In my current role, there's a lot of playing under development. Game design is largely handled externally though. That said, as a publisher who has partnered with a studio, we can help them align marketing strategy. Game designers/studios come to us to help publish/market their games. We don't seek to define the game design, we want to let the developers do what they do best and they trust we can provide resources to help them get their game noticed.

I am not involved in those high-level business conversations, but I know that neither the studio nor our team would enter into an agreement where we'd seek to dictate the core game elements (which were initially the draw to the business agreement in the first place).

Think of the relationship this way: studios have a game they are developing and think they have something that could work. With some funding, they have a team that is ensuring they have great game design, production timeline, and can deliver a game within a reasonable timeline. What they don't have is a platform team dedicated to back-end and front-end production that outputs a good website and user data collection. They don't have an analytics team that can set up valuable reports, make sure said data is being collected in-game, and reported in a digestible fashion. They don't have a dedicated QA team to isolate and solve bugs that arise from various patches and general play. They don't have a customer service team that can deal with mass & isolated reports for various scenarios. They also do not have a dedicated marketing team, which includes ensuring the core messaging of the game remains consistent, that PR outreach to media outlets is consistent, a UA (user acquisition) team that drives data-driven placements to target-specific and valuable audiences that are likely to invest in your game, and a design/video team that can support the assets to drive all of these initiatives.

I mainly studied Business, although our core curriculum at Berkeley encompassed Accounting and Banking subjects. Marketing in games is interesting. I think Marketing still carries this stigma that it's not data driven. It's very data driven these days. In fact, marketing has become so complex, the limitations are solely dependent on what the systems support. If I had the ability to target people who just entered the game within the last 7 days and send them special offers within that 1-week time period, send them a 1-week introductory email flow to inform them about game resources, and give them in-game login rewards that same period, I would. It's possible, and the data of those campaigns proves positive - but you have to have the ability to do so.