The Keith Stuart Column: Who are more stupid, gamers or marketing departments?

There’s been some controversy in the games industry recently about stupidity. Talking to Gamasutra this week, Kellee Santiago from Thatgamecompany, the inspired studio behind Flow, Flower and Journey, claimed that “gamers aren’t stupid” and that the only reason more games aren’t like Flow Flower and Journey is because publishers underestimate their audience.

It was a sentiment echoed by David Cage, the unmistakably Gallic founder of Quantic Dream, who in a bad-tempered interview with Develop claimed that marketing departments are destroying the games industry because all they want to hear about is how many guns a game has. “When you come to them about a game based on a story. Or, a game based on child abduction, they think ‘my god’”, he explained. “It’s very difficult for them to commit to anything that’s remotely different.”

So who is really to blame? Honestly, I can completely understand where marketing departments are coming from. In an industry where the biggest hits are either shooters like Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War or family-friendly Nintendo hits like Wii Play and Wii Sport, you can’t really attack marketers for pushing bullet-riddled blast-em’-ups and pleasant fitness games.

Mainstream marketing isn’t really about challenging tastes or attempting to set agendas; it’s about responding to demand. As the influential management theorist Peter Drucker put it, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” So if the masses want brainless space blasters, just make sure they know about YOUR brainless space blaster.

Blaming marketing departments makes no sense anyway when you consider the corporate climate they operate in. For every game that, say, Activision releases, there is a an army of shareholders who want to understand that their millions of dollars of investment are going on a sure bet; not on a game about flowers. It’s exactly the same in Hollywood. We get romantic comedies starring Jennifer Anniston because we go to see romantic comedies starring Jennifer Anniston. We might not know why we do it, but we do. The shareholders at Time Warner and Dreamworks don’t know why we do it either, but as long as we do, they’re happy to pump their money in.

So is it us? Are we the stupid ones?

Not necessarily. In the video game industry there is a much higher correlation between financial success and critical acclaim than there is in the music or movie sectors. If you look at the top ten movies of 2010, only one – Toy Story – had a Metacritic average of over 75%; of the top ten best-selling games, only one title – Kinect Adventures! – didn’t score over 75. This would seem to suggest that gamers are a pretty discerning crowd. Even if they DO like a lot of shooting and easy-to-play sports titles, at least they like good ones.

And of course, gamers are perfectly capable of supporting and elevating underground talent. Minecraft, World of Tanks, Braid and World of Goo have all done extremely well through a groundswell of support from dedicated communities rather than marketing men who would be terrified at the prospect of selling a game in which the player builds dungeons out of pixelated blocks. If anything, in this era of social networking and digital distribution marking departments have never had less influence.

Look, publishers aren’t pushing games on us that we don’t want; we’re not buying Call of Duty in our multi-millions because there isn’t enough choice, we’re doing it because we want to. If EA had put its entire marketing might behind Mirrors Edge; if Namco had really busted the bank to promote Enslaved, its arguable whether the outcome would have been any different? Fantasising about some utopian games industry in which the likes of Heavy Rain and El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron are the multi-million selling blockbusters is pointless. We’re lucky to have a thriving indie community in which amazingly unusual games get to modestly prosper, and we’re lucky that our mainstream mega-budget titles are as good as Modern Warfare, Assassin’s Creed and Halo: Reach.

So don’t blame the marketers and don’t dismiss mainstream gamers as idiots. At least we’re not playing romantic comedy games starring Jennifer Anniston. Thank the lord for small mercies.

 

Keith Stuart is a former games magazine editor and currently plies his trade as games correspondent for The Guardian and freeance writer on Official PlayStation Magazine and Edge. Follow Keith Stuart on Twitter: @keefstuart

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