Mike_L on 21 March 2016
| binary solo said: I think individual marketing deals by themselves don't achieve much for the one paying the money. Ultimately I think Sony and MS make the marketing deals worth the publisher's while, so any sales that are lost on the opposing platform are compensated by what ever MS/Sony contribute towards marketing (whether that's direct payment to the publisher or funding the marketing campaigns). But one might also consider that for some games the publisher would find it very difficult to run an extensive marketing campaign, and that the extra money from a marketing exclusive allows the publisher to get more ads on TV, more billboards put up and more advertising on the backs of buses and at bus stops. Which leads to over all higher sales than they might have achieved with a lesser marketing campaign. Especially when a game is being released at a crowded time of year and games are actually incompetition with each other for the gamer $$. Did RoTR sales suffer at the end of 2015 because MS put more effort into marketing other games? What if MS put FO4 levels of effort into ROTR and ROTR levels of effort into FO4? The question is whether the exclusive marketing has a hardware benefit for MS/Sony. I would say in general there isn't one where the exclusivity deal is marketing only. I think there probably is some hardware sales advantage if it's marketing+, where the + is a limited edition console and / or exclusive content. Not sure if there's an advantage from a standard bundle. Another factor is to look at what countries have the biggest sales for a particular game. A game that gets by far the most sales in the USA (out of proportion to over all US market size compared to the world), is going to have sales more balanced between PS4 and Xb one because the install base there is closer to 50/50 than in the vast majority of markets. And a game that sells primarily in Asia and continental Europe is going to be massively skewed towards PS4. So examining global game sales vs global hardware market share doesn't tell the full story when most games don't have similar tie ratios across all markets. It would be interesting to speculate how hardware and software sales would be if no one had any marketing exclusives. Would total game sales be lower? Would over all hardware sales be lower or about the same. Would the dominant console be more or less dominant or make no difference? OTOH, if all exclusive marketing went to the dominant console what would be the effect on the non-dominant console? Would the non-dominant console spend more time marketing 3rd party games that don't have marketing exclusivity alongside console exclusive content? And would that compensate for exclusive marketing of the big 3rd party IP. I think there are far too many variables to exclusive marketing to really draw a solid conclusion about value. But it is always a point of interest when it appears that sales of hardware and software run counter to who has the marketing exclusivity. It is interesting |
Many interesting points. Maybe you're right. Maybe e.g. Bethesda does receive more money from Microsoft marketing Fallout 4 with XB1 (than they would from Sony). And in that case, they wouldn't care as much about receiving less advertisement (e.g. on youtube where PS has over 4 mill subs and Xbox 1.3) and perhaps selling fewer Fallout 4+console bundles.
