Marketing Is For Sucky Products?

Yeah, marketing can be like this.

This is what one venture capitalist believes... you only really need marketing if your product isn't good enough to get viral attention. Of course, he's talking about web sites that have a service on them, such as Flickr or DropBox or any of a zillion others. His point is that for such things, you're better off putting the effort into making the product exceptional rather than trying to market something that doesn't have enough traction to get very far in the marketplace.

His comments don't apply to games or apps, though, which have to compete in a market with tens of thousands of other products. Many excellent games go unnoticed, and marketing could certainly help those. Sure, going viral is great, but very few games will have that particular lightning strike them.

But you should certainly strive to have an excellent products, because that will make marketing so much easier. And your chances of becoming a huge hit depend on the excellence of your product. Excellent marketing on a mediocre product won't get you very far, not in this era of instant reviews that go worldwide the moment your game is available.