EEDAR: Marketing Key to Resident Evil 5 Success

“I think what's interesting is we're starting to see companies understanding that you really do need to spend money – from a marketing budget perspective – if you want people to get very excited about your game. There are so many games out there that are only spending $1.5-$3.0 million on their marketing campaign. And they'll spend $20 million developing their game, but when it comes time to get consumers to chatter about it, they kind of trip over the finish line,” Short commented. “It's so different from Hollywood and the percentage they spend from their marketing budgets compared to what the development budget is. In some cases, 20-30% of the production budget goes toward marketing, just getting people aware and excited. So what stands out to me for RE5 is they did the right marketing campaign and they put the right amount of money behind it.” 

He added, “Even if you look at other titles that have done well – look at Professor Layton on the DS with Lisa Kudrow doing marketing for it, and look at Guitar Hero and how Activision hired on pretty big name sports athletes for their promotional campaign – the titles that are really blowing out in comparison to their competitors are the ones that are laying down the money on the marketing front. And I think long-term the industry is going to start maturing a little more in terms of allocating higher amounts to marketing budgets, particularly on the larger investment titles and hopefully on some of the more medium investment titles too – there's just such a wide variety of games these days... that sometimes we even forget about some big name title coming out.” 

Of course, all of this effort put into marketing is ultimately wasted if the game is of poor quality. Video game consumers are savvy these days, and if the game sucks, word will spread quickly. “Even amongst franchise based products... when you're dealing with core consumer you can't just rely on a brand or franchise name to get you home. Quality at the end of the day is still [a key factor] and helps greatly over the long-term sales of the product. ... If the game is crap, ultimately long-term that's going to damage you and it can potentially damage your franchise,” said Short. “But we've definitely seen the RE games trending up in quality over time too, which shows that Capcom has really been seeing the light in terms of spending more money on marketing and releasing quality games. And if you look at other publishers in the industry – like EA, THQ, Activision – there's a big movement right now to focus on quality and to try and deliver comprehensive quality experience that consumers will identify with.”