Marketing more important than quality, says analyst

A higher marketing spend can increase a game’s gross revenue three times more than positive review scores.

That’s according to new research by EEDAR, presented at the Montreal International Games Summit by the firm’s Jesse Divnich. During the presentation, Divnich explained that poorer quality games will a bigger marketing will perform better than better titles with less financial support.

“You can make the greatest game and it won’t even matter,” he said. “I know that’s discourage to developers at first but it’s very true.

“Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores. There’s a giant myth out there that reviews scores are the most crucial to a video game.

“The reason why that is is the information is readily available – we can go to Metacritic – and we see games like Grand Theft Auto and Call Of Duty succeed and we see they have a high quality score and we make that correlation. But the truth is, marketing actually has much more of an influence to game sales than high scores.”

More on this story can be found over at MCV