EA: we spend 66-75% of a Game's Budget on marketing

http://games.gamepressure.com/news.asp?ID=107846

EA’s chief creative officer describes game industry’s re-engineering on VentureBeat is an article offering EA chief creative officer Rich Hilleman's outlook on "re-engineering" their business in the changing video game market to appeal to a broader and less hardcore market. The article goes into detail on what EA is doing to capitalize on this trend, and IndustryGamers highlights Hilleman's comment that they expect to see further interim console changes, referring to the Xbox 560 and a PlayStation 3.5 before a true next generation cycle. The part we are especially fascinated by is the description of what portion of a game's budget is devoted to marketing, saying: "EA now typically spends two or three times as much on marketing and advertising as it does on developing a game."

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/shakes head.

You just cannot take these publishers seriously anymore, they complain about how expensive it is to make current-gen games and how piracy impacts on their bottom line, but yet they spend MILLIONS of dollars on bullshit marketing. Maybe they should invest all that time and money into developing better games and providing proper post-release support.

defiant007: post-release support.

EA: Tigerwoods 10, cash or gtfo

And don't forget that a majority of their games spend 10% of the textures advertising their other games. I made that up, but it's still somewhat true.

Must be the reason I don't like most of EA's games. I did like Dead Space, though, admittedly.

Didn't EA lose a lot of money last quarter? I think they might want to rethink this strategy.

Tip for EA: cut your advertising budgets by two thirds, and release your games for half the price you are asking now!

or... tilt the balance more towards development and release some games actually worth the full price tag!

If I just read this with the company name redacted, EA is the only company that would pop into my head. Seriously, my 6 year old cousin realizes this is not a good strategy.

They might actually make a good game should they chose to spend money on the development. This is probably a bad PR stunt as well.

66-75% for marketing? No wonder their games are shitty

But then again they don't have much of a choice since they are so keen on rehashing the same shit over and over again.

Essentially, EA is the devil. Sigh. They have done more to kill the fun in gaming than any other company.

I'm guessing that their numbers come from their marketing for *some* games that are heavily marked but the numbers are applied to *all* of the games they publish. Sorta like the music industry.

With that said, EA has published some pretty decent games and I don't think they're completely evil. Atari gets my vote for most evil publisher, evar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v60-qRvmzKA

lol

What waste of money, if a game is good people will buy it and news will spread, just look at what goes on in [H] forum, no good game slips by no matter how obscure. Just make a few trailers get them out on the net for all to see and thats all the advertising you need.

Shane_c82 said:

Didn't EA lose a lot of money last quarter? I think they might want to rethink this strategy.

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And last year was one of their best years too for us. Lots of new IP's, quality PC ports, besides their usual sport game updates they actually did some cool things.

But well they lost money, stockholders shake their heads, EA goes back to the same ole shit. They tried .

I really don't think it's too out of line for some of their games. The people who take the time to visit forums and review sites like many of us don't need to be marketed to. However think about the target audiences for games like Madden and The Sims, just to name a few. Yes people know these franchises very well, however would they have known release dates without EA mass marketing with tv ads, magazine ads, and other means?

I would also imagine that this percentage quoted was a guess and it varies per game. Some games market themselves more than others. The thread title is also compeletly misleading and it creates a bias against EA, not that we need that here. The article says 2 to 3 times more than development, meaning %50 to %66 of the budget, not up to 3/4 as is stated in the title. I'm also guessing he is refering to each games individual budget. This excludes things like R&D of new game engines and other new technologies of that sort that will be shared among titles.

It's the same way for a lot of products out there. You'd be suprised how much is spent on marketing.

defiant007 said:

http://games.gamepressure.com/news.asp?ID=107846



/shakes head.

You just cannot take these publishers seriously anymore, they complain about how expensive it is to make current-gen games and how piracy impacts on their bottom line, but yet they spend MILLIONS of dollars on bullshit marketing. Maybe they should invest all that time and money into developing better games and providing proper post-release support.

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I understand that.
EA make a lot of mass market (I hate that therm, but it seems to the most concise way to say it) games. They also do a lot of yearly titles (all the sports stuff and them some).

They have to:
A. tell people their games are in fact coming out and when. Not so much of a problem for the yearly sports titles - you can pretty well guess when Madden or MLB or NBA title are going to be availalbe, but the less regular but still high budget titles have to be sold to more than just the people who have the release date circled on the calendar from the moment the game had been unveiled at E3 4 years ago.
B. Convince people its worth shelling out the money for their full priced yearly upgrade of your favorite sport here title. Last years games were all pretty good, an unless you make some effort to show off the new features a lot of people will not want to pay for a full priced game to get the current rosters.

This is EA's market. This is why they sell multiple millions of copies of many games; most of which are going to be selling to the same people every year.

and their stock price is going down everyday too. stocks don't lie...people do

defiant007 said:

http://games.gamepressure.com/news.asp?ID=107846



/shakes head.

You just cannot take these publishers seriously anymore, they complain about how expensive it is to make current-gen games and how piracy impacts on their bottom line, but yet they spend MILLIONS of dollars on bullshit marketing. Maybe they should invest all that time and money into developing better games and providing proper post-release support.

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Sure, spend more money making the game but no money advertising it and no one will ever know you made it. That's brilliant.

You have to spend money on advertising. If you want people to buy your game then advertising is a must. And it is the responsibility of that publisher to advertise. That's one of the reasons they exist. Developers make the game. Publishers put it in a box, get it on store shelves and advertise it. EA would be remiss if they didn't do this.
Hell, developers hire publishers to do this for them.

Even if they give all that money to the developers it doesn't necessarily make a good game. Just blindly throwing money around doesn't fix issues. If the developers have a plan for a game that would suck then giving them more money just increases their bonuses and makes it suck for a few more hours.
Some of the best games to ever come out were made on very low budgets. Money does not equal quality.

PrincessFrosty said:

What waste of money, if a game is good people will buy it and news will spread, just look at what goes on in [H] forum, no good game slips by no matter how obscure. Just make a few trailers get them out on the net for all to see and thats all the advertising you need.

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Little fact: The internet doesn't matter. We can talk about a game until we're blue in the face, but if its not advertised well it will not sell. It simply doesn't matter. EA is far from the only company that does this, they are the only ones honest about it. Most people don't read gaming sites. We can't support these huge budget games by ourselves any more and we only have ourselves and each other to blame to for that.

I couldn't be less surprised although we get the occasional Dead Space and such.

This isn't too surprising, though no less comical.

EA has a ton of awesome games coming out as well as some very good franchises. However where EA goes wrong, especially with their marketing, is how they milk the franchises. From the plethora of Sim's spinoffs, the college and professional game spinoffs, to the absolutely horrible movie knockoff games, to the butchering of the NFS series, and others as well as their handling of the DRM fiasco's just so completely overshadows their good franchises and series.

Upcoming new IP's like Dante's Inferno and dragon's age look spectacular and other sequels from IP's like crysis, battlefield, assassins creed, command and conquer, army of two, and others have me looking forward to this next year. They've done pretty good allowing bioware and valve have free reign over their IP's they just get so overshadowed by the stupid amount of bad moves EA makes.

EA is a business and they are just trying to make as much money and protect their investments as best they can. They just don't ever really seem to learn from their mistakes as they should.

I call BS.

You're going to need marketing unless you're pinning your hopes on word of mouth and Steam/XBL/whatever availability. Rare is the game that allows you to do that amongst the general population, because you're going to have to consider that you'll need to spend some indirect effort weaning people off whatever they're playing and hitching them onboard your product, or getting less interested people to dole out the cash for it. Marketing does that, that's it's role.

Do they really need to spend this kind of money on some of their best known games? Why would they even need to advertise for Madden when they've already seen to it that it's the only football game available?

Proof that the market is completely flooded.

I could generate two to three times the hype they do with their traditional marketing techniques for 1/10th the cost. How, do you ask? My secret

Climber said:

EA has a ton of awesome games coming out as well as some very good franchises. However where EA goes wrong, especially with their marketing, is how they milk the franchises. From the plethora of Sim's spinoffs, the college and professional game spinoffs, to the absolutely horrible movie knockoff games, to the butchering of the NFS series, and others as well as their handling of the DRM fiasco's just so completely overshadows their good franchises and series.

Upcoming new IP's like Dante's Inferno and dragon's age look spectacular and other sequels from IP's like crysis, battlefield, assassins creed, command and conquer, army of two, and others have me looking forward to this next year. They've done pretty good allowing bioware and valve have free reign over their IP's they just get so overshadowed by the stupid amount of bad moves EA makes.

EA is a business and they are just trying to make as much money and protect their investments as best they can. They just don't ever really seem to learn from their mistakes as they should.

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The sports games and Sims expansions are what allow them to make all these other games we like. And it seems like EA is making strides on its sports games this year, at least that is what people have been saying. If you don't like the games, don't buy them. Pretty simple concept, but lets not blame a company for making money. At least they're not Activision.

NFS was going to die no matter what EA did. Black Box tried to evolve the series to keep up with the rest of the genre, but their development schedule didn't allow it. When EA decided to split the team in two and let them alternate we got Pro Street and Undercover. Pro Street showed some advancement and Undercover was exactly what fans were screaming they wanted. Undercover was Most Wanted 2, same thing fans were yelling about for the last two years.Yet it sold terribly, so terribly that EA had to kill the studio. Goes to show why companies don't listen to the fans as much as people thing they should. Given a couple more years the two teams probably could have come up with some great concepts. Shift looks like it will be really good. I like that their incorporating options for users to set how much they want the game to feel like an arcade racer or a sim racer. The studio behind it has a good reputation as well. Pity its coming out on the 15th though, won't be playing it with Batman and Red Faction releasing the same day.

As for the DRM fiasco, listen to episode 94 or 95 of the Gamers With Jobs podcast, they explain the whole DRM situation pretty well. Plus, EA has responded to the outcry. Sim 3 didn't have activations and neither will Dragon Age. Their future games probably won't either. At least they were upfront about their DRM from the get go. We knew what we were getting into when we bought a game.

Well, EA really can't tell Valve what to do. EA doesn't own Valve, they only publish their titles. Valve could afford to tell EA to piss off and self publish in retail, especially if they were to stop doing 360 titles.

I'm not sure how I feel about C&C4. On one hand the changes sound neat and could be really interesting, on the other hand they are still using the Sage engine and their netcode on the last couple C&C titles has been terrible. C&C4 will have to launch without a single flaw in the netcode for the game to work correctly. Online has to work out of the box. If it doesn't it will hurt the game, badly. Being a PC only title a bad launch will quickly spread throughout the community. I'm kind of hoping that the next C&C title will be Generals 2 or maybe they'll take a year off and build a new engine. C&C4 still looks good, but really they've been using the same engine since Generals.

And don't get me started on Dante's Inferno.

PS: EA doesn't own Assassin's Creed, that's Ubisoft.

PrincessFrosty said:

What waste of money, if a game is good people will buy it and news will spread, just look at what goes on in [H] forum, no good game slips by no matter how obscure. Just make a few trailers get them out on the net for all to see and thats all the advertising you need.

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Like World of Goo? I think one can make an argument for EA's position in desiring to market a game to an audience that would NOT have heard about it on gaming forums where rampant piracy might occur, but through mainstream channels (IE., TV or newspaper) that have viewers/readers not tech savvy enough to steal it.

bigbadgreen said:

The article says 2 to 3 times more than development, meaning %50 to %66 of the budget, not up to 3/4 as is stated in the title.

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No, the OP was correct. If you're spending 33.3% on development and 66.7% on marketing, marketing costs are twice the development costs. If you're spending 25% on development and 75% on marketing, marketing costs are three times the development costs.

dderidex said:

I think one can make an argument for EA's position in desiring to market a game to an audience that would NOT have heard about it on gaming forums where rampant piracy might occur, but through mainstream channels that have viewers/readers not tech savvy enough to steal it.

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You mean like CoD 4? Which also had/has a 90% piracy rate? (source no longer available)

This explains why most of EA's developed or published games are popular, but suck-ass.

LuminaryJanitor said:

No, the OP was correct. If you're spending 33.3% on development and 66.7% on marketing, marketing costs are twice the development costs. If you're spending 25% on development and 75% on marketing, marketing costs are three times the development costs.

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Thanks for pointing this out, I saw nobody else pointing it out and I was frustrated.

I thought supplement companies like Muscle Tech were the only ones that did this.

defiant007 said:

http://games.gamepressure.com/news.asp?ID=107846



/shakes head.

You just cannot take these publishers seriously anymore, they complain about how expensive it is to make current-gen games and how piracy impacts on their bottom line, but yet they spend MILLIONS of dollars on bullshit marketing. Maybe they should invest all that time and money into developing better games and providing proper post-release support.

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I like how one huge contingent of gamers whines like little girls that companies don't market their games, and others apparently are now whining that they do. Good thing gamers on message boards don't run these companies or we'd have fuckall to play.

Technoob said:

I like how one huge contingent of gamers whines like little girls that companies don't market their games, and others apparently are now whining that they do. Good thing gamers on message boards don't run these companies or we'd have fuckall to play.

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And ironically the people from the second group are some of the the ones complaining about games not taking advantage of hardware.

Urgent telephone call for EA chiefs:

66-75% ?


It shows.

I see lots of EA bashing when many companies spend a large chunk of their funds for marketing. I also see lots of EA bashing for their games. EA has put out some fine games- C&C3, Red Alert 3, Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, The Sims series, etc...

Technoob said:

I like how one huge contingent of gamers whines like little girls that companies don't market their games, and others apparently are now whining that they do. Good thing gamers on message boards don't run these companies or we'd have fuckall to play.

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I agree.

TheCommander said:

I see lots of EA bashing when many companies spend a large chunk of their funds for marketing. I also see lots of EA bashing for their games. EA has put out some fine games- C&C3, Red Alert 3, Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, The Sims series, etc...

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I would love to buy C&C3 and RA3, I have all the other C&C games every one of them. But I am not going to support the DRM BS they pulled with those games, so oh well, makes me sad that Westwood sold to them, but oh well. I did buy BF2 like 2 years ago and never opened it because COD1 was just fine. The Sims sucks. EA exclusive NFL contract pissed me off too, and I won't support it, I love football games but I still am playing ESPN 2K5, because I liked it a lot better than Madden.

FYMbyIce said:

I would love to buy C&C3 and RA3, I have all the other C&C games every one of them. But I am not going to support the DRM BS they pulled with those games, so oh well, makes me sad that Westwood sold to them, but oh well. I did buy BF2 like 2 years ago and never opened it because COD1 was just fine. The Sims sucks. EA exclusive NFL contract pissed me off too, and I won't support it, I love football games but I still am playing ESPN 2K5, because I liked it a lot better than Madden.

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DRM on C&C3? WTF are you talking about!? C&C3 doesn't have that DRM. RA3 has no activations on Steam so you can buy it there or wait to see if EA follows through with their promise to remove the DRM later in the game's life time.

Rent Madden 10, I've been hearing good things from fans of the sport. 2k1 was the last one I played for an extended period of time.