Most designers think of “Marketing” as a dirty word. They think a game’s success is just a matter of how much money is spent on marketing, as if marketing didn’t require skill, just cash. I think marketing is a very powerful tool for designers to understand and use. And marketing requires a lot of skill, not just cash — some games haven’t made enough money to just cover their advertising budget.
Do you want to create popular games? Marketing is, essentially, the art of making things popular. Quality isn’t enough — it sure wasn’t enough for Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil. Studying marketing will help you understand why some good games fail on the market while some bad games succeed. That way you have more chances of making good games that sell.
A large part of marketing is communicating ideas in a compelling way. This is an essential skill for game designers: whenever you try to convince someone that your ideas are good (something designers do on a daily basis), you’re basically marketing your ideas, whether you realize it or not. Might as well learn how to do it properly.
So, why do I care so much about marketing? Because it lets me make games that are more popular and it helps me communicate ideas more effectively. More surprisingly, some of the biggest insights I’ve had on game design came from reading about marketing — what makes a game cool isn’t that different from what makes anything else cool.