Entries from September 2007 ↓

Just a brief note about this horrible news. Obviously he worked closely with us at Codemasters over many years. A quiet, taciturn guy with a great sense of humour. And modest despite his awesome skills and great achievements, a consumate professional. He will be much missed.

It must be terrible for his wife and young daughter, one´s heart really must go out to them and what they are going through.

Try this, just flick through just about any (non gaming) magazine and what are they talking about? That’s right, people. We live in the age of celebrity and it is hardly suprising because people are a lot more interesting than anything else. So we live in an age where we can now lock a few fairly stupid nonentities into a house, televise it, and they become instant celebrities.

Around about 1982 I was trying to market games at Imagine and so went down the celebrity route with the company founders David Lawson and Mark Butler, obviously not losing the opportunity to allude to previous young Liverpool celebrities. This worked very, very well. We had TV stations passing one another in the stairs up to our offices. And we sold a mountain of games. So we kept it going with new angles till David and Mark pretty much got fed up/too busy. 

Then I looked round and saw Eugene Evans, who had previously worked for me as a Saturday boy at Microdigital (and who is now a Senior Director, Marketing at Electronic Arts).  Eugene was very young and earning a lot of money, also he was far better looking than David and Mark. So he bravely agreed to be the next celebrity. And again it worked, better if anything. We got him in all the main national newspapers, repeatedly. He went to 10 Downing Street to meet Margaret Thatcher. And when he passed his driving test and we bought him a Lotus it was all over the papers (we didn’t tell them when he wrote it off driving into the wall of the Moby Dick pub in West Kirby). And we sold more mountains of games.

This really, really, really worked. I cannot over emphasise this. If anyone wanted a quote about anything to do with games they game to us. So we pushed some other key staff as celebrities as well. John “Granddad” Gibson and Ian Weatherburn. This worked too. The press even wrote about me!

To give you an idea of how well this worked look at the games we were selling. Does anyone remember them today? Frankly they were pretty average and there were far better games around from other publishers. Yet we outsold them all by a country mile.

Then I did the same at Codemasters, with David and Richard Darling. And the press fell for it again. Massively. We got them featured in major articles in every sunday paper colour supplement and on to every saturday morning kids TV show. They were big news. And of course it sold us immemse mountains of games. And I could spin so much off it. For instance we brought out a version of BMX simulator which worked with four players. So I got my camera out and snapped a few shots of all four Darling brothers on a BMX bike on their front lawn. I sent this out with a press release and, voila, we had the next number one. Wicked.

Now just look at the state of celebrity in the games industry worldwide. It is truly pathetic. Where are our Tom Cruises, our Spice Girls, our Paris Hiltons? We have done a terrible job. The nearest we have is Peter Molineux (excellent article about this here), who is not exactly Kurt Cobain. It is a terrible state when all the fanboys have to rant about is the consoles themselves.

So how has this come about? Well firstly the nature of our business involves people with great technical skills sitting in front of screens for thousands of hours. These people are as far removed from pop stars as it is possible to be. Secondly the marketeers have failed. They have concentrated on product and that is not the main thing that people want to know about. People want to know about people.

So any marketeers reading this give it a try. Your victim needs to be brave and up for it. They also need to be prepared to give the time to it. Then it is suprisingly easy. Far easier than trying to market games. All you have to do is chat to them till you find a really interesting story, everyone has one. Or failing that use your imagination and make one up, it’s what the Hollywood and pop industry publicists do all the time. Then ride the roller coaster, scoring product points along the way. Use a professional publicist if you are unsure. Send your victim for media training if/when it gets serious.

You will be amazed at the uptake. The press are so hungry to write about people because they know that this is what their readers want to read. Just do it.

So would you like to be famous? Why aren’t you using celebrity in your business? Use the comments and let us know.

Never send a press release out on a monday (they are catching up with 2 days of stuff) or friday (they are in the pub). So if you are a publisher trying to maximise your press presence send 2 releases a week. Tuesday and thursday.

For every game find good stories and send out one press release each month starting a year before street date. Then the launch press release. That is 13. If you have a good story and sales are holding up then do a post launch release. Every release must be supported with assets (screenshots, videos, photographs, renders etc).

Talk to the people making the game so you know what is going on. They don’t know what is a good story and you do. If you don’t do this you will miss out on so much good stuff for your releases. The more you know, the more stories you have available and so you will be able to pick the strongest ones. This is why PR must be in house. An external PR company cannot possibly be close enough to the game to get all the best stories.

Run a press release schedule so everyone knows what is coming up over the next few months and can prepare for it. Keep a “reserve” story (usually something non product specific) to fill any gaps that come up. The schedule is massively important as it informs everyone what they have to do and when to get it all together. It is one of the main drivers for running a marketing department. It is also highly confidential, so control it.

Get every press release approved by the CEO (if he is the hands on micro manage type), the top marketing person, legal, the game producer or department head, anyone mentioned in the release and the external studio if it is not an internal game. These approvals cover your back and make sure the release is perfect. I had a big rubber stamp made with boxes for the signatures and used it on the back of every release. Then I would walk it round the building (I believe in MBWA) to gather the signatures. This resulted in a series of mini meetings getting the release perfect and getting everyone on side.

Once a story has appeared it is no longer news. So embargo the release worldwide to a fixed time so you get simultaneous release and maximum impact. Early to mid afternoon GMT works best. You must enforce this strictly, any infractions damage the story for everyone else.

You need to have the approved release finalised at least several days before release date so you can get it translated into every language. So your regional offices and distributors are up to speed. And so you are absolutely sure all the supporting assets are in place. When embargo time comes up everything must work smoothly and simultaneously. If you are doing this twice a week the mechanics should be spot on so jump hard on any problems.

The press release is the main source of marketing content. Give it (in advance) to all the other people in your company who can use it (obviously with them respecting the embargo). Sales, community support, the online team etc. Put it on the company noticeboard at embargo time and email it to (at least) everyone on the game team. Your employees should hear news from you first, not read it in the press. Also it helps if they can see what you are doing for a living.

Run a standard, corporate message “boilerplate” at the bottom of every press release. This should be interesting and very well written. Review it regularly to see if it can be improved to reflect the constant change everyone in this industry lives with.

If you are a major publisher or developer and your press releases are proper stories, properly supported with assets and properly distributed worldwide then they will easily reach tens of millions of people with the potential to get well into 9 figures. It is by far the most cost effective marketing you can do. So get it right.

So do you do all this? Or do you do it even better? Let us know by using comments? Especially if you have some good tips.

Currently there are quite a lot of independent game development companies that develop games for the big publishers. They draw up a contract and they are told what to do by the publisher. This is really just glorified outsourcing and will never make a lot of money because the publisher can and will shop round on price. In fact it is ironic that independent developers are themselves outsourcing to Eastern Europe and Asia in order to remain competetive.

The real route to riches is to own your own IP, to make your own game. Then to choose which publisher you will allow to distribute the finished product. This is how a lot of the film industry works and increasingly it will be how the gaming industry works.

You don’t have to have a Harry Potter or Olympics license to do this, either. When I was at Codemasters we published World Chamionship Snooker which was developed by Blade Interactive . They owned all the rights to the game and did all the work getting all the licenses. All we did was the manufacturing, sales and marketing. So when Sega came along and offered them a better deal Blade had no problem in taking the next iteration of their game to a different publisher.

Of course there are really massive games where the developer owns the rights. Valve have allowed Electronics Arts, Vivendi and Sierra Studios to publish huge titles like Counter Strike and Half Life for them.

This whole approach is a lot more risky than just being a sub contractor. You can finance it all yourself or you can introduce risk taking partners who help finance individual games in exchange for a slice of the profits. Finding these and making the right deal would be a new skill for most independent developers. But it takes the risk out of our industry and follows film practice.

Another new skill for developers would be the marketing. You can let the publisher do the launch advertising and promotion. What the developer can do is the long term stuff that builds the brand. Starting a year out with monthly press releases and a full time community manager. This is the stuff that builds a big swell of knowledge for the game which makes all the launch stuff just so much more effective.

And of course there is also the credible view that publishers will become redundant. That the future will see content generators going directly to market themselves via the internet and digital downloads. Obviously the current console publishing model precludes this, but who knows what the future will bring. And in the meantime there is always the PC.

So are you a developer or a publisher? Would you like to see the risk taken by external finance instead of the industry itself? Use the comment function to add to the debate.

When I sold my computer store, Microdigital, to Laskys (part of the Ladbroke group of companies) in the early 1980s one of the first things they did was to bundle me off on a residential management training course at Carewell Lodge, next to Lingfield racecourse. It was a given that to be at any management position in Ladbrokes you had to have the right training. This contrasts very sharply with my experience in the computer games industry.

It seems to me that most senior games management are where they are today by being in the right place at the right time. And that entrepeneurial skills (or smooth talking) have been valued well above management skills. At middle management level it seems that people are promoted, without training, till they reach their level of incompetence.

Anecdotally one director (not a Darling) at Codemasters used to deride my management training believing his natural (in other words rubbish) management skill were far superior.

It is not like this in other industries. In well managed industries you get the management training before you get any chance of promotion to higher responsiblity. And there is a glass ceiling which you will never get through without an MBA. To such a point that MBAs now earn substantially more than non MBAs with the same non management skills.

And this is how it is going to be in games (and already is in some places). The reasons are simple. Part of the problem is that we are a very young industry and we are still growing up, as we do our businesses will become more normal. A further influence is that publisher consolidation will be by big well managed companies who will squeeze out the chaff (an example of this is imminent in the UK). But most of all it will be because the untrained managers will underperform and Darwin and capitalism will, eventually, do their job. Though on the evidence that I have seen this process is taking a long time.

So what do you do about it? Firstly educate yourself. Read the Economist every week. Read some good management texts. (I still do both of these today). If you want to get to the top get an MBA, do it part time by remote learning if you have to. And as for your staff, only employ people who are better than yourself and always ensure they have the management training for the job that they are doing, especially at promotion time.

It is essential in a company to have a culture of management excellence. From the top to the bottom. And this is still suprisingly rare in computer games.

 So what are your experiences of game industry management? Use the comments to let everyone know.

In the late 80s I was at Codemasters in charge of marketing. Our products consisted of audio cassettes containing games for 8 bit computers that sold for £1.99, then £2.99. At this price we had to sell massive numbers of units to have a viable business.

These games were usually written by one person with input from an artist on the graphics. The programmers often came from the Darling brothers’ social circle from when they lived in Somerset. This was the case with the Oliver Twins who, unusually, worked together on their games. With this, and by hard graft, they had a prodigous output.

From the beginning they really understood what made a game work and thus sell. So it was no suprise when they came up with a game with an egg shaped cartoon character called Dizzy. His adventures and gentle humour made this an instant number one hit.

With a marketing budget of just above zero we had to do all sorts to build the brand (because, it turned out, that is what we were doing). For instance the Olivers made a large stuffed toy of the Dizzy character. We arranged for one of the game magazines to “kidnap” this in a story that got us lots of column inches over several issues.

The success was so great that the Olivers wrote a sequel, Treasure Island Dizzy. But more than that they built a game engine which made future iterations a much quicker and easier job. The new game was massive, going to and staying at number one whilst helping to keep sales of the original game going. We had a brand.

And what a brand. Of the 60 number ones that Codemasters has achieved (no mean feat), 12 different ones had the word “Dizzy” in their title. In IP terms this was a truly massive brand success and it involved the physical shipping of very many millions of units. In fact over the late 80s and early 90s it was probably the strongest single computer game brand in Britain.

Then the Olivers and the Darlings fell out. It doesn’t matter now how or why this happened. What matters is that it killed Dizzy. Dead. The problem is that the Olivers owned the copyright and the Darlings owned the trademark. So it was a stalemate.

The Darlings went off to make a fortune from the Game Genie then another one from the Playstation whilst the Olivers grafted away, as always, to build a great games development company, Blitz. This has brought them the success that their talent and application deserve.

A decade later I was back full time at Codemasters and obviously was interested in trying to rescue the great brand that I had helped to build. So I chatted to the Olivers , who I had always got on well with (it is difficult not to) and I chatted to the Darlings, who I also got on well with, about how to get Dizzy going again. And eventually we got to sit round a table together. And we hammered out a solution which the lawyers made into a workable agreement. All this made me very happy. As were the Olivers because they really love this character.

Now Dizzy had always been 2D so the Olivers went off and created a demo of how a game would work in 3D. Then the product planning committee at Codemasters met and decided not to do it. After all the work and effort that had gone into making it possible. I was somewhat less than a happy bunny. Their reasons were that after a decade everyone had forgotten Dizzy and that the brand was dead. But a big gap didn’t do Prince of Persia much harm. Another reason was that though Dizzy was well known in the UK and reasonably known in Europe it was unknown in the USA. My answer to this is that the UK is a very solid platform to build off and Dizzy is a great brand that will work anywhere.

So from my perspective Codemasters made mistakes twice with this brand. The original falling out with the Olivers prevented Dizzy from developing into a massive global brand that would have made everyone involved substantially richer. The rejection by product planning denied Codemasters the potential to build a global brand that over the last few years would have brought in substantial and much needed profit.

But it still may happen. Dizzy is still out there waiting to be rescued. All it takes is someone with a little enterprise to go and buy the rights off Rod Cousens and it could be game on. 12 number ones is not a fluke, Dizzy is a great brand.

So did you enjoy this little tale? Please comment with anything you want to add.

There is a theory going round that the big social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are a fad that has had it’s day. That the members have had their fun and are moving on to pastures new. This would be good news for the computer games industry because the time taken up by social networking has bitten deeply into computer game sales over the last 18 months or so. Also bad news for game marketing as these sites have been a fertile ground for some subversive promotional activity.

My theory is that the big social networking sites are really just MMORPG lite. And the lite bit has not been enough to keep a lasting hold on members. Firstly you have the task of building your profile (creating a false identity or “role”) then you need to go out into the game and start collecting “friends” and can engage in combat on the “forum”. There is even trading, but unfortunately it involves real money, a fatal flaw in the game design. You can also form clans or “groups” as they are known.

Coming at it from the other way, there is some consensus that one of the reasons World of Warcraft has outperformed it’s rivals so much is because it incorporates such a high level of social networking. In fact it really is a virtual community. Also Valve games have recently built social networking features into their Steam game service, which is growing in strength to be a very significant player.

So what I am trying to say here is that gaming definitely needs to move a lot more towards the social networking model, both in nurturing the community around the game and within the game itself. Xbox live, for instance, really needs a major upgrade in this direction.

As for the big social networking sites, well maybe they should introduce more gaming elements. Like a fictitious currency, character levels and a few quests.

Maybe the social networkers and the MMORPGs will both evolve so they meet in the middle and become the same thing!

So is this barmy or do you detect a gem of truth? Let us know by clicking the comments button.