Postmortem

• • 3 things done well:
     1. Doing simple research of how to start an LLC was helpful to me. It helped me since it's relevant to marketing and it helped the team get a start on that. I may not necessarily have a use for this knowledge in the future, but knowing where to look to start up a business is something that could become useful should I choose to do that or know anyone else who does.
    2. The market research generally went well. I used a survey on surveymonkey and asked questions specific to what was necessary for this project. Furthermore, I was able to use a fan group for RPG's to make it easy to understand what hardcore RPG players are looking for. This is also useful for myself, since I have interest in making RPG's. This is particularly useful for the team as well.
    3. Looking into all of the individual costs of a project (such as licenses and salaries) did a lot to open my eyes to exactly how much goes into a single game project financially. It's a bit intimidating, but knowing this will be helpful for how to determine what does and doesn't work in the future.
    
• • 3 things that could have been better:
     1. I really do not like doing a lot of math. It's easy to make stupid mistakes and ruin everything. The only thing I could really do to overcome this was work through it and double check what I had already done. I don't think I found any good way to improve myself in this area other than to just power through and do as hard of work as I could.
    2. While most of my numbers remained the same over the course of the class, certain ones (such as the marketing budget) had to be changed as new information came to me in later assignments. This became fairly confusing and I wish I had the correct numbers earlier. I added some asterisks to previous assignments to remind myself that the old numbers weren't accurate, and that worked okay, but it would have been easier if I had found a way to avoid this in the first place.
    3. The equity offer mentioned in the Financial Report was difficult because I had to research how to write one and there aren't many good examples online. I think I did an okay job, but I'm not sure. I feel like I probably should have asked more questions about this one, but it was one of the last things I did so it became difficult to do so.
    
• Most important element

 The most important element for me was the more psychological element of marketing. Figuring out what makes people want to buy a product was very interesting to me, as well as all of the factors that go into it (such as whether a person will buy a product more than once). Examples such as exposure of newer games increasing the sales of older games in the same series is a big one. This makes me think that doing cross-referential things across multiple games would be a good strategy going forward.

Week 7

I felt like I wasn't as able to focus on the reading this week with the class coming to an end, but even so, there were some elements that stuck out to me. The idea that Prestige Luggage looks as though they're performing exceptionally well but other statistics show them potentially falling behind shows just how initially looking at statistics can be misleading. While difficult to understand, Chapter 12's concept of determining the value of information is interesting to me. While on Survey Monkey, I noticed a Premium Feature would attempt to show what the mood of a person was while they answered the question based on how their answer was worded. I couldn't use this feature, but was reminded of it by the text and figuring out what the price that that information is worth is something worth looking into.

Being that this was the final week, I didn't get a lot done on the team project, working mildly on the goals set for me but without significant progress. I did do research on equity, however, and coming up with an offer for the Financial Report was difficult but I think I got it down.

Week 6

The reading this week was from chapters 7 through 10. Chapter 7's use of the Prisoner's Dilemma I found to be particularly interesting, as that concept is something I find interesting in general. I've seen Prisoner's Dilemma applies to a lot of things, including game mechanics, a game show, and of course just the initial concept of it being two prisoners, but never to the subject of marketing. Chapter 9's topic of exposure was also interesting, particularly the idea of multiple ads working like a venn diagram to determine how much exposure overlaps between them.

I finished the market analysis this week, and as a result also finished the first objective given to me by the team as there was a lot of overlap between the two of them. I did not start up any work on the objective after that, however.

Week 5

The reading for this week was Chapter 4, "Product and Portfolio Management", and Chapter 5, "Customer Profitability". The former chapter had a particular part that I found interesting in which David Aakar cites many attributes of Brand Equity but chooses not to combine them into some individual score, while Bill Moran has worked out a formula to do so. This may be in part because Moran's version involves math, but I find Aakar's more appealing because its lack of formulas makes it a bit looser and easier to judge subjectively. I don't have as much to say about Chapter 5 but learning about customer retention rates was interesting.

For my work with the team, I was able to start work on their request to look into demographic research. This aligns with the market research report, and while I didn't get much done on it this week, the two of them can be worked on together.

Week 4

I spoke with the team lead about the report paper, asking him every question I could. By using a Discord call, it was very easy to go back and forth about this without being confusing. I got the information I needed to work on the report.

In addition, I have been assigned several tasks by the team to work on over the next few weeks, including research into demographics, the best avenues of marketing, publishing and revenue options, business practicies, copyrights, and nda's. I was given these assignments near the end of the week so I have not started on any of them just yet, but I am almost there.

Reading through the chapters of the book again gave me a clearer understanding of them than before, which allowed the previously mentioned interview to go fairly smoothly, although I had to cross-reference the book a lot during it to make sure it was all good.

Week 3

Not much was accomplished in terms of the team this week- I was still waiting on them. I asked the team lead if he had anything for me to do, and he said he would soon.

I read through the first three chapters of the book but didn't really understand it that well. There were a lot of terms that flew over my head and formulas that were difficult to properly memorize. At this point, I was pretty lost and confused about it all.

Week 2

Not much was done for the team this week. They want me to post on Twitter weekly to promote the game, but the Twitter account is not yet active and as of this posting I'm waiting on that.

In terms of readings, I learned a lot about how cable and satellite television works and is marketed. What I found most interesting and relevant from these readings was how different cable channels are able to market to specific niches, as well as how decisions are made on when to appeal to a broader audience and when not to. This is incredibly useful for marketing games, because games fall under a similar category of entertainment where genre is popular- Even if the concept of different channels and networks does not apply.