Despite being currently active in the games market, my entire professional career — not that it is very extensive — was based on political marketing. Joining this area in late 2013 and early 2014, I worked with projects that range from NGOs with a sociopolitical focus to seasonal general (2014 and 2018) and municipal (2016) elections, from councilors to high-ranking executive positions.
Working in different proportions, the main discomfort I observed was the deification of the mediocre. Candidates with some local expression who think they are gods in their political mission, untouchable. People who barely managed to get reelected to their position in the legislature in question or who thought they still have morality with the population because of a term as constituent deputy in 1987.
Indeed, getting thousands — or even one or two dozens of thousands — of votes is a feat. After all, in 2018, for example, there were more than two thousand candidates for State Deputy for 94 seats (a competition of twenty-one for each vacancy). The competition for councilor, at least here in São Paulo, is even greater: there were more than thirteen hundred candidates for 55 vacancies (twenty-three to one) in 2016.
In practice, however, this is not the case. The fact that you were able to easily elect yourself as councilor within your own den will not mean that you will be able to so easily elect yourself to state deputy with just that, for example. Having successive terms in the legislature doesn’t mean you’ve made it to a higher shelf in the political game.
Okay, and what does this have to do with Compass, GamePlan and the gaming market?
In practice, this is reproduced here. Something that we face a lot in our daily lives is talking to developers who are proud of their project, with an absurd zeal to the point of not accepting criticism, which affects its performance as a product inserted in a very competitive market. In this aspect, we, fortunately, are here precisely to make it easier for the responsible person to acquire this vision and stop seeing it as a work of passion.
However, even leaving aside the passionate side, there is still a reality check for these guys. Just as a councilor from any district is not an untouchable and unreachable political deity, his project, no matter how cold his vision in terms of the market, is not a big deal.
To give you an idea, according to data from Statista, between 2018 and 2019, 17340 games were released on Steam, an average of twenty-two games per day, approximately. The daily competition is not very far, including the numbers (and then we admit that it is pure coincidence), the vacancies for the legislative office.
The big problem is that a lot has already been produced in the cultural sphere. More than that, according to Julia Kristeva’s semiotics — whose studies derive from Bakhtin — everything is constructed as a mosaic of quotes because the author’s own conception of identity is a set, an amalgamation, of his experiences and experiences during his training and for the rest of his life.
After all, that’s why we benchmark. Today, many games will necessarily look, both in theory and in practice, like others. That’s why we use market intelligence to design the best strategy and, in fact, improve this same idea, which is already being virtuously rehashed.
I see how presumptuous it is to believe that your particular project is special. Of course, a project, if done well, can achieve due success within its own scale, but that does not mean that its relative success makes it comparable to true great examples in the market, such as a Cuphead or a Shovel Knight. Statistics mostly play against him. We are in the habit of looking at success stories and taking them as examples, but they are only successful because others—in overwhelmingly larger numbers—have failed to show themselves as exponents.
It is also healthy to watch your own work being performed masterfully and with extreme competence, which occasionally optimizes its chances of success. However, it becomes increasingly difficult to become a truly universal example because, somewhere, your project will always refer to someone else.
I’m not saying all products are useless because they are copies that reference others. It’s always worth taking pride in his success and using him as a stimulus to move forward. What I’m saying is that having a particular project that worked doesn’t make it a reference at all.
Developer, stop. Your project is not special.
