Is Making A Great Game All That Matters?

My theory: A 7/10 game can't be helped. A 9/10 game can't be stopped.

“Wait… The only thing that matters is making a good g—” [gunshots]

After a decade of games marketing experience, I’ve reluctantly concluded that marketing rarely makes the difference between success and failure for games.

You first start to notice this when you’ve gotta build a go-to-market plan for a game and you start looking into what others have tried. Plenty of hit games do the bare minimum: they tweet out the patch notes and post a trailer or two, then ride the word-of-mouth express to moneytown. And many good-but-not-great games do everything right—they run playtests, publish a demo, get into festivals, make polished assets, develop a creator outreach strategy—and come up short anyway.

I’m not saying marketing doesn’t matter. You’ve gotta pick your audience, get your positioning right, make a killer Steam page, and figure out a way to let people know your game exists. Failing to do the basics will hobble even a banger game.

But once you check off the fundamentals, you’ve gotta step back and watch the baby bird try to fly for itself. If your game has wings (word-of-mouth support from players), it’ll soar. And if it doesn’t, it’s gonna smash into the ground and get eaten by coyotes—no matter how clever your tagline was or how much you paid Ludwig to play it.

But isn’t this metaphor too limited? Games are artistic works, not baby birds. And between the soaring success stories and drop-dead bombs, is there not a happy class of moderately successful games that sell well enough for developers to keep the lights on while they make the next one? Surely there’s some middle ground between breaking records and breaking up studios. Isn’t this exactly the place where marketing can make a huge difference?

This is true, as far as it goes, particularly for some of the big legacy game publishers. They have a few well-entrenched franchises that almost always drive millions of units sold, come rain or come shine. “There are only 3 types of AAA games: Soldier Gun, Warrior Sword, and Sports Year,” one indie dev declared this week.” And we’ve all seen many mid-tier Sports Year games that nonetheless exceeded their annual sales targets. These are the exceptions that prove the rule—when game franchises fail to hit the quality bar for too many years in a row, they lose the aura that once propelled their year-over-year success.

Recently a friend¹ who reads Push to Talk asked: “What truly great games (8/10 rating minimum) didn’t have some form of success after launch?” I couldn’t think of a perfect counterexample. The closest would probably be Ian MacLarty’s Jumpgrid. It is the most underrated mobile puzzle game of the last ten years—as near as you can get to a 10/10 for that type of game—but wasn’t a major commercial success. “Although,” MacLarty told me last year, “it won a lot of awards.” Maybe this is good news. Does the universe really reward greatness, even if sometimes it’s only with accolades?

No way, you’re probably thinking. You just never hear about the great games that failed. Maybe there are countless incredible games hidden on digital storefronts that simply haven’t found players. And of course, most of us don’t really believe in objective ratings for art, do we?

But we can’t help arguing over ratings anyway. We peek at the Metacritic score or the Steam reviews before buying a game. We log into Letterboxd or Rotten Tomatoes before picking a film for movie night. It’s easy to dismiss the opinion of one person, but much harder to resist the influence of the aggregated masses. When tens of thousands of people have reviewed something and settled on an average score of 9/10 or higher, there is “objectively” something there that is moving large numbers of people.

I believe there’s something else going on here. It’s not true that games we think are 9/10 or 10/10 are guaranteed to succeed—art cannot be objectively rated for others. But it is undeniably true that games only get word-of-mouth growth when a huge percentage of players in the target audience have a powerfully positive reaction to the game. Word of mouth doesn’t happen for games that players see as 7s or 8s. It only happens for games these players would rate as 9s or higher. And as it turns out, there is a long-established marketing research metric based on this exact theory, called Net Promoter Score.

The trick behind Net Promoter Score is to directly ask people “How likely are you to recommend [this thing] to a friend?”

You get your NPS by counting up the percentage of responses that were 9s or 10s and subtracting the percentage of responses that were between a 1 and 6. The final number is always somewhere between -100 and 100. A 50 is considered great (think about it: it would mean that 70% of people think your product is amazing, and only 20% are sour on it). Though I have seen some private surveys conducted by major games publishers where some games earned an NPS score higher than 80. These games, I probably don’t have to tell you, were all major breakout hits.

The real insight behind the Net Promoter Score is that only the 9s and 10s count in your favor. The 7s and 8s count for nothing. These people are not going to give you word-of-mouth growth.

This obviously applies to games as well. Games that “pop off” with players are games that make people bang the table and sing their praises. Games like these—the ones seen as a 9/10 or a 10/10 by most people—almost don’t need marketing support, beyond an initial push. These games fly on their own.

And games that most people see as a 7 or 8 probably won’t make it on their own. Marketing can help more people find out about these games, but its power to drive sales will run into a wall if word-of-mouth growth never kicks in. Mother bird can only bring back so many worms before that baby gets too fat for the nest.

So it logically follows that there is a burden of responsibility on marketing teams: Before launching any game, you have to help developers discover where they stand with players. Devs need to know whether what they’re making passes the bar required for word-of-mouth growth. And if you as a marketer are doing your job (conducting research, surveying players widely, building feedback loops with the product teams) and you’re failing to find any market niche that bangs the table for a game, you’ve gotta bring that information to the product leads so they can make informed changes.

Because sooner or later, it’s gonna be time to jump.

1. Hi Chase