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Justin

Execution is everything. Execution includes being able to develop, market and incrementally deliver your game successfully. Anything else is old-school thinking. Execution these days includes marketing. And even the development part of execution is not easy and for many people not achievable.

The goal of execution is to succeed. It is not easy.

Tadhg

Hi Justin,

When most people think of 'execution', what they mean is 'delivery', from the software itself to the marketing plan and the financing.

All well and good, but I've worked on many a well-executed project that didn't perform well in the market. At the same time there are examples of poor or middlingly-well executed games that become breakout hits. As pieces of software, professionals roll their eyes at them, but yet they succeed, despite the complaints of "but this part wasn't very good" or "it's just X meets Y".

Execution is complex. The complexity comes from the right people, plan, process, money etc. All of these are fairly knowable problems though. They're not 'hard'.

'Hard' is where the factors are not knowable and the risk is much more about what you believe will work despite proof or lack thereof. It's hard because there's an emotional quality, a leap in the dark and that sort of thing. Solving hard problems is much more difficult because it's not just a set of money, time, method and people variables. It's things like a marketing story, authenticity, taking risks and setting the new opportunities rather than following them.

Thanks for the comment!

Ron Gollehon

Tadhg,
Great response to Justin !
You will find, in our GameWorking business model, that we have and will be creating new "opportunities" for the social game players.

adam

Hola

could you expand on your groupon style point?

cheers
adam

Tadhg

Sure.

Groupon's social achievement dynamic is an example of a kind of gamification. I talked about it more in this post:

http://whatgamesare.com/2011/01/gamification-avoiding-the-fate-of-args-meta.html

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