Dead Space creator Glen Schofield says his team had to play a little dirty with its internal marketing to get EA's support.
Talking to The Game Business, Schofield touched on the delicate topic of AAA game development and how, despite having EA as a publisher, Dead Space developers had to fight for attention like they were a scrappy indie studio.
"You end up marketing inside your own company. I made a scary freaking calendar, with just the concept art that we had," Schofield said. "I must have spent $4,000. We gave it to the executives… holy crap did I get in trouble for that! But at the same time… now they're starting to hear Dead Space."
Schofield added that the developers – who, following Dead Space's critical success, re-branded under the new moniker Visceral Games – had to go as far as internally marketing their own game in EA's bathrooms, vying for attention from the higher ups in their most private moments.
"Then we made posters and we'd put them up when there were big internal meetings. The executives would get together, and we put these posters in the [toilets], so whenever they went to the bathroom, they were seeing Dead Space. We did this gorilla [sic] marketing to stay relevant."
He added, "that's about as indie as you can get inside a giant company, having to fight for your dollars."
Schofield then described what I can only imagine is a nightmare scenario for a game studio competing with other studios under the same mega corporate umbrella: executives looking at both studio's games and ranking them numerically.
"The chief creative officers come in and look at all the games," he said. "They compare our game to Mirror's Edge, because that was the other new one coming out that year.
"We're about five or six months before shipping. Something like that. They give Mirror's Edge a 90, and Dead Space is 72. This is internal. The team is devastated. And we've got five or six months. It just sucks the wind out."
Schofield said EA's assessment led to Mirror's Edge getting "more marketing money than Dead Space," whose budget he pegs at "$12 – 14 million.
"I know there's people going, 'That's more than my budget for the game we're making'. Is that what AAA is? I don't know."
Yes, Dead Space is a AAA game simply by virtue of its backing from EA, but it's definitely interesting to hear how the developers had to fight so hard for funding in light of what we now know is one of the best sci-fi horror games ever made.
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