N'Gai Croal's always insightful LevelUp blog at Newsweek has roped Midway's Steve Allison in for a guest editorial discussing what developers should learn from marketers, in partial answer to Denis Dyack's recent series of suggestions, and it makes for interesting reading.

It's a little bit depressing - but maybe I don't work the best as a profit maximizer, and Allison is definitely trying to be realistic: "According to our numbers, the actual success rate of new IP over the past four years is just seven percent. In other words, 93 percent of new IP fails in the marketplace. So while the 90-plus review scores and armfuls of awards create the perception that titles like Psychonauts, Shadow of the Colossus, Okami and other great pieces of work were big successes, the truth is that they were big financial disappointments and money losers."

There are some things that don't ring true in his rhetoric - a bit too much random Midway hyping, for starters - witness this statement in the second part: "A game's sales potential is entirely determined by the strength of its overall concept, while the difference between its sales potential and its final tally is determined by its execution. And given the phenomenal execution of Psychonauts, Ico, Psi-Ops and the other art house games listed above, their failure can be ascribed to a misguided concept, poor timing or both."

Wait, Psi-Ops (which was, yes, made by Midway) is an 'art house game'? Nonetheless, Allison has, abstractly, a pretty good point - "What happens all too often in the videogame business is that we get art house movies made at blockbuster budgets." This is true in a number of cases, but I wonder - how many of those titles were aimed squarely at the mainstream but just failed to understand the market properly?

Well, I'm pretty sure that Psi-Ops is one of those 'mainstream missers', for starters, and it's going to be interesting to see whether Midway, increasingly playing a high-stakes game, can hit home runs with the titles they need to, such as Stranglehold and Blacksite: Area 51. If they do, then Allison has really delivered on the concepts he espouses here. If not - well, I guess we can always blame it on the art house?