Some things to note are the box, Trailers, Ads, ratings, etc. Marketing is what makes a game sell in the end. 50 top selling games is the goal here. This is not easy to find as most of that information is held by marketing research groups. It was agreed that I could look at the top selling games of the quarter or month, and as time passes new top selling games will appear. So i went on www.ign.com and www.NPD.com, and www.gamespot.com and looked at the top sellers. I would only look at a game that was on a top sellers list for 2 months or on quarterly lists.

This one did take less time than the first, but it still took some 200 to 250 hours to complete. It was interesting to find the patterns in here. It’s a big contradiction to the first challenge sometimes. Similar to the first challenge here are all the games I looked at as well as a 3 page discussion of ideal marketing.

• Challenge 2 – Complete The whole list is here all confounded. Notice how some games are pretty bad. but still sell because of other aspects of the marketing machine (190kb)
• Discussions on Ideal Marketing – A 3 page paper outlining aspects that I believe are important in the marketing process of a game (69kb)

I thought this was an interesting challenge because it obliged you to look and play games that you might not play any other time. I played Madden games from 2001 all the way through 2005. I had never played Madden before. It also allowed me to discover games that I had previously dismissed, and now want to own because of this (ICO anyone?).

I submitted my final 25 games and was advised by David Perry that i was been the first to complete this challenge. I’ve made available here my research in PDF format. As an extra I also wrote a 6 page paper on some ideal elements that should be included or at least considered when designing a game.