Why Flood the Market?

Take a brief moment to look atthese publishing company stats*:

·        Activision Blizzard

o  Annual Revenue: $2,898,136,000

·        Electronic Arts

o  Annual Revenue: $4,212,000,000

One of the first things you may notice is the over $4 billion annual revenue from EA and the $3 billion annual revenue from Activision Blizzard. However, EA is famous for flooding the market with video games. Is this the reason for its success?

As gamers, we would hope that publishers would only publish high-quality games. No doubt many there are many gamers whom despise EA for releasing buggy games with limited or no patches to fix the bugs. This, I believe, is may be part of their strategy. Call me crazy but I think that by releasing a lot of buggy games instead of concentrating on making a few, high quality games, is actually the safer road to succeeding in the industry. One has to look at this from the point of view of a businessman instead of a gamer. If you think about it, the strategy is quite brilliant. Publish tons of games at a low cost; find one that became popular and concentrate on getting sequels but this time with better quality. One can also add in the fact that EA has the advantage of all the companies it has bought in the industry. With so many developers, it is easy for EA to release so many games in a given year. Hate EA as much as you want, but the strategy works for them.

Activision did not really start to take off as a huge publisher until the release of Call of Duty and Guitar Hero. The merger with Vivendi Games certainly helped matters as well. But if one would look before these hits, Activision also tried to publish as many games as possible. While they were not able to compete with the force of EA, Activision also had to go through quite a number of games before they found their way to the now popular franchises, Call of Duty and Guitar Hero.

My point here is that while we as gamers want to have only high-quality games available, the deed is may actually not be possible,especially now. The industry is still a business and has to make money.Producing AAA games cost a lot of money and is not always a guarantee to sell well profitably (Ōkami comes to mind). The game may be well-received by game critics and several gamers but it may not generate the sales needed for the company to remain profitable or cover the costs of making the game. The fact is, even if the game is of high-quality, if it does not appeal to a majority of the gamers, it will not sell. Therefore, the safest road for the companies,is to flood the market with games, even if the games are still buggy. Once the niche is found, the company may begin to produce sequels in high-quality.We gamers may hate this business strategy, but it is a strategy that is close risk-free and low-cost. It is not perfect nor is it ideal, but it works.

*stats taken from bizjournal.com