Email: Sales and Quality

Sean,

Your posts on sales and quality lately have been very interesting, and I largely agree with them, if you substitute the word “value” for each use of the word “quality”.  From the consumer’s perspective*, sales determine value, not quality.  A Toyota Corolla may have sold more over it’s lifetime than a Mercedes Benz CL-Class, but that does not make the Toyota a higher “quality” car.  It means that it is the car that provides the most value to the consumer verses its cost.  It may also mean that it is produced at a cost that makes it available or desirable to a wider market.  People buy a lot of Charles Shaw wine, that in no way makes it of a better quality than more expensive wines that sell less. People use particle board for furniture construction more than they use oak (and more of that furniture is sold), that does not make particle board a higher quality material, it makes it a better value.  This is pretty basic stuff.  For as much authority as you like to speak with on your site, you should take the time to get the semantics right.

All things being equal, a higher quality product will sell more than a lower quality product…but all things are not equal.  Price, supply, and information (influenced by marketing) will all impact sales levels.

Hope this helps,

XXXXX

*I suppose you could argue that from a producer’s perspective the “quality” of a product is determined by how well it is designed to meet the market, including how it is priced.  As in, if I was running an company and you came to me with several proposals for products we could produce I could say that the proposed product that is likely to sell the most is the highest “quality” proposal…But I think even from the perspective of a product designer one would typically, and correctly, say that the “quality” of a product is its set of attributes, its effectiveness at performing a given job or function…not its value to consumers relative to its cost (which will largely determine the quantity sold).

I am quite happy the emailer has learned how to read a textbook and is quoting it with gusto. But of course, the textbook often is very wrong when it is applied to the real world. Remember that the entire underpinning of disruption was that business schools (including the Harvard Business School) were teaching things that were sending businesses to their death.

If I wanted to say the word ‘value’, I would have written the word ‘value’. But as you will note, I intentionally wrote the word ‘quality’.

I want you to define to me the definition of ‘quality’ for a video game. It is very difficult. Even Miyamoto struggles with this. What is the definition of ‘quality’ for entertainment? Another very difficult question.

As the saying goes, “The audience is always, always, always right. You can point to the accessible parking lot, to the time of the showing, to the weather of the sky, but none of that matters. The audience is always right.” One issue with entertainment is that the entertainer does not treat it as a business but as a personal response to his or her ‘creativity’. So when sales do not happen, the entertainer will say that it was “too much quality” for the peasant-like masses. “The masses do not appreciate art,” the entertainer will sniff.

You are avoiding a point I made that goes back hundreds of years. When Mark Twain wrote his books, they were not considered ‘quality’ because he wrote in the language of common people. Other American novelists, in order to ‘define American literature’, were trying to imitate European authors or writers from ancient Rome and ancient Greece. Mark Twain ended up defining the quality of American literature precisely because he sold to the masses.

You can go back to Shakespeare who wrote plays at the time which were popular with the masses but not popular with the ‘critics’ at the time. It was not considered quality work then. Yet, today it is the poetry of the ages.

I remember when Super Mario Brothers came out. It was not considered a ‘quality’ game. Neither were games like the Legend of Zelda. The NES was not considered a ‘quality’ game console. Companies like Electronic Arts sneered at it. Yet, it sold and sold. Today, those games are considered the ‘gold standard’ of quality concerning video games.

Remember that PONG was not the first tennis like video game. There were others. They didn’t sell. Do you know why the first video game console, Baur’s Odyssey released in the 70s, failed? It is because everyone kept returning the system because they thought they were buying the home version of PONG but were getting Baur’s crappy game. It was the constant returns that caused Magnavox to discontinue the Odyssey. And during the creation of PONG, Bushnell says the drive was to make it quality. It was PONG selling so much that gave a definition to ‘quality’ concerning video games. Other big hit video games would add to that definition of ‘quality’.

This same thing occurs with books, movies, music, and so on.

Replacing the word ‘quality’ with the word ‘value’ makes you go nowhere because everyone demands quality entertainment and it becomes a circular argument.

It is like saying a movie that revolves around special effects failed in the box office. “It is because people do not value the special effects,” says the marketer. But the real answer is that it was a bad quality movie. It is human nature to take a subject and define it entirely in the lens of what one person’s profession is. A marketer will always apply his marketing mumbo jumbo to everything.

One thing we witnessed was the absolute destruction of Wii momentum due to User Generated Content. UGC passed all the executives and marketers of Nintendo with their vote of approval. Yet, it destroyed the momentum of the Wii. The Wii would have fallen through the floor if it were not for Mario 5.

The textbook definition of ‘content’ in video games has always referred to the art assets and sound assets and overall playtime and ‘size’ of the digital world. After the UGC disaster, I began talking about ‘content’ and how it was a driving force for people wanting to buy games. It is said, “When Malstrom says content, he must be meaning value.” But no, I meant content. I actually mean the substance of the work and not necessarily the value of it. Who the hell values the ‘Mushroom Kingdom’?

Why are American newspapers in decline? They still have high value. Who would not want to see oneself in the New York Time? The reason why they are in decline is because of the content. The stories the editors choose to place in the paper are not resonating with what people want to read. You can’t say ‘value’ because the customer still highly values such a newspaper like the New York Times. It is the content of the paper that is turning people off. The paper is not competing with quality content appearing in alternative places such as the Internet. (How can I be so ‘authoritative’ on this subject? It is because a very big media person told me so. It is pretty common sense when you think about it.)

Why are video games in decline? Analysts will give you all sorts of reasons. But they will not offer the most common sense reason: that video games are not as good in quality as they were generations ago. In a way, video games are more highly valued today as there is less stigma about them as there was in the 80s, for example.

Why did Wii Music fail? Was it because of marketing? It was because it wasn’t a quality product. It wasn’t fun.

Now look at the success of Wii Sports success. Did that succeed because of marketing? Ask any marketer and they will, of course, claim marketing is of course the reason for its success. But the truth of the matter is that Wii Sports is one of the best quality video games ever made.

Why does 2d Mario sell more than 3d Mario? Is it because 2d Mario is more accessible? It is because 2d Mario is a higher quality game. I can actually point that the core gameplay in 2d Mario is far more intense and arcade like than 3d Mario gameplay which is slower, more puzzle orientated, and more bloated.

The big, big problem the Industry has is that they are thinking like you, Emailer. The Industry does not see games like Mario 5 or Wii Sports as extremely well made games. What they think instead is that the games are mediocre in quality, but they have high value to people who do not want to play seriously. This is the thought process that gave birth to the Casual Game Fallacy. We have watched shovelware flood the Wii. And we have watched such shovelware bomb out. Retailers refuse to buy these games.

With Kinect, Microsoft is stunned there was such a backlash. I am sure they are telling themselves what you are saying, emailer, that quality is in the eye of the demographic group, that they will value Kinect. But what people want is quality entertainment and Kinect is most definitely not quality. Kinect is a good example of what happens when development is controlled by the marketers. Aside from a novelty gadget item, who wants to buy Kinect?

Crappy products for crappy customers, disruption’s motto, is quality in a new context of use… not value as in crowds of people running around with all sorts of different values. People did not flock to the movie theaters to watch Star Wars because they had ‘different values’. People flocked to the movie theaters because Star Wars was a quality piece of entertainment and what Hollywood was making before, the doldrums of movies, was garbage. Much of the ‘sophisticated’ and ‘serious’ movies of the 70s were bad. When ‘Star Wars’ came out, movie watchers complained that ‘Star Wars’ destroyed movies (similar how hardcore gamers say the Wii destroyed gaming).

It is all about what is the definition of quality. Since Human Nature is universal and eternal, quality is going to be what best resonates with Human Nature. Sales indicate the definition of quality. Remember when video games were defined as nothing but toys? What changed these ‘toys’ into ‘quality products’? Sales.