No Man's Sky - Death of Marketing?
Nick, Peter and Fraser look at the controversy surrounding 'No Man's Sky', and ask if the information revolution has killed marketing.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing the recently released video game No Man's Sky. So Nick, can you tell us about this game and why we're discussing it?
Speaker B:Yeah, so No Man's Sky is a game developed by Hello Studios which has been very eagerly anticipated for the last couple of years, mainly on the strength of some very exciting looking trailers and marketing material associated with the game which made various claims about what you were going to be able to do. Essentially it's a sort of space exploration game, you're a person on, you know, at any given time you might be on a planet, you build spaceships, you gather resources, you sell resources, you buy better spaceships, you fly around. Some of the interesting things that were claimed in the game is that there are quintillion planets in the galaxy of No Man's Sky and that's one with 18 zeros so it holds out this, you know, limitless possibility of exploration. Some of the other claims were that every planet would have its own unique flora and fauna that would be generated in the game and that if you discovered a new species you could, you know, name it and I think people were just really excited by the idea of this huge open sandbox but which would also have lots and lots of interesting space trading mechanics, you know, you could design your own spaceships. It looked like a very exciting game and I should say at this point that I haven't played it, I've only read reviews and seen other people playing it online but the game that was delivered has been widely agreed to be a big disappointment and to really to fail to deliver on a lot of those claims. Some people have called it a walking simulator or a screenshot generator where essentially you just do the same thing over and over again. You walk around, you pick up resources. Yes, the rocks might be slightly different shape, this animal might be a slightly different colour but, you know, essentially you are just using all those things just to gather the same kinds of resources on every planet. You fly to another planet, you do the same thing and it just happens over and over again and all the kind of exciting immersive stuff that people were expecting is not there. So anyway, I mean, people have even complained to the Advertising Standards Agency and so on that it has simply not delivered the game that was promised. Okay, so thanks for painting that picture for us. So this widely
Speaker A:anticipated, what looked like an incredibly complex and fun game was touted for quite a few people excited. The game's come out, it looks like a load of rubbish. And yeah, I mean, I think
Speaker B:I don't know, I think people aren't totally agreed on whether the game itself is a load of rubbish or whether actually it's just rubbish in comparison to the game people were expecting. So it has a terrible rating on Steam, which is an online computer games portal. And I think, you know, whether or not, I think a lot of people are saying, well, if it was $10 or something, it might be quite fun to just, you know, go around and explore these planets. But it's a $60 game, which is a, you know, a very, that's a that's a premium price tag, really, for a computer game. So people are just all around very disappointed. But anyway, we're not here, are we, to talk about
Speaker A:No Man's Sky? Well, we sort of are, we sort of aren't. But as is typical, this leads us into an Aleph way of looking at this. So what is it from the Aleph angle that interests you about
Speaker B:this? I think the question of actually, what was the point of all that marketing? In this day and age, when, you know, it's so easy to get reviews from other people, and to find out lots about a product, be it a game or any other thing, before you buy it, because does marketing actually still have a function? Or can it actually only lead to disappointment by making incorrect claims about
Speaker A:a product? Okay, so that's quite a sort of a profound question about what is marketing. And
Speaker C:yeah, Peter, do you want to dive in at this point? Yeah, I think the I think marketing is part of the generation of a new product. So No Man's Sky is obviously a very complicated bit of software, it's required many thousands of man hours of development and programming and art and, and all sorts of things to generate this package. It's not built on an existing engine, I imagine, I think it's a new engine, it's not basically a whole ground up new thing. So in order to get that off the ground, you need lots of investment, and your investors will expect your product to be viable. And so that that will, there's an expectation for it to look like a thing. So the part of that is a big marketing package, which will generate interest. And from interest, you can gauge how big your market is going to be. So you can then you can ensure your investors that they're going to get return, etc. So I think it's sort of it's, it's necessary to get something new off the ground. I think I think Nick is right, marketing might not be necessary in newer models of software and game development, where you start with a very, you start using an existing, flexible engine, you as a member of the community, you can generate your own content, and you can make mods and plugins that build on this existing thing, because all you that's a much lower bar to creating something new. Because you're building on something that already exists. So yeah, I think it's, it's difficult, I think if you could, if you if it was a, if it was just a glory project, and you had lots of money, then marketing might not be necessary. Because you could generate interest in in newer ways.
Speaker A:But is it the case that I think, Nick, maybe your point is also that with many, many products or services you might buy these days, you rely on, it's not just you, I mean, a lot of people, the majority of people may be rely on peer reviews, which you can access, whether that be you're going to go and stay with Airbnb somewhere, or whether you're going to buy a certain book from Amazon, let's say. And I think most people I know would would look at a review first. And if the review was not good, we would go right, may not buy that then. Right? Yeah. And so therefore, you're saying and so therefore, this kind of marketing fluff and hype is is actually fairly pointless, because, you know, rubbish will out as it were. I'm not I mean, is that your point? And if it is, I'm not sure I agree with you. But anyway, I mean, I think with all these things,
Speaker B:you know, I'm not saying Oh, marketing's dead. And I think actually, if we had a marketing person here, they would be very keen to point out so we ought to point it out for them. That when people shouldn't just use marketing to mean advertising, marketing is, as Peter says, part of product development. And it's about understanding what it is that your potential customers want, and designing a thing that meets those needs. That is fundamental to value generation. Well, that'd be market research, wouldn't it? Well, but all of that is considered to be part of part of marketing. It's sort of understanding how to get your product to be something that people want. That's fine. I mean, I think I think you know, but the question is, does the is there a need now for the marketing profession? And or is there, you know, anything like as much need for that as a bespoke activity? And the issue here is not, you know, that it's in some way been killed. It's just has it been changed in by the widespread availability of information. And I would say given that one of the main roles, one of the sort of the outward facing role of marketers is to generate awareness and interest in their products to present the value offer, if you like, to the potential markets so that they'll, they'll fork out for the thing you're trying to sell. You know, so there's a large part of marketing is about informing people about trying to get people to understand what it is that you're offering them. Now, what I'm saying is that do we need people whose job is to do that anymore? Or can we effectively crowdsource that that function by by, you know, having access and we've got to remember how, you know, 20, 30 years ago, you just had no idea you had the back of the box when you wanted to buy a game. You know, you had the back of the book, we're now so used, we're awash with information about everything about what you know, what the hotel is like, about how good a train service is about which coffee companies, you know, best on the station platform, we can, you know, we just I think we've forgotten just quite how revolutionary that is. Okay. Peter, you want to come in with something?
Speaker C:Yeah, I think I think you touched on something interesting there, Nick, this this amount of information we have about any given product, from from other users from other people who have reviewed it in a sort of in a in a equal way with other products is astounding. I mean, how many apart from major chains, how many hotels actually advertise anymore independent small chain hotels, I don't think I've never seen a hotel advert in the last sort of 10 years or so, you know, there used to be billboards all over the road saying hotel five miles turn left, but they just they don't exist anymore. And because we have things like booking.com, where you can you can get a very, a very large amount of information about any given product, you can totally tailor your experience based on your needs. And I think that with these big review sites like CNET, and TripAdvisor, TripAdvisor, and but but I'm thinking more professional review sites where people actually say do a product rundown. Oh, okay. And this is a new form of advertising, a new sort of style of advertising, a new style of marketing where a third a third party takes it on themselves to do a faithful and unbiased breakdown of of products based on useful criteria for the consumer to make a decision on. So this is you know, this is, I can imagine marketing houses moving more towards this and saying, Okay, well, we're not biased to any one product, we know we're sort of notionally backing this product is the best, but the other alternatives are X, Y, Z. And the reason why we are better than them for you, this particular type of person, is that we have better, we have better scores on these parameters.
Speaker A:Okay. Yeah, I do feel like we need a marketing person here. We need a marketing expert. I know some.
Speaker B:I've, I've, I've actively shunned marketing people in my life. So I you know, I don't have any friends who are into marketing. Yeah, actually, that's not quite true. You don't have any friends. Oh, well, that's, that's, yeah, that's right. That's the more general case.
Speaker A:Well, I have interest. I'm not mad about marketers either. What would I think?
Speaker B:I think there's a question here. Why don't? Okay, I think we need to drill into why I'm secretly quite pleased with the idea of marketing being sort of made redundant as a function. Why it is that people don't like the idea of marketing as, as a sort of separate function. There's a very famous sketch by Bill Hicks, where he says, you know, he sort of, he rages at the marketing profession and says, Oh, I know that the marketers out there will all be saying, Oh, yeah, that's Bill's very clever. He's going for the anti-marketing dollar. That's a big dollar. You know, it's, it is one of those professions is a bit like sort of used car salesman where they probably very unfairly get a bit of a kicking. And I think there's a question
Speaker C:as to why. There's been some great parodies of marketing and advertising, the Richard E. Grant film, where he grows a second head. He has a sort of nervous breakdown. And during this, he's imagining he's growing a second head. He has a crisis, a crisis of confidence that what he does is completely valueless. And it's just about ripping people off and getting more money, getting people to buy things that they don't need and can't afford.
Speaker A:Doesn't this keep the aspergistra flying or something like that?
Speaker C:No, it's another one. Anyway, but yeah, it's a great movie. And that's a really good parody of marketeers and advertising agencies.
Speaker A:Well, I think the thing is, with marketing, it's all about, although my perception is that it's a bit thin. I don't actually personally, I don't find it most intellectual of endeavors. And I think that's a little unfair. I mean, Well, let me finish. And then, and then, and also, I mean, I have a background where I worked in sales. So if you want something that's not intellectual, there we go.
Speaker B:And sales is definitely not marketing, right? Sales people will be very clear about that point.
Speaker A:Well, and it is because I mean, and sales is just so much more direct, usually. And it's sort of fairly no nonsense, or certainly the way I used to do it was, which is just get ahold of someone, say, do you want to buy this? And you know, that's more or less it. Now, it is a little bit more complex than that. But with marketing, it's, it's far more sort of manipulative, I used to find. And the other thing is, actually, I've been on the other side of the fence where I've tried to sell to marketing people. And my God, that was difficult, but just because they think they know it all. Anyway, this, these broad sweeping generalization, generalizations aside, where are we? Where have we got to?
Speaker B:Well, I think I think the issue, sorry, Peter, the issue is, the extent to which marketing is separable from design, good design, you know, that actually, if what you're trying to do is, get people to buy a product, there are, there are sort of two approaches on there. One is to, one is to make the product more like something that that person wants. So just turn the product into something that's more valuable for that person. And the other is to present the product in such a way that that person for various reasons, decides that they want that thing. So in other words, you either adapt the product to the preferences, or you try and change the preferences so that they fit the product. And I think it's that latter activity that people object to. And I think it's a, I don't know, something a bit, a bit, I think, I think there's a perceived authenticity problem there. It's much like, you know, if, if, if you met someone, you thought, oh, they're charmingly eccentric, I like that person. But then you discover that actually, you know, that they'd simply worked very hard on trying to appear charmingly eccentric, you would stop liking them. And I think that's part, that's some, something, something around that. And it's quite detectable.
Speaker A:So we're talking about authenticity. And it's easily easy to detect, I think people spot that
Speaker B:kind of thing. Well, not if people are doing it well, I suppose. By definition.
Speaker A:Well, I don't know. I think there's something I mean, going off on a side thing, but, you know, putting on affectations, I think that's easy to spot. But anyway, that's not really talking about, I know, it's sort of generally in line with what we're talking about with marketing, but maybe I'm being too specific there. Peter, you were going to say something. Yeah, I think there are some
Speaker C:generally pretty unscrupulous people who market to the masses. And look at some American terrestrial television channels. Some of the marketing that goes on is, is really obviously designed to pull the wool over the eyes of less educated people, less worldly people to make them buy these products. So you wonder what on earth, why do I need this gadget when I can do the same thing with a knife in half the time for cutting tomatoes? But that's advertising, isn't it? I recognize that can be part of a marketing campaign. And that's advertising. Well, I think there's a dialogue goes on between the salespeople and the marketing people and the product development people to say, oh, we got this idea that was easy to sell. We can ship a few million units of this thing. And we can dress it up as this going away and design it. It's not actually solving any particular problem, but people will buy it because it's a new thing. And it's as seen on TV. And they'll, they'll go for it. But it's jumped to the defense of the marketeers, the salespeople and the designers. I've had good experience in engineering companies. So I think it depends on the product and depends on the target market. To cite an example, I was a young graduate, I worked in a computer hardware design company. Our sales and market department was staffed by ex-engineers. They were all engineers who knew the system. And actually, they were responsible for driving the design and pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved as much as the design engineers were. So they would always sort of make a bit of a bold promise to a customer saying, oh, well, we can double the density of components on this board by next year, because we got an idea that this new chipset is coming out or whatever. And that would give set a real challenge to the designers to actually make that happen, because they sort of half promised this product. So it's, I think it can be a force for good as much as a force for real.
Speaker A:That's a force for evil. I mean, look, I mean, I don't want this to descend into who has to do the grubbiest jobs within the system of capitalism, right? Because you're always going to have someone sort of a bit like, you know, a lawyer is someone you hire when you've murdered someone, you want it explained in the best possible light, right? Similarly, if you've got a product out there, you want it to sort of people to know about it. And that's going to be a marketer.
Speaker B:Okay, well, no, that's that's, I think that's what the debate here is, does it need to be
Speaker A:Exactly. And that's what I want to get on in one form or another, there's always going to, you know, how do we persuade a consumer to buy a certain product. And I think what we're saying is that you can't there's there's new because of the changes in technology, and the availability of information, accessibility, and how accurate that information is, there's new ways that that can happen. Right? So does that mean we kill all the marketers? Or does it just mean don't smile? Does it? Do we? Do we kill all the marketers? Or, or, or marketing is now a different thing? I want to hear Nick?
Speaker B:Well, yeah, I mean, I think that's the point that it I mean, marketing as a thing has to happen, you cannot get away from it. It's a bit like, I mean, I really hate clothes. I mean, I hate buying them. I can see them. Yeah. And, and I really, I would really rather that clothes weren't a thing. You know, if we all just wore the same thing, and we could just take clothes out of the equation, nothing, but I have nothing at all. But I, but I recognize that you can't, you cannot do that. You can't even say, look, I'm gonna deliberately not send a message with my clothes. Because you are going to be sending a message by doing that. And marketing is the same, you have to have a public face, you have to have something that your company or your product looks like, you know, it cannot not have some kind of appearance, and it cannot not present information about itself, those things have to happen. So the marketing function is not something that's going to go away, it's fundamental. But But the question is, you know, do we need I think, and I think it's probably you can look at something like the record industry, where, you know, the the actually one of the core functions was for the music industry to put musicians, one way or another in contact with people who wanted to listen to music, that was expensive, it was expensive to find musicians to record them to put those things onto physical media, to send them to shops, all of that stuff needed to be done by someone. Now, you know, that is no longer one of the core tasks of the music industry is not to find out who the musicians are not to understand the market, because that's happening by itself. Musicians and and people who want to listen to music can find each other now, for free. And I think, you know, one of the one of the core tasks of marketing in the past was to deliver information, which didn't exist. And in fact, because companies would have a monopoly on the information pipeline about their product, it was much easier for marketers to get away with saying this product's really, really good. It does all these things, which may be hugely exaggerated claims. And actually, there was very little recourse that people had against those kinds of exaggerations. Now, it's just impossible, like you can't, you can't lie about your product. I think, you know, what's so unusual about No Man's Sky is, is that actually, this is a sort of an unusual thing to happen these days, is for a product to be totally different to what it was claimed, because it's so hard to get away with, and they didn't get away with it.
Speaker C: s a computer game released in: Speaker B:Oh, you mean, like, actually printed on paper? Actually printed on paper.
Speaker C:You could pick it up. Yeah, and you had to walk to the shops to get it. Because this was sort of pre-internet, really, pre-web. It was marketed as the last thing you will ever desire, which is quite strong. I mean, shortly after reading that, I probably wanted some lunch. But yeah, and it wasn't very good. It was released way too early against, despite the protestations of the main developer, the head developer, because it wasn't ready, it was buggy, etc. But the plan was for them to release updates and patches and more. This was a model of downloadable content before downloads, really. But it just never worked because they just didn't, they didn't follow up, didn't back it up.
Speaker A:So that, I mean, presumably, from what we're saying, that sort of thing would have been more common back in those days than it would be now for the reasons we've just said. And actually, No Man's Sky is fairly unusual.
Speaker B:Yeah. And I think, I mean, I grew up with misleading advertising. It was, you know, all the toys on Saturday morning telly looked amazing. And they were mainly hugely disappointing. You know, it was just a fact of life.
Speaker A:Okay, so look, what I sort of take from this is, and, you know, I like this when this happens, is when we, there seems to be a common thread often in our podcasts. And it's, as I said before, this is about information availability of information changing how we behave, right? And this makes me think of cars and driving places. I don't know if you've heard, there's an app out there called Waze. And have you heard it? I don't know if I've mentioned it before. But it's the same thing. I remember when I was about 17 years old, actually, I was 18, because it took me three attempts to pass my driving test. I was driving down to some friends in Winchester. And it was the first time I'd ever gone on a journey of that length. And my mum was a bit worried about me. And so she called up the AA on the phone. And they had this service where they will plan the route for you and print it out. And they send it off to you. And you can study it before. And then you have these bits of paper as you're driving along. And it costs, say, I don't know, I don't know how much it costs, 10, 20 quid, maybe something like that. Yeah. And of course, that was one of the only options apart from reading a map. Okay. Whereas now, that's laughable, right? Because I just sort of get my phone and I use Waze, right? And the reason is availability of information. So it's having a similar... Other route planning applications do exist. And yeah, it's about availability of information. That's why I think this is what our podcast is really about right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, look, let's round it up. Anything pithy? I've got something I want to say. But I mean, anything you want to say to round it off with one, two sentences? Not really. I've got a slightly longer point to make. Okay, go on, go for it. But I think
Speaker C:you can usefully break down what advertising is into two main things. One is about awareness of product. So getting your product out there so people are aware that it's there and they can sell it and they can buy. And then the other is differentiation. So saying our product is better than this other product because X, Y and Z. I think as this new form of advertising, awareness will remain because you'll still need to hear about something in order to buy it. But the marketeers and the salespeople trying to differentiate it with other products will diminish and that will be entirely taken over by user reviews and third party reviews. Yeah. And I
Speaker A:think a marketeer would say, well, look, that's part of my job, what I do now, exactly these third party reviews, et cetera. I think our brains are slightly blunt instruments on this. I do think maybe we should revisit it. I think we should this and I think we should get a marketeer in here sometime. Anything you want to say to finish off, Nick? No, I just echo Peter's point, really.
Speaker B:It can't all be just based on what other people have said about something because how do those other people find out about it? Yeah, exactly. Someone has to be first, right? So that's where
Speaker A:we go to our friends in PR. They're nice. So okay, let's round up there. So I think the only thing I'd like to finish this off by saying is I'm slightly concerned about this brave new world that you imagine, Nick, where we all have to dress like you and wear clothes like you. You know, that's
Speaker B:probably what I've taken from this episode. I mean, basically, that just means nondescript trousers and a black t-shirt. Yeah, it's all kind of a bit Maoist somehow. Yeah, in my sort of future utopia, which would be really dystopian, everyone would have to wear the same clothes. I think the
Speaker A:only thing that might brighten up would be the gold statues of you everywhere that revolve face the sun, right? So yeah, thank you very much indeed for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer of Tell Me Studios and I've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Thank you as always. Bye-bye.
