Tales from Gamedev: How marketers aim to be "just one of you"

[Punp]

I've been in the back of a few board rooms - both real and virtual - and I've learned that advertising is exploitative and sociopathic (duh).

Here are some examples, mostly from gamedev.

The average phone/browser has a unique ad id which tracks users between sites (like insta/youtube) and apps.

They use this to work out whether their ad campaign was successful (i.e. did customer 1 see our ad and then download the app?).

They also use analytics provided by google to know audience interests. i.e. their market may be in the venn diagram of mountaineering and tamagotchi. Weirdly the game theme rarely matches to interests.

They may also use browser profiling (i.e. what plugins you do/don't have, what settings are on, etc to identify an individual), and I've spoken with people who actively lament privacy implementations because they hamper their hokey business model.

Most games are made based on the success of what came before.

This seems like an obvious one, but most companies aren't innovating new designs. They just see what has sold previously and make more of that. Remember Minecraft and the open world crafters that came afterwards? Remember "souls-like" games?

In a recent meeting my game was decided to be "too new and weird" and instead they showed me their flagship game about a kid and his dog with awful art made using a game template and declared it the best of that genre.

Original research and development is reserved for actual indie developers so they can take all the risk. Then the companies swoop down with a bigger ad budget and take the ideas wholesale.

Game marketers aim to be "just one of you".

Well, not one of you. A bottle of turps, a learning disorder and religious parents is all they'd need for emulating the standard Agoran.

No, this particular advice is for advertising on rebbit and Twitter etc where they encourage indie devs to talk about """their experience""" making a game and carefully hand pick the most flashy screenshots and video. All of it is fake, from the persona of the struggling artist to the carefully crafted title and the people who come in later asking for a link to the game. They'll gather a few upvotes from their employees when the post launches to make sure it starts off well.

When the quarterly profits need to look good they fire a few people.

I was told by a director that if a game wasn't going to increase its profit that year they were considering firing the team so they could retain profits for themselves and their stakeholders instead of putting it into the developers. This is mostly because they've got investor cash and the investors must be appeased. Essentially investors make an investment (duh) and want to see a return (increase) on that investment.

Attention retention is the name of the game.

A metric for success in games is how long the game is running on the target machine. As you can imagine this can lead to all kinds of fuckabouts including bigger assets to make the game take longer to load, making gameplay purposefully addictive or the odds of winning much lower.

Weirdly enough this is also a metric for success in dating apps - the longer they can leave customers dangling at the end of the hook the longer they'll be on the app, thus the more premiums they pay as they get more desperate for success.

Summary

This is the end of my little shot of misery. Things haven't been going great for me in game dev this month and it's made me incredibly bitter, so if you want to check out and wishlist my game on Steam you can find a link here.

Of course not, you idiot. This is exactly what I warned you about. Just. One. Of. You.

 

[Sketch Relics]

I was told by a director that if a game wasn't going to increase its profit that year they were considering firing the team so they could retain profits for themselves and their stakeholders instead of putting it into the developers. This is mostly because they've got investor cash and the investors must be appeased. Essentially investors make an investment (duh) and want to see a return (increase) on that investment.

Things like this make me wonder what the up-side of taking investor money actually is in the long run. It seems to just cause a lot of bad short term strategies that probably make less money overall.

 

[Punp]

Things like this make me wonder what the up-side of taking investor money actually is in the long run. It seems to just cause a lot of bad short term strategies that probably make less money overall.

Essentially you need to take investor money because everyone else is taking investor money and you need to do it to compete. EA is big on it and they've recently sold more of their business to be able to keep up with their own shitty practice.

Eventually the company claims bankruptcy and the CEO and his cronies escape with golden parachutes while their third party friends have made all the money being hired to do work on the projects.

This will ultimately lead to another gaming collapse, and all the signs are already here. It's a saturated market.

I'll tell you who didn't take major debt - Nintendo - and it's what allowed them to survive the last collapse. Their business model was sturdy and steady. Unfortunately they too have now taken the route of "money now pay later expand expand expand" and you can see the result in all their predictable recycled games of the past decade.

 

[big_ping07]

i don't quite understand why retention is the name of the game when they're competing against shit like mincecrafd.
different games serve different purposes. i'm not spending more than ~2minutes on a phone app. it's there to fill a short amount of time. is the amount of revisits not a viable metric? and how can you even explain this to superiors/investors when they don't even consume the product??
sad stuff. sad stuff.

 

[sungen]

What do you think the next gaming market crash will look like? I'm thinking that the gaming "industry" is at a point where the whole thing is too big to fail, even if one or two AAA companies go under, the indie sector will continue to thrive provided the ACTUAL market doesn't shit the bed to the point where your average Joe can't afford to have an autism project.
Though funny enough, I was just talking to a homie that I'd argue big names will continue to shit the bed even if they release good games because fanboys who already drank the koolaid will buy them until they get something so bad that they won't, and that they're never going to pull any new customers given how their reputation is soiled for those they've fucked over and reputation runs the AAA sector, if that makes any sense.

 

[Punp]

i don't quite understand why retention is the name of the game when they're competing against shit like mincecrafd.
different games serve different purposes. i'm not spending more than ~2minutes on a phone app. it's there to fill a short amount of time. is the amount of revisits not a viable metric? and how can you even explain this to superiors/investors when they don't even consume the product??
sad stuff. sad stuff.

Sorry, I should've been clearer. What you're talking about is return customers (long term retention) and it's also a valuable metric. You can see how that got weaponised in games where you get "3 free coins every 12 hours" or whatever.

Essentially I was badly explaining Goodheart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

What do you think the next gaming market crash will look like? I'm thinking that the gaming "industry" is at a point where the whole thing is too big to fail, even if one or two AAA companies go under, the indie sector will continue to thrive provided the ACTUAL market doesn't shit the bed to the point where your average Joe can't afford to have an autism project.
Though funny enough, I was just talking to a homie that I'd argue big names will continue to shit the bed even if they release good games because fanboys who already drank the koolaid will buy them until they get something so bad that they won't, and that they're never going to pull any new customers given how their reputation is soiled for those they've fucked over and reputation runs the AAA sector, if that makes any sense.

Essentially the whole thing is already collapsing. People always point to Indie developers as the heroes who will swoop in, but the only Indies I know who can dedicate real time to projects have sugar mommys/daddys who pay the rent and keep the lights on. This is an elite class of society who can afford to throw money at a project in the hopes that it catches fire.

Eventually investors will cotton on that their investments are not returning what they want and they'll move onto something else. At the moment that something else is AI and it is going very fucking badly in that sector too.

The result is mass downsizing of the big companies (which is on record as some of the largest job losses in three years). This is all damage control. Basically gaming is following what happened to streaming - first it was Netflix (steam), then the other platforms joined (Hulu/Epic), then more and more came to the table with their own walled gardens only to find that the audience just wouldn't divide that far.

Now they're all collapsing under the weight of their hosting expenses and can't keep up the monopoly strategy of under pricing their competition.

Steam is collapsing under its lack of curation - there is a whole new stack of games on the front page daily.


You mentioned before that you're a gamedev and my recommendation to you would be to find a small pond and become a big fish. You find an audience who is really desperate for foot fetish pony city builder games and you go to town.

 

[SomaSpice]

This is the end of my little shot of misery. Things haven't been going great for me in game dev this month and it's made me incredibly bitter, so if you want to check out and wishlist my game on Steam you can find a link here.

Of course not, you idiot. This is exactly what I warned you about. Just. One. Of. You.

You find an audience who is really desperate for foot fetish pony city builder games and you go to town.

Punp, you can link your pony porn game in here... We love you just the way you are, there's no need to be ashamed.

 

[Punp]

Punp, you can link your pony porn game in here... We love you just the way you are, there's no need to be ashamed.

If you think I'm going to link to my work life in an environment where I call people out on their shit opinions and argue about religion, BLM, aliens and trans people then you know much less about gamedev than I gave you credit for.

 

[SomaSpice]

If you think I'm going to link to my work life in an environment where I call people out on their shit opinions and argue about religion, BLM, aliens and trans people then you know much less about gamedev than I gave you credit for.

My friend, I was pulling your leg by jokingly calling you a pony furfag.

 

[Punp]

My friend, I was pulling your leg by jokingly calling you a pony furfag.

I sometimes think my sense of humour might be too dry for this forum. I should surround my text with Union Jack flags so people are aware that I'm just being British.

 

[SomaSpice]

I sometimes think my sense of humour might be too dry for this forum. I should surround my text with Union Jack flags so people are aware that I'm just being British.

I think the internet has conditioned us (me?) to assume people are actually sperging out unless they're really hamming up the sarcasm.

 

[McGovern '72!]

The literature industry works kind of like this, as far as I can tell. You get a bunch of editor bastards who look for things that perfectly fit into current degenerate genres (because every English major has been brainwashed by Jung and le Hero's Journey and thinks that stories are just the same thing but with different aesthetics) and who actively reject anything ""experimental"" because it could spell something bad for their careers. If you look at bookstores today you can see the results of this process clearly: a bunch of funko pop "wowsodeep"-tier faggotry that refuses to break with the dead past it's shackled itself to. Harold Bloom deserves infinite torture in hell.

Anyways, at least with games you have a burgeoning indie scene to rip off. With books the publishers don't even look down at the genuine creatives they're stepping on. As a book-writer you can either exile yourself to the void that is self-publishing or buckle down and write enemies-to-lovers slow burn sci-fi wholesome romance for a buncha bastards with no taste.

 

[Ross_Я]

Literally nothing new, but it is good to see everything I already knew confirmed by someone who is actually into the gamedev, all neatly in one post.

This seems like an obvious one, but most companies aren't innovating new designs. They just see what has sold previously and make more of that. Remember Minecraft and the open world crafters that came afterwards? Remember "souls-like" games?

In a recent meeting my game was decided to be "too new and weird" and instead they showed me their flagship game about a kid and his dog with awful art made using a game template and declared it the best of that genre.

Original research and development is reserved for actual indie developers so they can take all the risk. Then the companies swoop down with a bigger ad budget and take the ideas wholesale.

I've read so much about this one specifically. They just do not take risks anymore, any risks, at all. Consequently, everything's so stale and bland in my eyes. And, frankly, it does not apply to video games only. I mean, it's pretty obvious that a lot of these points apply to a lot of things aside from video games. Some points are just general advertisement points to begin with, and the other points - well, they are just business points. Biz is biz, and as long as it is a business - it doesn't matter if the final product is a video game, a movie or a book - pretty much all the same points still apply.
Culture is fucking dying.

A bottle of turps, a learning disorder and religious parents is all they'd need for emulating the standard Agoran.

 

[Brapuccino]

Astroturfing is basically the way of all effective advertising at this point, for basically any "industry".
Fast food chains got in early on the Twitter bullshit with their "how do you do, fellow kids?" accounts.
You've got film studios and distribution companies posting on the internet, creating all these totally organic memes to promote their crap, that then start compounding into a big mass of turds like "Barbenheimer" (Morbius was another particularly grating example).
If you're on the internet, you're basically cattle for a million different interests, everywhere you go without exceptions, this is the inherent nature of advertising.
Advertisers work based on what the most effective methods for selling are, and things haven't really changed much from way back when.
If you were to look back on how they used to promote products in the old days you'd find a lot of really scummy shit, like concentrated, organized efforts to spread the most blatant lies, and yet, say it enough times and it's true. It makes me think about "big" or "famous" people sometimes, even ones I look up to, and wonder how much of their rise to notoriety could be said to be truly "organic", and if there was anything like this involved, if so how bad was it?
Advertisement's backbone is deceit, and it's always really been this way. It's a terrible thing, but it doesn't really surprise me to read this kind of stuff anymore, it even feels logical.

 

[llillilll]

When the quarterly profits need to look good they fire a few people.

I was told by a director that if a game wasn't going to increase its profit that year they were considering firing the team so they could retain profits for themselves and their stakeholders instead of putting it into the developers.

This was the worst part for me. I kinda knew such a thing could happen but just seeing someone say it out loud just hits hard.

 

[Some_porcupine]

The average phone/browser has a unique ad id which tracks users between sites (like insta/youtube) and apps.

cookies as bits operator
user 1, user 2, 3...
binary tree folders that use webicons

(if not speaking of edge or chrome, those are more obvious)
and MS-connect-to-all internal system - apps on windows vs browsers snooping (there was lawsuit i think? but people forgot)

 

[Some_porcupine]

I've been in the back of a few board rooms - both real and virtual - and I've learned that advertising is exploitative and sociopathic (duh).

Here are some examples, mostly from gamedev.

The average phone/browser has a unique ad id which tracks users between sites (like insta/youtube) and apps.

They use this to work out whether their ad campaign was successful (i.e. did customer 1 see our ad and then download the app?).

They also use analytics provided by google to know audience interests. i.e. their market may be in the venn diagram of mountaineering and tamagotchi. Weirdly the game theme rarely matches to interests.

They may also use browser profiling (i.e. what plugins you do/don't have, what settings are on, etc to identify an individual), and I've spoken with people who actively lament privacy implementations because they hamper their hokey business model.

Most games are made based on the success of what came before.

This seems like an obvious one, but most companies aren't innovating new designs. They just see what has sold previously and make more of that. Remember Minecraft and the open world crafters that came afterwards? Remember "souls-like" games?

In a recent meeting my game was decided to be "too new and weird" and instead they showed me their flagship game about a kid and his dog with awful art made using a game template and declared it the best of that genre.

Original research and development is reserved for actual indie developers so they can take all the risk. Then the companies swoop down with a bigger ad budget and take the ideas wholesale.

Game marketers aim to be "just one of you".

Well, not one of you. A bottle of turps, a learning disorder and religious parents is all they'd need for emulating the standard Agoran.

No, this particular advice is for advertising on rebbit and Twitter etc where they encourage indie devs to talk about """their experience""" making a game and carefully hand pick the most flashy screenshots and video. All of it is fake, from the persona of the struggling artist to the carefully crafted title and the people who come in later asking for a link to the game. They'll gather a few upvotes from their employees when the post launches to make sure it starts off well.

When the quarterly profits need to look good they fire a few people.

I was told by a director that if a game wasn't going to increase its profit that year they were considering firing the team so they could retain profits for themselves and their stakeholders instead of putting it into the developers. This is mostly because they've got investor cash and the investors must be appeased. Essentially investors make an investment (duh) and want to see a return (increase) on that investment.

Attention retention is the name of the game.

A metric for success in games is how long the game is running on the target machine. As you can imagine this can lead to all kinds of fuckabouts including bigger assets to make the game take longer to load, making gameplay purposefully addictive or the odds of winning much lower.

Weirdly enough this is also a metric for success in dating apps - the longer they can leave customers dangling at the end of the hook the longer they'll be on the app, thus the more premiums they pay as they get more desperate for success.

Summary

This is the end of my little shot of misery. Things haven't been going great for me in game dev this month and it's made me incredibly bitter, so if you want to check out and wishlist my game on Steam you can find a link here.

Of course not, you idiot. This is exactly what I warned you about. Just. One. Of. You.

because everything can(t) be about postmodernism on agora

Young people (´84 - ´14 and on) giving up on life - Life under L.S.Capitalism - "Where is my Jetpack!" (Cancelled) Futures

glam rock, "teenage rampage", creatives? (to create new future visions) Yeah, those are good- I don't mean at all to undersell or overlook the creative visions that Gen Z already has. Gen Z has a great deal of unique aphorisms, culture, etc. but it isn't understood or catalogued by older...

forum.agoraroad.com

 

[Jodo_Fan]

All of it is fake, from the persona of the struggling artist to the carefully crafted title and the people who come in later asking for a link to the game.

"Solo dev working on passion project for 37 years!"

"My pixel art went from this to this in 5 months!"

We need to shift some of the blame for this crap onto the general public. Presumably, if there wasn't a statistical advantage to these turgid posting templates, people wouldn't use them.

Now they're all collapsing under the weight of their hosting expenses and can't keep up the monopoly strategy of under pricing their competition.

I am convinced the current quasi-dystopian tech economy is almost entirely a creation of central banks and their loose monetary policy post 2008. I'd hate for anyone to lose their job.... but would love to see the company that's dropping 2 billion dollars on GTA 6 take a large correction to the crotch.

You mentioned before that you're a gamedev and my recommendation to you would be to find a small pond and become a big fish. You find an audience who is really desperate for foot fetish pony city builder games and you go to town.

Porn aside, I'm not sure there even is such a thing anymore. The market is so crazy flooded at the mo.

I'm thinking that the gaming "industry" is at a point where the whole thing is too big to fail,

There are a few categories of too big to fail: A) Huge companies that are diversified enough to take multiple hits and keep going. B) Companies that are large enough to take down a whole economy and thus get bailed out. And finally, C) Too big to fail as in the Titanic. Gaming feels like a C to me..... Of course, there will always be games and even hits, but the scrabble for life-boats is going to be brutal.

This is the end of my little shot of misery. Things haven't been going great for me in game dev this month and it's made me incredibly bitter, so if you want to check out and wishlist my game on Steam you can find a link here.

Seriously, though, you should go indie, watch your bank balance drain, then make an authentic depression based RPG-adventure or walking sim. I'll definitely maybe buy it when it gets to 95% discount, promise.

 

[Sketch Relics]

Essentially you need to take investor money because everyone else is taking investor money and you need to do it to compete. EA is big on it and they've recently sold more of their business to be able to keep up with their own shitty practice.

Eventually the company claims bankruptcy and the CEO and his cronies escape with golden parachutes while their third party friends have made all the money being hired to do work on the projects.

This will ultimately lead to another gaming collapse, and all the signs are already here. It's a saturated market.

I'll tell you who didn't take major debt - Nintendo - and it's what allowed them to survive the last collapse. Their business model was sturdy and steady. Unfortunately they too have now taken the route of "money now pay later expand expand expand" and you can see the result in all their predictable recycled games of the past decade.

As far as I'm aware, Nintendo still has an absolutely massive war chest (a quick search has them at 15bil) so I don't think they will be suffering much any time soon.
I'm actually curious as to which games you're referring to. Since the only Nintendo franchise I know of that's been receiving that kind of flack lately is Pokemon and that's more due to Gamefreak as Nintendo doesn't actually have that much say in what goes on in the franchise.

What do you think the next gaming market crash will look like? I'm thinking that the gaming "industry" is at a point where the whole thing is too big to fail, even if one or two AAA companies go under, the indie sector will continue to thrive provided the ACTUAL market doesn't shit the bed to the point where your average Joe can't afford to have an autism project.
Though funny enough, I was just talking to a homie that I'd argue big names will continue to shit the bed even if they release good games because fanboys who already drank the koolaid will buy them until they get something so bad that they won't, and that they're never going to pull any new customers given how their reputation is soiled for those they've fucked over and reputation runs the AAA sector, if that makes any sense.

It's unlikely to be through their own actions, rather I think it will happen when something else goes an causes a chain reaction that hits any company with these types of shitty business practices hard. Personally I think we are in a sort of investment/growth bubble and when that goes a bunch of investors are probably going to panic and pull out which will basically husk the companies that they were invested in.

 

[Punp]

Porn aside, I'm not sure there even is such a thing anymore. The market is so crazy flooded at the mo.

I agree with everything above, but I also want to add onto this: there is always a smaller market. If I wasn't so focused on my privacy on this forum there are a few projects I could've joined and been paid for.