(05-08-2014, 09:40 AM)ExKage Wrote: Not to derail the subject but it's not just marketing video game executives.
I've heard some awful logic and decision making processes behind the merchandise marketing head honchos for things like cartoons and comics.
I usually don't like io9 but here's what Paul Dini had to say about one of the cancellations of a show he worked on and the WTF-thoughts about it.
It's not just that they think/know that the demographic is what sells. It's that they're not willing to change their mindset about it. They want to sell particular items. They don't want to think about marketing to -include- a different demographic; they want to keep that same demographic no matter what.
There's worse than that. Â I used to work at a company that had a contract with Starbucks. Â I designed them for overseas, specifically Europe, the Middle East, and Asia (seriously, there's a four story nightclub of a Starbucks in Abdul Amman in Jordan I worked on, coffee is srs bsns out there).
Our branch wasn't run by principle architects, though, they were run by a set of MBAs in the back. Â They tried to "streamline" us in two ways. Â First, they opened an office in Mumbai to try and handle some of the Revit grunt work on the cheap. Â Second, they stripped the team down to one actual architect, the rest were all designers in certification and interior designers. Â Third, they started taking on an enormous amount of projects, figuring these things would increase our capacity.
What happened was that the Mumbai office never got anything done. Â They couldn't retain staff, what staff they retained was ineffectual. Â So they always had half the staff we expected. Â So we had to handle everything, and there was only one architect to handle ALL of the official stamping and oversight (we were pushing out five projects PER PERSON one week). Â Which meant our huge volume overwhelmed the stripped-down staff. Â They immediately put us into mandatory 48 hour a week shifts (which didn't matter, I was doing 60 hours a week just to meet the deadlines I had, and there were people staying longer).
A month or so of that, of missing deadlines because of the Mumbai office and having construction admin issues because of checkset oversights, Starbucks decided to drastically scale back our work. Â Dried up overnight. Â They decided to start laying off staff. Â I was caught up in the second round of that. Â In the end, almost the entire team quit and left the firm hanging because they were sick of how it was being run.
Knowing business doesn't mean you should run a business. Â Sort of the reason otherwise shockingly good developers like Capcom are in trouble right now. Â MBAs that don't know games are running the show.
