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Feature: 'Steve Allison On Marketing Midway'

In this exclusive Gamasutra interview, Midway's CMO Steve Allison discusses the publisher's marketing tactics, including cutting ad costs with celebrity interviews, strat...

Simon Carless, Blogger

July 12, 2006

1 Min Read
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In this exclusive Gamasutra interview, Midway's CMO Steve Allison discusses the publisher's marketing tactics, including cutting ad costs with celebrity interviews, strategically cancelling games, and spending nearly a million dollars testing game concepts. Allison is particularly forthright on market-led testing of game concepts, commenting: “God bless everyone in product development," said Allison. "Product development folks are so focused on things they think are cool, that we end up with every game concept as post-apocalyptic shooter, robots, mechs. There is a place for that, but there’s a place for a couple of those games. We’re going to see ninety-percent of those games fail, and ten-percent make it.” In addition, the cancellation of the Snoop Dogg and John Singleton-associated Midway title Fear & Respect was touched on in similarly frank style by Allison: "We killed Fear and Respect,” Allison explains, “because we have enough data-points to know the hood thing is basically dead. It would be dead before it came out. And you don’t want to come out on a dead vibe." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including a number of other interesting opinions on today's game biz (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).

About the Author

Simon Carless

Blogger

Simon Carless is the founder of the GameDiscoverCo agency and creator of the popular GameDiscoverCo game discoverability newsletter. He consults with a number of PC/console publishers and developers, and was previously most known for his role helping to shape the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Conference for many years.

He is also an investor and advisor to UK indie game publisher No More Robots (Descenders, Hypnospace Outlaw), a previous publisher and editor-in-chief at both Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, and sits on the board of the Video Game History Foundation.

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