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March 18, 2006
What should your studio do with non-sex games?
Rockstar's announcement that they're making a table tennis game (and all the obvious media fallout as a result) got me thinking about developer/publisher branding.
Suppose that you're a studio that's known for its sexual content (whether that was your original intent or not). Suppose that for any number of reasons, you now want to work on a new game that doesn't have any.
If it gets published under your banner, there are some obvious positives: you already have a loyal fan base that will try the new game specifically because it came from you and they like your other games; and if you view the sex-content branding as a stigma then this could help you to convince the world that you're capable of a wider range of games.
On the other hand, you could also lose customers that assume your new game will be "just like the others", and if the sex-content branding has been working in your favor you run the risk of weakening it.
You could always spin off a new company so that you'd have a separate brand to work with, but then the new brand is starting from square one, so that new game of yours had better be amazing.
Are there any hard-and-fast rules here that could assist a studio in deciding what to do, or does it all depend on the specific company, the specific game and the specific situation? Aside from developing the game under the existing brand or creating a new one, are there other alternatives?
And a bonus question: if you were Rockstar, would you be releasing a ping-pong game, or would you handle it differently?
Posted by IanSchreiber at March 18, 2006 12:24 PM | Discuss this post on our forums