When it comes to talking about marketing, Seth Godin is one of my favourite speakers and thinkers. I honestly don’t know if empirical data matches up with his anecdotal evidence, but the story he tells of being able to distinguish yourself in the marketplace and carve out a niche for yourself is a compelling one when you’re a smaller indie developer, looking to survive in the same business where Halo 3 and GTA:IV are thriving.

He’s got a blog and in today’s post he throws up a graphic and an argument about appealing to a niche or going for the mainstream. There’s a parallel here to game development.

The reason you need to care is that gap in the middle. Every day, millions of businesses get stuck in that gap. They either move to the right in search of the masses or move to the left in search of authenticity, but they compromise. And they get stuck with neither.

I can’t find the reference, but at the GDC a few years ago, one of the speakers put up a graph of sales numbers and profitability for video games, indexed by budget. It turns out that games with budgets under $200,000 or over $10 million tended to do very well. The prospects for games with budgets in the middle (the vast majority of games that are put out every year) were awful.

In the context of Seth’s graphic, this trend makes a lot of sense. Games that have huge budgets are nearly guaranteed to be masterpieces. These are the games that get delayed to bring the quality up, with the team knowing full well that extra development costs will get drowned by sales when the game finally comes out. With a $10+ million budget you can afford to make the game good and you really can’t afford to let the game be bad.

On the other end of the scale, with a $200,000 budget, you’re so limited in your time and money that you can’t have any illusions about what you’ll be able to implement. If you’re making a sub $200,000 game, you have no choice but to make the game tight and focused. This is the realm of Everyday Shooter, N+ or flOw (note: I actually don’t know how much it cost of make any of these games).

Does budget automatically predict quality? Of course not. But if you are working on a $4 million FPS, you might want to sit the team down and have a serious conversation about the scope and character of your project.