Art or Commerce

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Art or Commerce

• Bruce Reilly
• President
• Mass Bay Marketing LLC

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Art Or Commerce

• Introduction
• Review of Game Industry
• The Sales Function
• TerraGlyph Interactive Postmortem
• Or how to lose 30,000,000

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Art Or Commerce

• Development is compete
• Now what?

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Art or Commerce

• How do we get to the consumer?
• Who does that job?

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Who are you?

• Are you big?
• First Party Hardware
• Microsoft
• Nintendo
• Sony
• Third Party Software Publisher
• EA
• Take Two

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Who are you?

• Are you small?
• Publisher Only
• Developer Only
• Contract Developer
• Little room in the middle

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Retail Channels

• Top Five Accounts
• Wal-mart
• Best Buy
• Target
• Electronics Boutique
• Game Stop

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Retail Channels

• How much of the market do they control?

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Top 5 Accounts

• 75 - 80 of total sales.

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Art or Commerce

• Before consumer ever sees the game these chain
  buyers are the gatekeepers
• Much more conservative now.
• Batman Toys R US
• Non risk takers

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Art or Commerce

• How are products selected?
• Reputation of Company
• Only as good as last game
• Past Performance
• Why sequels are king
• Expectation you can fix a problem
• Price protection
• Marketing and Advertising funds

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Art or Commerce

• What doesnt happen?
• Buyers dont play the gamesoften
• Or have
• Spirited discussion of game play
• Care about the quality of graphics
• Story line
• Listen to the music

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Art or Commerce

• They must trust the person selling game
• Will ask your opinion
• Must believe word of mouth
• Can not be PR purchased
• Must believe what they see
• E3 and Prototypes
• Person who actually plays game

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Art or Commerce

• Why did I call this presentation
• Art or Commerce?
• Aero The Acrobat
• Do I want to make money?
• Do I want to make art?
• Must do both to survive and be successful!

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Art or Commerce

• TerraGlyph Interactive Postmortem
• 30,000,000 Loss
• Lack of Time
• First 80 easy
• Lack of Internal approval
• More like internal deception
• Carnivale Beta

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Art or Commerce

• TerraGlyph Interactive Postmortem
• 30,000,000 Loss
• Inadequate Content Pipeline
• Large Team Problems
• Crunch Time
• Absolutely
• Ruined families and friendships

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Art or Commerce

• TerraGlyph Interactive Postmortem
• 30,000,000 Loss
• Technology / Performance
• Thought I could do it
• Have to appreciate we tried
• Team Problems
• Who gets limited resources
• When technology waits for art
• Quality/Bugs

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Art or Commerce

• TerraGlyph Interactive Postmortem
• 30,000,000 Loss
• Publisher Interface
• What does Disney know
• Contract versus reality
• What does it all mean?
• How did your projects work?
• Small versus large company

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Art or Commerce

• What does it mean to you?
• Do it better
• Be smarter
• Take chances
• Dont settle for the way its always been done

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Art or Commerce

• For meSolve this problem
• The ability to allow customers and consumers to
  play the game in 30-45 days
• Cost no more than 100,000

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Art or Commerce

• Questions