Exploring Game Design Students Understanding of Marketing

In 2019 there were approximately 5000 students studying game-related courses at TAFEs or universities within Australia. However, there were just 1000 positions available in video game production (Swanston 2019). Due to a lack of government subsidiaries and the continuing impacts from the Global Financial Crisis which resulted in major, international studios pulling out of Australia (Swanston 2019), the industry is small compared to those overseas. These students thus face a precarious and competitive job market in Australia when they graduate, and those who stay in Australia will likely form their own, indie studio or possibly work as sole traders. In either case, they would be entering a market with relatively low barriers to publication. For example, there are over 50,000 video games available on Steam, the most popular digital distribution platform for PC games, and 8,000-10,000 are added each year (Bailey 2021). Therefore, this means that aspiring designers would be faced with the need to breakthrough, differentiate themselves, and demonstrate they present a superior product (Conway & Hemphill 2019). Due to the costs and resources required for game development, many developers utilise crowdsourcing (Namousi & Kohl, 2016), which also requires differentiation to be successful. As such, knowledge of marketing would appear to be an important business and employability skill for aspiring video game designers and developers given the competition that characterises their industry. This research thus aimed to understand the current marketing skills and knowledge of video game design students and thus what they would likely graduate with. While prior research has investigated the effects of marketing activities on video games products and consumers (Healey & Moe 2016; Steiner, Wiegand, Eggert, & Backhaus 2016; Butcher, Tang, & Phau 2017; Weijo, Bean, & Rintamäki 2017), the marketing knowledge that video game developers and future developers possess remains unexplored