| richardhutnik said: shio, you apparently don't grasp the concept of the importance of advertising in marketing as it relates to consumer products, like where you buy products (retail). Apparently, in your world, things like this don't matter. You apparently don't grasp it at all. At this point, it will be pointless to continue with you on this. Most games are purchased as gifts by people, who do holiday shopping, and they buy them retail. For you, you have online sales as a grasping at straws to throw doubt on things. Anyhow, I would suggest you do a study in Marketing 101, so you can start to grasp this, and be able to discuss this, rather than kick into defensive mode and have to resort to Autosurf and Galactic Civilization II (I bought my copy in a store) as to why marketing and advertising isn't needed. As of now, I doubt you even could begin to discuss this. So, let's consider this discussion closed at this point. Anyone else want to discuss the future of consoles and PCs, who has a basic understanding that sales and marketing are important to game sales? |
Again, Why does it matter if a game has much marketing or not??? What you're saying is that if a game doesn't have much marketing then it should be labeled trash no matter how good it is. Hey everyone! richardhutnik is saying Zack & Wiki, Okami, Braid, Audiosurf and World of Goo are all "trash" and should be ignored!! What truly matters is if the game is successful or not. Whether that is achieved by selling 100k or 10 millions, that is up to various factors.
And I guess I have to tell you this one more time: Most PC revenue is from online! The shift from Retail to online is absolutely natural and is the evolution of PC gaming. There are more and more people that feel it's pointless to buy games on discs because it doesn't bring any additional benefits compared to the digital copies.
And it's funny that you mention holiday shopping, because several DD Services also have holiday deals. Last winter holiday, Steam made a huge sale on all of it's games for an entire week. I myself, who didn't expect to buy Steam games in the holiday, ended up buying 7 PC games on Steam. And if you think I bought too much, there were PC gamers that bought dozens of games from Steam in that week. And apparently the sales of UT3 was so sucessful that Epic even decided to give Steam support of their game, by adding achievements to the Steam version and allowing Steam integration of the retail copy of UT3.
You're the one who doesn't have any business sense. Only Mass-appealing games can support significant marketing. Didn't you know that game companies only usually spend 10% of the expected revenue of the game for marketing? No one is idiot enough to spend dozens of millions on ads for a game because it will eat away on the game's profits. The good thing about Digital Distribution is that it possesses an efficient marketing system that allows the ads to reach the intended audience with an 100% success rate. You still keep talking about retail this, retail that, but the truth is most PC gamers are past that and will keep using DD more and more until DD compltely takes over the traditional boxed games.
One last thing: You still haven't given my any proof for the support of your claims. Please give me meaningful figures/numbers, or else I'll just have to label you as an ignorant of the videogame industry.
