I am an avid listener and consumer of information on the business I love. I like to hear about market trends, data, and insight. It’s not a matter of knowing which trend to follow. I like to learn more about how the market reacts to our craft.
The issue with that is that majority of this content comes from consultants and managers. They pretend to quantify everything, and it doesn’t work like that.
Market trends influence the industry and investments because those act when informed on this data. But data cannot measure intangible things such as cognition and emotion.
Creativity evades quantification. Business people want certainty: I put X and then I will get Y.
It’s what we put out there that shapes the market. We design games for an audience, and we shouldn’t decide to read the previous spending choices for that audience. We should instead focus on what they were looking for, in exchange for their money. Our job is to read something intangible, but existent.
- If millions of players play daily a specific game in a genre it doesn’t mean there is an actual market around that genre. They will most likely continue to play that game in that area. And they are looking for another kind of experience to complement the one they get from that game.
- Also, mobile games have shifted in the last decade from the first long-term minded business based on brand (Rovio, King, Supercell) to the last short-term performance marketing companies (MiHoYo, Voodoo, Playrix). And the results are out there, few winners of the race to the bottom.
That’s where the art of game design truly helps. Too many times our business is led by people who prefer to make something bad but controllable instead of something good but not controllable.
And to make something spectacular, you should focus on making something good in first place.