What a mess it would be! You see their minds are tuned into
math tables and simple logic only. There is no grey area to them, not much
based on emotional responses and they are not very open to others’ ideas as a
result of this thinking.
I am talking about the new generation of game programming
that goes on in the Internet now where the game is constantly under
development. They no longer call it under beta since it is always facing beta
changes where the development team tries to fund the game on the fly and the
head of the team is undoubtedly another programmer. There are server costs and
certainly employee costs which are primarily code writers directed by the development
team. I very much doubt that they spend any money on marketing personnel since
they would constantly be at odds with each other since they do not think alike.
Let me try to give an example of how the two minds work in a
business model. Let’s look at a bakery that just makes bread for now. The game
programmers get out their math table and figure out what price maybe one
percent of the market might pay and they figure white bread should sell for $30
a loaf to meet their immediate cost (computer, personnel and materials) and
profit needs (Ferrari Fund, since they think they have a no fail plan). And
when that doesn’t work so well, they layoff a bunch of the personnel that they
got to write the code and try to sell French bread now for $40 a loaf with a
new group of personnel that they work even harder and for less money if they
can get away with it.
Now the marketing driven mind recognizes that $30 a loaf is
way out of line compared to other food products (other computer games and
entertainment offerings) and sets its price more around $3 a loaf of white
bread and maybe $3.50 for the French bread. Every once in a while they offer
one of the two products on sale for $2 and $2.50 but not at the same time. And
every once in a while the marketing mind features something different like
pastries, pies, tarts or donuts at a premium price sometimes and on sale. It
all depends on how well the overall company performance is going (the Ferrari
Fund).
Now if the sales department had their way, everything would
be on sale all of the time. “Let’s get everyone to buy our bread”. And that is
why the sales department and the IT (information technology) department never
get along. They just do not understand each groups approach to business.
So the reason why the new approach exists for now in online
computer games is because the programmers are creating the product without the
help of marketing minds because they honestly think their approach works. It
does for a time until the customers get fed up and go to another bakery.
Instead of trying the marketing approach they push for bread at $50 a loaf and
beyond to try and meet their cost and profit goals.
And soon they go out of business wondering what they did
wrong. Simple, they tried to do something in isolation of the real world
business market where the basic rules of economy apply and the consumer will
always go to what they see as a reasonably priced product for what they want or
need and computer games are just a diversion and not a necessity like food.
So why do they think that $50 dollars for a bunch of game tokens/gems/diamonds/coins
that only give maybe $5 of value compared to other entertainment products? It
is simply because they think their product is better than everyone else’s offering
because they developed it and they need more money to keep it going. The
consumer market will tell them soon enough if it is worth anything.
Don’t order your Ferrari’s anytime soon boys.
