content: past and current trends (Spore, LittleBigPlanet, Halo 3).
• The internet as a marketing channel: the most boring slide, I practically skipped it.
• The internet as a distribution channel: Steam, consoles, Manifesto Games.
• The internet as a trading platform: all the kooky stories of people buying virtual real estate for $100,000. This took quite a while to research.
• The internet as a gaming platform: Gaia Online, Desktop Tower Defense, Line Rider, Habbo Hotel, Three Rings, Runescape. This was my key point: a disruptive new market/industry is developing that is mostly being ignored by the ‘core’ games industry. And yes, if you follow Raph Koster, that won’t be news to you. I came at it from a somewhat different angle though.

It really was an overview of the various ways in which the internet is transforming the games industry – it was wide, not deep. There were still many topics I had to leave out: ‘big’ games and ARGs, mobile games, professional gaming, South Korea and Asia in general, game elements in pure Web 2.0 sites, in-game advertising, machinima… it’s a big subject.

If you want to see the slides, you can download them here (710K PDF).

There’s a long story as to why this particular topic interests me so much right now, but I am keeping that for a later blog post.

I hadn’t done a presentation for some time, but it all went pretty smooth. It is customary to have many technical glitches that need fixing before the talk starts, but I was hooked up to the internet and the beamer in no time. I did have to put a new hard drive into my iBook the night before, which was an interesting challenge. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done involving computer hardware – layers upon layers of tiny screws… But it all worked out fine. The only thing that did not work as planned was playing HD videos with Keynote running on a 3 year old machine with only 768 Mb of RAM. But although the videos would have livened things up, they didn’t contain any vital information.

The audience was very nice, a lot of people seemed quite interested even though I threw a ton of information at them. In retrospect I could have reduced certain things a bit better, focussed it a bit more on the other material they had been learning. But I was assuming they wouldn’t all be super-knowledgeable about the games industry, and it is hard to make certain points about how interesting the new games / web 2.0 sector is if you don’t know about console manufacturers, rising development costs, and the demographics of various market segments.

Developing the presentation kind of went like this:

• Interest in the topic (for reasons I will explain in a future post).
• Pondering the right concept for this particular presentation.
• A first draft of the structure of the presentation. By this point I basically knew what I wanted to say.
• Fact-finding and slide-designing. Fact-finding took most of the time – about three to four days. I had to search several key sites, look through old bookmarks, gather tons of news items and articles, then pick the data I needed.
• Practicing. When I practiced at home, even though I talked slowly, I did fine for time, but when I did it live I overran by a few minutes and there was no time for questions at the end. Practicing on the same day as the presentation itself turned out to be dangerous: I could notice myself growing hoarse. But I brought some throat lozenges and a bottle of water and it turned out fine.

Using Keynote was a breeze – it was super-easy to make fancy charts that look a lot better than copying in some picture. I would have loved to have the latest version of Keynote on a MacBook capable of driving two screens though. The presenter mode is so sexy. On the other hand, printing out the slides for my notes and looking at my watch worked fine.

To paraphrase Pascal (maybe): I apologize for the presentation being so long; I did not have time to make it shorter. It was okay – at least I didn’t just read out the slides. But it wasn’t quite at the level I wanted it to be. Ah well, practice makes perfect.

(Via Slashdot Games.)

(Thanks Tobi!)

I haven’t read any other thoughts on this yet, but I must admit to being a bit puzzled. Initially I thought the Intel processors in newer Macs makes ports easier, but to be honest I am not sure if that is the case. Has the Mac market grown? Is there some strategic advantage? I haven’t figured it out yet. I would imagine the ROI on Mac ports should be quite decent for a company that is big enough such as EA. (Too bad I don’t have an Intel Mac I guess.)

Second, John Carmack of id Software presented their new technology:

He’d been talking about it for a while, there is a first iteration in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, here was the real deal. No real announcements apart from that video, the game in question will come out for PC, Mac, PS3 and Xbox 360, details to follow at E3 (remember E3?). News-wise, it was cool, but somehow not quite as exciting as Bungie showing Halo for the first time at MacWorld New York 1999.

What does this all mean? Does Apple now ‘get’ games? Or does Mr. Jobs still hate them, as he allegedly does? Although having Mr. Gordon and Mr. Carmack on stage is impressive, I can’t see this as a serious move into games. Strategically, Apple is involved in a fight over the living room (however much Mr. Jobs refers to Apple TV a ‘hobby’) against Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and, I guess, Sony’s PlayStation 3. I don’t quite see how these announcements fit into that struggle. Now, if Apple were to announce a wireless controller for the Apple TV, that’d be different. But the Apple TV is not that powerful, the profit margins on it are low (see previous link), and since they don’t control the software they can’t take a loss on the hardware the way Microsoft and Sony do. So, I am waiting for another shoe to drop.

As a bonus for Mac fans, here’s John Hodgman as Steve Jobs:

(Yes, PC lovers, I have seen the PC vs Mac spoof ads. I even laughed.)