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| 02.16.2007Please don't use the 10 minute Test
I would like to discourage readers from using Mr. Garneau's 10 minute sales potential test because it places the blame of a title’s poor sales on the developer, when it is almost entirely the marketing team’s fault. To follow the 10 minute test would kill great ideas at the outset, and that would be a disservice to the industry.
The commercial success of a title, or any product for that matter, is based entirely on the abilities of its marketing, not the quality of its design. We all know how many bad titles became commercial successes while the good ones wasted away in bargain bins. In the case of Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil, they were deemed the lesser of the group by their respective publishers, and so they received a meager advertising budget. To make the situation worse, the advertisements failed to capture the imagination and the scope of these titles. This forced the titles to “sell themselves,” which always result in poor sales.
The 10 minute sales potential test will undoubtedly place doubt in the minds of people who have great ideas, and that should never happen. To encourage development teams to make decisions based on a title’s sale potential is to ignore the most basic principal of design – to try something new. It should never be the developer’s responsibility to cater to the needs of marketing. It should always be the other way around.-Jaime Kuroiwa
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Letters to the Editor
