Chris Roberts Back in your wallet - STAR CITIZEN

[Malakili]

I dunno, has anyone ever been involved in printing? Those wall murals must have cost as much as the damned doors.

[Teleku]

Yeah, when mentioning the money I saw being wasted, that was a big one.

[HaemishM]

I gather the wall murals probably cost as much to put up as the shush doors but they won't cost nearly as much to maintain when some dipshit breaks one of those doors. 

[Fabricated]

One thing that pisses me off the most about that video (beside the obvious fucking waste) is how they spend gobs of money on shushing Star Trek doors, yet can't even be bothered to give their code monkeys fucking cube walls for any sort of personal space. Fuck you, open office plan philosophy. FUCK YOU SO HARD.

Nah, open office philosophies are hilarious when evenly implemented.

They're going for this at the university where I work and it's being applied to everyone who works in new buildings or any place that receives major renovations to office space. So tenured professors and muckity mucks get these awful sliding glass door offices that they can't hide from students and underlings in and makes them look like they're on display in a 7-11, and anyone who isn't super important gets stuck in modern wallless cubicle hell where you can't hold a proper conversation despite the white noise generators placed in the office specifically to allow that.

It's glorious how much the most well-heeled and self-important faculty/staff hate it and how they can't do anything about it.

[HaemishM]

I absolutely despise open office plans. At least give me SOME semblance of personal space, even if it's frosted glass cubicle walls like we have in our offices now.

[Margalis]

Game developers don't understand business.

Not understanding business (or, in the case of many smaller devs, just not caring) is a little different from what we're seeing with Star Citizen, which is Trump-style opulence.

They have a hundred million dollars to spend and they aren't on the hook for any of it, directly or indirectly. They understand business pretty well, it's the making a game part they don't get. The business of RSI is raising money, not making games.

[ajax34i]

I gather the wall murals probably cost as much to put up as the shush doors but they won't cost nearly as much to maintain when some dipshit breaks one of those doors. 

I disagree.  There's a reason walls are white (or some soft color) at work: cause it's easy to paint over all the smudges and marks that people leave on them.  They have to do it on a monthly schedule where I work (granted, we're a laboratory, not a dev house, but people are in a hurry and they bump into or slide against the walls).

The shush doors may not meet OSHA fire safety or power outage standards.

[Khaldun]

RSI is a Potemkin village, and those need to look opulent in order to satisfy the Empress possible donors marks.

[Paelos]

That's the best, most exact summation of the shit that is the Games Industry I've seen. Nice job.

Now do Marketing and how salespeople help fuck things up by helping each other out.

Marketing people just confuse me. They consider people looking at their stuff a success, even if people are annoying or repulsed by it. Frankly, I think they are possessed by some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where the only way they can fail is if they are ignored while screaming in your living room.

[Venkman]

I see a lot of people in marketing who have no background in it and then focus on either doing things the way those around them do it, or just on the communications/PR part of marketing.

They're also treated like second class citizens in this industry, so it's not surprising the best and the brightest of them either don't last very long or don't come at all. It's a lot more fulfilling to be in marketing in a CPG industry, or insurance.

[Draegan]

That's the best, most exact summation of the shit that is the Games Industry I've seen. Nice job.

Now do Marketing and how salespeople help fuck things up by helping each other out.

Marketing people just confuse me. They consider people looking at their stuff a success, even if people are annoying or repulsed by it. Frankly, I think they are possessed by some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where the only way they can fail is if they are ignored while screaming in your living room.

I'm trained as an engineer but I'm in sales and marketing. Getting people to look at your stuff is the hardest thing to do. That's 80% of the battle. What makes you good at your job is make sure they aren't repulsed.

[MahrinSkel]

And here I am, getting a Marketing degree because I think it will make me a better game designer.  

--Dave

[Draegan]

And now you'll be able to spout out things like grand strategy and internet 3.0.

[HaemishM]

Getting people to look at your stuff is the hardest thing to do. That's 80% of the battle.

This. Marketing is all about convincing people that YOUR SHIT is worth their money and that is a lot harder of a thing than you think.

With that said, marketing people are either really vapid, soulless twats with a certain sick cunning or they are earnest people who unfortunately exist to part people with their money.

[MahrinSkel]

I actually learned something in my MKT 201 class that seemed kind of interesting. In Biz School, "Product Design" is the process of identifying a market (defined by their demographics, usually) and then figuring out how to present or adapt a product so they will buy it.

Now, this makes perfect sense when you're a toothpaste company and you're trying to find ways to sell more toothpaste. But it also explains quite a lot about why the suits have never had any respect for "design" the way that games people define it, and why some of the more...puzzling business decisions have been made the way they were.

--Dave

[Draegan]

I actually learned something in my MKT 201 class that seemed kind of interesting. In Biz School, "Product Design" is the process of identifying a market (defined by their demographics, usually) and then figuring out how to present or adapt a product so they will buy it.

Now, this makes perfect sense when you're a toothpaste company and you're trying to find ways to sell more toothpaste. But it also explains quite a lot about why the suits have never had any respect for "design" the way that games people define it, and why some of the more...puzzling business decisions have been made the way they were.

--Dave

It's the same way in the industrial manufacturing space as well.

[Sky]

Mt Dew and Cheetos is all you need to know. Surely.

[Pennilenko]

Mt Dew and Cheetos is all you need to know. Surely.

Throwback Mt. Dew with real sugar is fucking delicious. I know I've said it before but it needs repeating.

[MahrinSkel]

It's the same way in the industrial manufacturing space as well.

Yes, but in that kind of situation they shift to 'demand assessment' surveys, instead of asking 'what would make people in XYZ demo buy this kind of product?', they go out and ask questions about what kind of needs the buyer has, and what factors might influence their choice (if you make shelves, you find out if they want tougher shelves, or shelves that slide out, or shelves that can be adjusted, etc.) and then you go back to the engineers and ask them to come up with a product that ticks those boxes (hence "product design" being a business side process).

But since our marketing people often have not the slightest clue about games, or gamers, they don't ask the right questions, or understand the answers. And then the stuff they hand off to the actual developers is just gibberish that gets ignored.

--Dave

Edit: The literally textbook example of marketing not understanding the product is the Walkman: Sony's marketing people went out and asked people who bought recording equipment if they wanted to buy a portable cassette tape machine that couldn't record, offering various price points. They came back and said that nobody wanted the device at any price.

Of course, the question they should have been asking is "Would you like to be able to listen to your music whenever you want, like you can with your home stereo, but anywhere, while walking around, and without disturbing others?

Portable music had been limited to big "boom boxes" or to radios that had lousy reception and sound quality. The marketers were trying to assess a product they hadn't seen and didn't understand. So they didn't ask the right questions, or understand why the answers were useless (not even 'wrong').

[HaemishM]

Marketing for games is essentially "What else has sold in this very well-defined and pigeonholed genre? What can we do to copy that?"

That's about it. Marketers are also lazy fucks and the it's so much easier to build a campaign around "it's like X but different" without of course saying what X is.

[Samprimary]

you have to step it up a notch. you can't just chug dew and doritos like a pleb, you have to find the right kinds.

[Venkman]

Marketing for games is essentially "What else has sold in this very well-defined and pigeonholed genre? What can we do to copy that?"

That's about it. Marketers are also lazy fucks and the it's so much easier to build a campaign around "it's like X but different" without of course saying what X is.

Mahrin's already gone through the process of learning Marketing as it was for a long while, a byproduct of CinC hiearchical management where companies defined what consumers could have and then convinced them to want it. "We make X widgets for Y customers, so as long as Y is willing to pay Z for X forever more, we're all good".

But the walkman case study is a good example of the pivot. Instead of talking about utility, you talk about need state.

Trouble is, for a while, the core video game industry has been more like the CinC model than the modern one. Nobody asks "do you need to shoot virtual people for shits and giggles"? They all said "well, we have this optimized development pipeline or know some shills willing to work for peanuts, so we'll hawk the hell out of it and see what we get".

What's upended all that is the direct connection to consumers. Old style marketing had layers of obfuscation between developers and end users. You can handwave a whole mess of shit when you're only listening through three layers of interpretation from store managers who "lose" customer feedback surveys to focus groups stocked with focus group takers rather than real people.

But nowadays, between Steam, mobile apps, and Netflix, there isn't a thing successful companies can do that don't immediately give them real consumer feedback they can't ignore to their detriment. Today's example is Pokemon Go. But for us here, this goes back to MUDs.

This has upended a bunch of shit. There's nothing really wrong with the concepts like Five Forces or 4Ps/8Cs. It's just that so much of them are taught from the standpoint of starting from zero, following the prescribed 12 step program, and analyzing the results, all over a multi year period, and all while under the cloak of a trade secret that only becomes public when you apply for a patent right before release. This is all wildly unrealistic. Nothing ever EVER starts from nothing. Everything done is a step after something already done.

Further, modern companies are realtime. You launch 40% complete and iterate the shit out of it based on what the customers tell you. And that's been moving to the physical world too. Supply chains are optimzing around way many more companies doing way fewer things, for maximum adaptabillity. We're a long way from Henry Ford's river Rouge wherein one side went raw material and the other finished good.

So, realtime delivery, realtime analysis, realtime customer engagement, realtime decision making. Not your father's MBA

[Megrim]

you have to step it up a notch. you can't just chug dew and doritos like a pleb, you have to find the right kinds.

'visual cancer'

oh for fuck sakes

[lamaros]

I imagine they are the fattening products of choice for those who were those awesome Affliction t-shirts.

[Jeff Kelly]

Mahrin's already gone through the process of learning Marketing as it was for a long while, a byproduct of CinC hiearchical management where companies defined what consumers could have and then convinced them to want it. "We make X widgets for Y customers, so as long as Y is willing to pay Z for X forever more, we're all good".

But the walkman case study is a good example of the pivot. Instead of talking about utility, you talk about need state.

Trouble is, for a while, the core video game industry has been more like the CinC model than the modern one. Nobody asks "do you need to shoot virtual people for shits and giggles"? They all said "well, we have this optimized development pipeline or know some shills willing to work for peanuts, so we'll hawk the hell out of it and see what we get".

The walk man is not the best example, because it is a very clearly defined product with an obvious use case that you can clearly communicate. "Listen to Music on the go". The need part was "just" convincing you that you'd want to listen to music on the go and I'd reckon that this had to be rather easy considering that you already had boom boxes and other portable stereos. You could clearly define the "utility" of the walk man as well since it was much more portable than the typical "Ghetto Blaster".

A better example would be the mobile phone business prior to the iPhone. The whole market was so horribly horizontally segmented that you could literally buy hundreds of different phones that each failed to meet one particular need you'd have. Nokia being the most egregious example. The whole market was structured to address abstract "needs" of "target audiences" and was tiered into "price points" that had to meet certain "feature sets". At the height Nokia released 15 new devices per quarter that had been entirely designed by commitee to cater to a virtual market segment that only existed in the mind of the marketing department.

A simple product pitch was all that was needed to topple a whole industry business sector. It's a phone, it's a web browser and it's an iPod. The rest of the keynote was just so that they could "prove" that the device could actually do all of this and that it wasn't another case of marketing bullshit. Sacrilege for a Business that only thought in "price tiers" and thought that a "$600 market" for phones didn't exist as if the price was the only redeeming feature. Ironically people had basically been begging Nokia to release a phone like the iPhone for years but Nokia was incabable of listening to their audience because they were so caught up in their own market research and product marketing bullshit that they wouldn't or couldn't listen to a Need that was so significant that it completely levelled an industry once companies started to cater to it.

There are a lot of parallels to how companies like EA or Activision approach their product development and marketing and why entire segments of people feel disenfranchised. Also why companies are constantly surprised by sleeper hits and (re)-emerging trends that their marketing department insisted would not be viable because of some bullshit market research reasons.

[HaemishM]

That Nokia description sounds exactly like the kind of thinking that led to the N-Gage.

[MahrinSkel]

Like a lot of the apocrypha that gets passed around Biz School, the Sony thing probably didn't actually happen, or at least not the way the story is told. I'm not going to defend the honor of the Marketing profession, my reasons for choosing it as a major are primarily mercenary: I won't have to explain how it was applicable, and it wouldn't require slogging through a bunch of courses where I wasn't learning anything (or worse, knew more than the professor).

Jeff's examples show much better what happens when you let Marketing drive the bus in a technical industry. I think there are things that the technical/creative side has to learn from the business/marketing side, and waiting for the biz side to learn something about what they are selling is both taking too long, and how you get abominations like Zynga and Kingsoft.

--Dave

[Jeff Kelly]

Totally.

There exist a lot of very great post mortems by Ex-Nokia employees that detail exactly how Nokia basically doomed itself simply because of product development that was entirely marketing driven, targeted at non-existing market researched audiences and priced towards market researched price tiers. Completely ignoring both what was technologically possible and what people actually wanted. Basically because Nokia's customers at that point weren't actually the phone users but the network operators.

In 2007 Nokias flagship phone - the N95 - was more expensive ($795 w.o. contract) by nearly two hundred dollars than the original iPhone ($599) yet it was generations behind on almost every level.

AAA gaming right now is at the same point the mobile phone market was ten years ago. Risk averse, marketing driven to a fault. Rely more on market research and audience tests than actual product design and whish that the audience wasn't as fickle and instead just bought the next small Iteration of their tried and true product. That's why hucksters like Chris Roberst can exists. They pretend to listen to their audience and pretend to fill a void left over by the big Studios that listen more to their own highly paid marketing departments.

[apocrypha]

Like a lot of the apocrypha that gets passed around Biz School

Triggered.

[Samprimary]

Totally.

There exist a lot of very great post mortems by Ex-Nokia employees that detail exactly how Nokia basically doomed itself simply because of product development that was entirely marketing driven, targeted at non-existing market researched audiences and priced towards market researched price tiers. Completely ignoring both what was technologically possible and what people actually wanted. Basically because Nokia's customers at that point weren't actually the phone users but the network operators.

In 2007 Nokias flagship phone - the N95 - was more expensive ($795 w.o. contract) by nearly two hundred dollars than the original iPhone ($599) yet it was generations behind on almost every level.

damn, can i read some of these you think are the best

[apocrypha]

PCGamer jumps from hype train to hype train without the slightest trace of irony:

http://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-30s-planetary-landing-blows-no-mans-sky-away/

[Lucas]

Although, it must be said, yesterday's presentation at Gamescom was pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GucYhhLwIxg (for some reason it starts at the 12 minute mark when I click on it. Oh well, just rewind it)

Another thing that needs to be said, is that all of it was probably run on monster computers and in a "controlled" environment of 3-4 players and on a totally different dev branch (that's not uncommon when it comes to previews, anyway), but hey, it definitely garnered some positive attention after the stalemate of the last few months.

This is what should come out by the end of the year/beginning of the next:


Only 99 systems to go after Stanton!!!  

And in October they should show some more Squadron 42-related stuff (another thing that should come out by the end of 2016....right :D)
-------------------
EDIT: changed the YT link.

[Malakili]

No Man's Sky had lots of awesome videos when they were in a controlled environment too.

[Severian]

And in October they should show some more Squadron 42-related stuff (another thing that should come out by the end of 2016....right :D)

 
Star Citizen's Squadron 42 release slips into 2017

Speaking to German magazine GameStar, Chris Roberts has said that the single-player component of Star Citizen, Squadron 42, will be more likely to arrive near the middle or end of 2017 than its current Q42016 window 

- http://www.pcgamesn.com/star-citizen/squadron-42-release-date

[jakonovski]

One might think it bad, but a year's delay literally nets them millions.