Design by committee is typically panned for very legitimate reasons. Committees are rarely comprised of innovators, visionaries, and experts in their respective fields, but rather executives, marketing, and division heads who will all typically defer to marketing while inserting just enough of their ideas to make it their idea. Inevitably either the project runs into issues being outdated or so detached from the common market it is destined for failure.
Thus when we have Toadman Studios, formally Toadman Interactive, announcing the foundation of Enad Global 7 as a new business model that will revolutionize the industry by merging marketing, branding, and development to produce a true unison you just roll your eyes. A proper counter to their press release would simply be, “Oh, so you’ve established a decentralized corporate structure that will divide and relegate the functionality and duties across multiple different incorporated entities thus limiting liability to the overall structure, then have those entities work together as a consortium?”
Press Statement (Source Gematsu)
The first project from Toadman Studios of the Enad Global 7 group is EvilvEvil, a slick vampire shooter, and will be supported by publisher Sold Out, and creative agency Petrol Advertising. EvilvEvil will serve as the inaugural Enad Global 7 project that reflects the cross functional approach of bringing together separate companies across the video game and entertainment space, to produce a true unison of development, marketing, and branding.
EvilvEvil is a co-op first-person vampire shooter with a player-directed, continuously updated storyline. Its cast of characters will bring ultracool vampires with a heavy dose of attitude and other monstrosities. The current release window is set to be end of 2020. More information on the game will be released at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco from March 16 to 20.
The logo alone before even looking at the hipster trailer is exactly what you can expect from a committee of brand designers and marketers. A good marketer first learns the nuances of their industry, their consumer base, and individual customers then shape a campaign around appealing to them.
Your typical marketer never having embraced the dark side of marketing just puts out whatever they think is cool based on publicly available focus group testing data packets and other forms of joyless brand consumption. Thus you have well endowed white chick, butch black chick, and generic white action hero staring off into the distance.
With the checkboxes checked they produce a single hipster trailer that has successfully appealed to no one.
Unless the two companies handling branding and marketing just really suck at their job, this project is dead in the water. A sad victim of design by committee that unsurprisingly has a severe disconnect from their target market, i.e., gamers.
