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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Analysis and Opinion   >   Opinion   >   Developers Lead; Marketing Bods follow

Developers Lead; Marketing Bods follow

By on August 20, 2012

In an interview over at the Guardian, four games journalists gave their impressions of Gamescom. The full article is definitely worth reading, but this summary from Dan Griliopolous leaped out at me

“The paid MMO is dead. No-one’s doing it. The developers who have MMOs in development now tend to say they haven’t decided what the business model is – by which they mean, what flavour of free they’re going for. There’s still a lot of room for price experimentation in both the mobile and MMO space, and someone’s going to find a model that’s not just not-intrusive but compelling and also a fun way to pay.

Lots of developers are still confused about their route to market. Lots of them have instinctively crass tastes, and the increasing preponderance of booth babes at GamesCom is hardly redressing the public’s negative impression of computer games. Making an analogy to politics, developers need to lead the public, like the Indie developers do on Kongregate, iOS and Steam, not follow like the marketing bods do at GamesCom. ”

I love the idea that developers lead while marketing bods follow. I look forward to seeing GAMESbrief readers continue to lead.

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About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com