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

by cheapLEY , Friday, March 31, 2017, 16:44 (2606 days ago) @ Ragashingo

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?

That's a valid point. I think it's probably the latter, but even then, that advertising money could probably be better spent on development (in an ideal world).

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?

For a single game, no, but if consumers stopped preordering altogether and did so consistently, it would be a trend and devs/publishers would know they'd have to focus on developing a good game rather than marketing hype to sell games. It's a weird issue, because other than some shady idiots on Steam Greenlight or whatever, I don't think any developers set out to make a bad game to just take the money and run. But if they used marketing money and used it to actually give the developers time to finish things instead of kicking the game out the door and hoping advertising will have sold enough copies, it'd probably be a net positive for games. I haven't played it, but Mass Effect: Andromeda looks like a perfect example of this. That's a game that clearly needs more work (and arguably a game that probably doesn't need a lot of advertising to sell). I wager that it would have sold quite a bit more if got great reviews and was known as the best Mass Effect game instead of (arguably) the worst. Sure, it probably sold well enough, but I'd bet quite a few folks are going to wait until it hits that $20-30 price point before they buy it, or pick it up used for even less, rather than rushing out day one to buy it at full price. Maybe it works out for them to have kicked it out the door like they did, or maybe it would have been worth investing the extra money to give the devs time to finish it. I don't know.

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?

It's not necessarily about more programmers, artists, etc. It's about time. More money for the same amount of employees means a longer development period, which is probably always better (unless we hit a Star Citizen situation). Sure, having an unlimited amount of time means that you probably just never finish the thing and try to do too much, but being able to have a buffer period when you realize things aren't working would undoubtedly be better than having a strict deadline.

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?

I'd actually be curious to know that, too. We know that Bungie didn't have total marketing control during the first Destiny because of what happened with Marty. So how much control do they have? Someone said earlier that they suspected that Bungie writers had basically nothing to do with the script of the teaser or the trailer and probably only looked it over for canon discrepancies, and I'd have a hard time believing that.