I never worked in mobile games, does the old Zynga model of “clone successful games, advertise/SEO the hell out of the clones, and jam them full of adware” still represent the majority of the space?
Google has seriously gone to shit. I oftentimes have to scroll through a half dozen or more garbage sites to get to relevant information these days. I was dealing with this yesterday when trying to find info on a game I was playing, the top of the results are always garbage SEO sites that just scrape and paste text. It’s no wonder “reddit” is such a common suffix at the end of search terms these days.
There are still a lot of companies that try to do that, and I imagine it’s still profitable for the ones that can get their clone onto the market early enough and can drive their dev costs down enough, but mostly that method just clogs up storefronts and hurts discoverability for the games being cloned. I guess it does continue to undermine Apple’s defense in lawsuits against them, so there’s one good thing about it? Sucks for all the legitimate devs affected by it, though.
God forbid you ever need to solve a problem with obscure Windows settings or the like. You’ll get three pages of copypasted results, often advertising a fake program that claims to be able to solve the problem, before you get to a Reddit or StackOverflow post that most of the previous results were copypasted from (and that still doesn’t actually solve your problem).
The game appears as the first result on Play. It also has the entire front page of results on Google search (Steam, homepage, Play, Playstation store Xbox store, Amazon, Wikipedia). This seems like a really bad example to hitch your “Google doesn’t care about SEO abuse” wagon to.
The Apple app store search is orders of magnitude worse than other storefronts in my experience.
Someone surely seems to be happy to have left the Squenix umbrella.
D’Astous was also present as Square Enix and sister studio Crystal Dynamics signed a multi-project deal with Marvel, which eventually led to the beleaguered Marvel’s Avengers and last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy – which, despite being well received by critics, “undershot initial expectations,” according to the publisher.
"Maybe at the time [the deal was signed] the superhero thing was a big thing. It still is, but there is some fatigue with superheroes. And especially in games – very few manage to be successful with superheroes. There’s always Batman [from] the guys at Rocksteady. There was Spider-Man. But out of the people that have done it, the success rate of superhero games is not good.
“Maybe it was the easy way out. They might have thought that selling a superhero game is easier than a conventional game.”
“I was losing hope that Square Enix Japan would bring great things to Eidos. I was losing confidence in my headquarters in London. In their annual fiscal reports, Japan always added one or two phrases saying, ‘We were disappointed with certain games. They didn’t reach expectations.’ And they did that strictly for certain games that were done outside of Japan.”
He continues: “If I read between the lines, Square Enix Japan was not as committed as we hoped initially. And there are rumours, obviously, that with all these activities of mergers and acquisitions, that Sony would really like to have Square Enix within their wheelhouse. I heard rumours that Sony said they’re really interested in Square Enix Tokyo, but not the rest. So, I think [Square Enix CEO Yosuke] Matsuda-san put it like a garage sale.”
That, D’Astous suggests, may explain the $300 million price tag for three AAA studios and a host of long-running IP, including the blockbuster Tomb Raider franchise. By comparison, Embracer purchased Gearbox in a deal worth $1.3 billion.
“They have about 1,000 staff. Eidos has about 1,000,” D’Astous says. "They have basically Borderlands and others, and Eidos has five times the IPs. So why four times less? I guess there weren’t a lot of key people interested. And it shows the health of the value of the potential of Eidos, unfortunately.
“It was a train wreck in slow motion, to my eyes, anyway. It was predictable that the train was not going in a good direction. And maybe that justified $300 million. That’s really not a lot. That doesn’t make sense.”
D’Astous is unsure how much of the Eidos studios’ underperformance can be attributed to Square Enix’s management in Japan, but he does maintain that “some of the bad decisions came from London.”
“They were there since the start, and some decisions I question. There have been no changes at the head office now for more than a decade. So, I think it’s more of the same, to a certain point.”
At least that sounds a lot more reasonable and a lot less whiny than most of these kiss and tell articles.
It can’t be any worse. Congratulations to Eidos Montreal.
D’Astous left Eidos Montreal in 2013.
As someone who works in SEO, this enrages me.
Which part, the fact that companies are abusing SEO, or that @WarpRattler says they have zero interest in stopping abuse? Not being snarky, just confused, as both approaches make sense.
Both. SEO, at its core, is to make a site or product more useful to users, and then more valuable to search engines because search engines want to deliver valuable results. This is done through good, useful content, good tagging, clean code and more, to help users find the right stuff related to what they’re looking for.
The fact that it’s being abused, and that nothing is being done about this abuse, is appalling to me.
SEO is a zero sum game through and through. The whole industry was birthed around manipulating the rankings so people buy widget A instead of widget B, regardless of their comparative quality, what reviewers actually have to say, etc. It’s advertising, plain and simple, and absolutely nobody, ever, tries to market something as ‘second best’*.
I think Google et al do actually care, but there’s too much cash involved in the manipulating and the entire SEO industry essentially colludes to break any algorithmic adjustments made to search engines almost as soon as they happen. Everyone wants to be on top.
About the only counter to it is the hand-curated response made by an actual human, hence the proliferation of the ‘reddit search’ as mentioned by @KevinC. Maybe the advancements in natural language processing AI systems will lead to something intelligent enough to proactively ignore such manipulation in future, though of course if such a system was actually successful it’d be a deathblow to even the ‘good’ parts of the SEO industry.
* Pepsi! For when they don’t have Coke.
I don’t know, blaming the failure of Avengers on superhero fatigue and not the fact that it tried to be a Destiny style live game and was bad at that feels pretty specious.
Eh, both could be true. It’s fine and natural to not want to say “it was all my fault, we screwed up” because, sometimes, it’s more complicated. Compared to so many posts like that though this one seemed as I said pretty level headed. YMMV.
Been a decent career for me for 18 years, but please, do go on.
A person buys widget A due to better SEO manipulation, meaning they don’t buy B. Side A’s win is side B’s loss, hence zero sum. That observation says nothing about whatever economic microcosm exists around the act of promoting either widget A or B, nor the morality of it. If you’re good at it, been paid decently and acted honourably, then that’s great. But I didn’t imply there’s no money in it.
Not to be too pedantic about it, but I think that it’s not entirely zero sum. I know that sometimes I will want to purchase something and get bad results looking for it and just end up not doing it. So businesses can definitely lose out on impulse buy type purchases if their legitimate product can’t get visibility vs a bunch of junk.
I would also note that SEO has created its own side industry of experts, apps, etc. Hell when I use wordpress I have an SEO optimization addon that checks everything to make sure it is going to appear on search results better.
They have kind of broken the system, and it has become a game to get your genuine article above the chaff of bot generated and auto-edited trash that appears in searches.
The apple example is a joke. Searching the damn name of the app doesn’t send results of the app, because its clones have optimized the seo of the name of the app as a tag. This is something apple can fix, and google doesn’t appear to have a problem with, because on the play app store (as shitty as it can be) if you put in the exact name of the app you are looking for, it comes in as the top option, with tons of knockoff garbage around it (and often above it in the sponsored results)
Emulators are the salvation to this problem.