J Force Forums

So some guys on youtube think that I don't do anything and that I'm unneeded. And many other people aren't exactly sure of what I do either. This sort of bothers me, because I do a lot of work. So I wrote a somewhat lengthy response to this person. It's too long to be posted on youtube so I'm posting it here.

The comment:

Are you kidding me?? "Nobody understands the power of marketing", your not the CEO of a fortune 500, you're a little team building an XNA game with one programmer and one artist. You don't do anything, oh let me guess you're the "designer". What is it you do again??

The fact that we're the complete opposite of a fortune 500 company is exactly why a marketing person is necessary. We don't have a big budget to spend on marketing, but we do have one guy to spend all his time on marketing. If I was not on this team, there would be/will be much, much fewer people that know about our game. And since we're making a multiplayer game, the more marketing I do the more players we will have. So I'm actually making our game better. Also, to be frank, I think I can market games better than any other indie company out there. Yes, really. Once other developers witness my power, they'll be wishing I was on their team. And I know that sounds naive and arrogant, but just wait and see, alright?

Anyway, here is what I do/will do:

1. make the video docs (which can be time consuming, & they've already created a lot of awareness for us and gotten some press coverage. And I have several other videos in store (apart from our vid docs) that are going to get us some major exposure. These will separate us from all other game developers.
2. create trailers & upload them to dozens of video sites (and not just any old trailer, I'm talkin best trailer EVER, which will also get quite a bit of coverage)
3. write press releases/prepare media kits and send them to several hundred sites
4. making sure our game gets reviewed by many popular review sites (this will take some slick PR work to get it on the likes of IGN, Gamespot, etc.)
5. advertising
6. website maintenance, including writing all site content, blog posts, adding/removing affiliate games, adding features/making tweaks, forum moderation/community management, traffic analysis, seeking out & dealing with advertisers to get direct ads on our site, etc.
7. SEO (and not just for this site, but our videos too)
8. reading/writing/negotiating contracts
9. dealing with portals, publishers, & affiliates
10. customer service/support
11. setting up international distribution/localization
12. promotion on several social networking sites such as youtube, myspace, facebook and many more (how did you find out about us? Cuz I sent you a friend request, right? That's marketing)
13. ensuring our game gets to the top of social bookmarking sites such as Digg (gotta know how to work it).
14. submitting our game to hundreds of download/submission sites
15. posting on many, many forums & blogs without hurting our reputation
16. accounting/paperwork (there will be lots of this when we start selling our game and form a real company, especially if we form something higher than an LLC)
17. box packaging (yes, we will sell boxed copies of our game too)
18. make & sell t-shirts
19. market research (I've already done a ton of this)
20. pay expenses (I buy everything. Web costs, advertising, game engines, software, xna membership, contest entries, music, servers, camcorder, etc.)
21. recruiting team members
22. project management (scheduling meetings, tasks, motivating, etc.)

All this stuff takes away a lot of time from game development, and most of it is never ending work. Any team that doesn't have a full-time marketer is leaving money on the table. That's a fact. Read The Indie Game Development Survival Guide or The Indie Developers' Guide to Selling Games or Business and Legal Primer for Game Development and you will quickly realize how much work is involved here.

Also, Introversion Software, one of the most successful, if not THE most successful indie game company, has a core of 1 programmer and 2 business managers, and that was the whole team at the beginning. They were young and worked in their spare time on their first game, just like us. They are obviously doing something right. Here's a quote from their manager in this interview:

RPS: Is there an