Premades and Precepts

I’m not in the sharpest of moods right now, due to it being the day after Friday, so apologies for rambling incoherence.

Anyway, I got a public response to my pointed letter on paysites! Yay for corporate sincerity.

Jeff Green writes:

Well, the fact that we link to many of these sites ourselves, as you say, gives you the answer to part of your question: These sites aren’t doing anything wrong. Part of why The Sims is so dang popular is this ability to create and trade objects with other gamers. There are a ton of sites that do this completely for free, too, offering thousands of items at no cost at all. So, really, you don’t have to "put up" with anything. You can ignore the pay sites and go to the free ones. Or, make your own stuff and sell it yourself.  Capitalism FTW! God Bless America!

I posted the following (long) comment to the post on ea.com. In case it fails moderation, I’m posting it below.

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EA now typically spends two or three times as much on marketing and advertising as it does on developing a game. That’s because advertising is critical to getting a game in the top ten rankings. If you have a $10 million game, don’t be surprised if the the TV advertising costs drive the ad budget to $30 million. If a $60 game yields revenue of $35 for EA, then (according to my math) the company has to sell 1.1 million copies just to break even.

I’d sure like to know how much it cost to develop The Sims 3, and exactly how much of that budget was spent on flashy billboards and product placements.

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There is a two-part interview with Russell Arons, VP of marketing for EA Play (so that’s what it’s called now) up on Gamesindustry.biz. I like to read these ‘industry sources’ because you often get a totally different perspective from what press releases and official previews tell you, such as…

TS3’s REAL core audience

“The Sims 3 is looking at 16-24 year-old PC players .. [it] has been developed from the ground up specifically against those consumer audiences.”

“it’s not just about appealing to the current Sims fans – they’re critically important, but we know we have to bring new consumers in too.”

So the people complaining about unnecessary changes, and who aren’t in this nicely-segmented age bracket or are ‘old consumers’, have a point. It’s not “developed against” them.

More below about the delay, social networking and kids, and the surprising use of the Internet to market games.

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Edit: If you’re looking for the careers in the full game, see this post

SimSocial, the so-called “free trial” of TS3 went live this weekend. I currently have horrendously slow internet but I did play it for about half an hour, and found the most interesting aspect of it the careers. We now have some information on career tracks that will probably make it into the final game! There’s probably a list elsewhere on the net, but here’s the one I’ve been compiling. As you may tell from the snarky comments, I’m not a big fan of them.

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