Friendly reminder: Pre-orders are a metric guaging support (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, March 31, 2017, 17:46 (2582 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Great post and I'll do my best to address these concerns. Please keep in mind that my "no-preorders" advice has to do with overall, long term trends within the game industry, and will probably not have a perceivable effect on any individual game, especially if you only look at the actual pre-order window.

There may be some truth in the idea that preorders do some harm to games, especially when viewed over the long term, but there are also major problems with the idea, like:
1. Have games' ad budgets been increasingly subtracted from their development budgets over the years, or has the market grown bigger so that there is more total money to spend?

I think the answer is yes to both. Video games are an 80 Billion dollar industry. Compare to film, which is only 8 Billion globally. There's just a crapton of money flying around gaming. So while budgets are the highest they've ever been, a higher percentage of AAA game budgets is going to advertising than ever before, too. Actually, I'm not sure that's true. At Activision and EA it is true. Other AAA devs I can't speak to. This neogaf thread where a guy collates info about destiny indicates ATVI spent $140 million developing bungie, and another $360 million ($500M total) on marketing, licensing, and packaging. The packaging claim is kind of weird here, since it's always included in the sale price of a game and is thus "baked in." It also necessarily changes based on how many copies of a game you have to produce to meet demand. Let's be super generous and assume $100M was spent on packaging (there's no way it's this high, but screw it). That still means ATVI spent $260 Million on advertising and promotions for this game. Nearly double the actual development cost, both of which are astronomical amounts of money. I'm not aware of many games that outspend development with marketing, but I know 50/50 splits are fairly common in AAA devs these days. That's a recent development (last 10 years). Before that, you were hard pressed to find a game like Myst that had a 50/50 split, and I have been unable to find any game with more marketing expenses than development costs without going back to a time when games were developed pretty much on spec by a guy in his basement and marketing was 90+% of the initial cost because game development as an industry wasn't really a thing yet.

Again, much more money is available to both pools, but marketing % of total costs is higher now than it has been in years past (and still climbing).

2. If a game only starts taking preorders and running marketing five months from shipping, like Destiny 2, can a preorder boycott actually have any impact on development?

A preorder boycott will not impact a single game, especially if it starts so late in the development cycle. An overall trend in the industry away from pre-orders will influence budgets down the line, however.

3. Would pouring all the marketing money into a game's development even work? Would more programmers, artists, etc fix a game's problems? And even if it did, would something like that be sustainable? That is: Does a perfect game that nobody knows about get any sales?

No, and I wouldn't want to pour all marketing money into game dev. Rather, I'm looking for more of a 30/70 marketing/game dev split than a 50/50 (or worse) split. Usually longer development cycles are the most advantageous expenditures of money, rather than additional staffers. Not always though, it depends on the game. And no, a perfect game no one knows about doesn't sell at all, obviously. You still need to spend on marketing. I just don't think you should spend so much, and certainly not spend so much before launch as opposed to post launch (promoting your rave reviews, etc).

4. Finally, how much of a studio's time / effort is spent on the marketing vs the game they are making? It seems... questionable... that the two have much to do with each other. For instance, how many of Bungie's programmers, environment artists, tools designers, etc even touched the Destiny 2 teaser and trailer? And of the ~3 years Destiny 2 has been in development, what percent of the studio's time was spent on the advertising vs the game?

The studio doesn't spend very much time on marketing at all; it's a different department. Some people, like Deej, have a job that entails occasionally promoting the game with livestreams etc.., but that's all a very small impact on the other devs, most of whom are proud to show off their work and thrilled for the 15 minutes to share it with the world. Morale boost, if anything. For a fully animated game trailer, the development could have gone lots of different ways. It could have been fully produced out of house, but I highly doubt that. Maybe it's 100% in-house like a Blizzard games trailer (they have dedicated animators who do only the movies and split their times between games and ads etc. Often the ads serve double duty as cutscenes or splash screen teasers within a game, too). Usually it's a mix. You get a few artists to rig up your existing assets with more animating handles and bones, and you get a motion picture animator to do the actual work. The writers either write the script or hire a commercial writer who learns about the characters and writes to their strengths. The voice actors are obviously the same ones as in the game in this case (but aren't always). Sometimes you hire additional artists to upscale your textures and poly counts. Sometimes your game is built at very high scales to being with and we're only ever seeing downscale versions of the working models in the actual game, so those assets are already built. The actual editing and post processing is probably a contract hire (I do this kind of work from time to time as a freelance editor, myself - cody can probably speak to this as well, though I think he mainly does features? I'm not sure) It's usually a week's work, more if you're getting loads of notes from corporate, and it's pretty straightforward. Anyway, the point is that commercials aren't usually a drain on the development team's staff, even when they use the same assets.

I do like the idea that games should get sales based on their quality vs a flash ad campaign. And paying for a game before anyone even knows if it is good or not does seem silly. Especially new games in a series like Destiny 1. But even if a good ad campaign gets a lot of undeserved sales, wouldn't a bad or disappointing game cause hesitation next time?

Very true. A bad or disappointing game that has poor sales as a result, however, gives the developer who missed the mark all the more reason to make a better game the next time. A bad or disappointing game that has great sales because of strong pre-release advertising, however, has little reason to change anything (less so at a large corporate environment where the people making the decisions aren't really involved in actually making the game). I've actually been *very* impressed with Hello Games and the post-fiasco work they've been putting into NMS. I wish more studios had that sort of drive to make amends when they let down their customers.

Isn't that what we're kinda seeing around here with Destiny 2 right now?

Yes.

Ultimately, I think a blanket statement that preorders hurt the quality of games is, at best, ignoring too many economic, marketing, and software development realities to be valid. Even when we do see an example of a game with good marketing turning out to be a disappointment, like with Destiny 1, it is probably the case that it was poor development decisions made long before a single pixel of marketing material was created that caused the disappointment. And not the fact that some millions of dollars were spent on that marketing two or three years later.

Agree to disagree on this point, I think. I feel like pre-orders are detrimental, overall, to the quality of games because they remove some of the pressure from the development team to make an actually good game. It's totally fine to feel differently.