$115m to develop the game, $150 million to market it. [1]

[1]http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-18/grand-theft-...

This makes me sad.

It shouldn't. Clearly their strategy works.

It makes me sad as a developer, because it implies that marketing is more important than the development effort. It's where the money is, right?

That's a fallacy. Money is not the only marker of importance.

Here, marketing had a positive ROI, so they put as much money into it as they judged profitable.

But if Grand Theft Auto V was an awful game, then the marketing would have been largely wasted, no matter how much they spent.

Anything good still needs marketing, but marketing won't save a bad product. There's nothing inherently filthy about marketing.

It's very, very hard to get people to hear about the stuff you do, even if it's really good.

I dont agree. Proper marketing can sell you almost anything. Even so-so products. And its not rare to see not so good games make it to top 10 sales. The game quality can vary but to sell a lot you can be sure marketing is the decisive factor.

Do you recall all the marketing for "Duke Nukem Forever?" That was a huge steaming turd that no amount of marketing could fix.

Yes, and we have plenty of examples of successes that came naked, without marketing. Eg Minecraft.

Nice successes indeed, but not $1B in a few days successes ;))

Where did I say that word of mouth could no sell either? I'm making the case for the positive aspects of Marketing.

>>because it implies that marketing is more important than the development effort.

It doesn't imply such a thing.

You can think of marketing as a force multiplier. If the developed product is shit, it doesn't matter how well it's marketed because it will never sehahahahahah I can't even say that with a straight face.

If you look at the entire system, its sad for me to think that companies spend 60% of their budget to fight for attention between each other.

Its not Rockstar's fault or shortcoming, but its a problem in how things are done in general.

In the form of a story: Company A and Company B compose an entire economic system, and each build a product with 100% budget. Company A falls behind in sales to Company B for a variety of reasons, of which luck could be one of them. So to get more awareness and better sales, they take 10% of their budget and put it into marketing the product. Now they get ahead in sales, and are very happy. Company B figures this, and now uses 20% of the budget, to overcome Company A.

They will keep racing on marketing and presence as long as they can build the product and stay afloat.

So production is decreasing in proportion to available resources. In absolute terms, we'd have to answer the question of "is marketing making the pie larger" and if so by how much.

If you believe this article http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ it apparently takes more than it gives.

Not really. This quote explains it well, even though it's talking about pharmaceutical companies:

>Company X spends, let's say, $10 a year on research. (We're lopping off a lot of zeros to make this easier). It has no revenues from selling drugs yet, and is burning through its cash while it tries to get its first on onto the market. It succeeds, and the new drug will bring in $100 dollars a year for the first two or three years, before the competition catches up with some of the incremental me-toos that everyone will switch to for mysterious reasons that apparently have nothing to do with anything working better. But I digress; let's get back to the key point. That $100 a year figure assumes that the company spends $30 a year on marketing (advertising, promotion, patient awareness, brand-building, all that stuff). If the company does not spend all that time and effort, the new drug will only bring in $60 a year, but that's pure profit. (We're going to ignore all the other costs, assuming that they're the same between the two cases).

>So the company can bring in $60 dollars a year by doing no promotion, or it can bring in $70 a year after accounting for the expenses of marketing. The company will, of course, choose the latter. "But," you're saying, "what if all that marketing expense doesn't raise sales from $60 up to $100 a year?" Ah, then you are doing it wrong. The whole point, the raison d'etre of the marketing department is to bring in more money than they are spending. Marketing deals with the profitable side of the business; their job is to maximize those profits. If they spend more than those extra profits, well, it's time to fire them, isn't it?

>R&D, on the other hand, is not the profitable side of the business. Far from it. We are black holes of finance: huge sums of money spiral in beyond our event horizons, emitting piteous cries and futile streams of braking radiation, and are never seen again. The point is, these are totally different parts of the company, doing totally different things. Complaining that the marketing budget is bigger than the R&D budget is like complaining that a car's passenger compartment is bigger than its gas tank, or that a ship's sail is bigger than its rudder.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/08/09/getting_drug...

R&D is just a cost. What brings money in is sales and marketing. You dont just sell a product because its 'out there', you need to spend considerable efforts to make it look valuable to all potential customers. Of course its more important than development, because it brings money in. Thats why even shitty games sell relatively well.

Not more important, just more expensive due to external costs, in particular, advertising.

To me this says systems for quantizing game quality needs to catch up to marketing. There will be more money flowing into top quality developers if the quality of development can be measured as ROI.

It seems like a hard problem to me.

Right because Minecraft's success has been because of that massive marketing campaign by Mojang. It depends. Marketing works sometimes, and sometimes you don't need it.

I think it is marketing is need most of the time, sometimes it isn't. Have a look around you at all the marketing that is going on. Even on this website.

It should it shouldn't. Should make you sad because the quality of work should stand on it's eon, shouldn't because consumers require marketing to be encouraged to spend money. Films have often had large marketing spends for a while, the games industry is catching up.

Why? It pays for itself. That's how movies get sold too - you get the best bang for the buck by spending about equally on production and marketing.

Why? Marketing is needed.

Kind of makes me wonder what rorrr2's list would look like for the marketing side.

level design too :)