Entries from October 2007 ↓

A blog is an enormously powerful enabling tool, potentially anyone on planet earth can put their views in front of everyone on planet earth. This has led to all sorts of interesting phenomenon. The Baghdad blogger told us what it was like to be living in a country that we, the West, were (illegally) attacking. This gave us a unique insight into what it was like to be on the other side.

In computer games we have the EA Spouse who, by revealing working conditions and pay, succeeded in improving the lives of thousands of game industry workers. It has become a very powerful marketing tool. Every game should have a development blog that enables potential customers to follow the story of what they are going to buy.

Now we have Nintendo technical recruiter Jessica Zenner (pen name Jessica Carr) sacked for writing about work.

Here is an extract from her blog: “One plus about working with hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily” “My gut tells me that this woman hasn’t been fu***d in years.”

About 5 or 6 years ago, before the blog explosion, I was using Google in different ways to research Codemasters’ online presence. I came across a blog from one of our employees, Andrew Pallister, which was a detailed written and photographic diary of his life. It is called MeDiaryPics. And any journalist or competitor would have made hay with the contents. Hundreds of photographs of inside the company and a detailed log of all his work on our games. All created in innocence of the potential downside.

So obviously I told my superiors. I also had to explain to them what a blog was. What I was hoping was that we could stop the potential leaking and at the same time harness Andrew’s knowledge and talent for marketing advantage. But HR have a very one dimensional view on life. Andrew was asked to remove all the sensitive stuff from his blog, which must have taken him ages. A blog policy (ie don’t write anything about the company) was instituted and sent to every employee. Marketing opportunity lost.

So is your company frightened of blogs or does it embrace them for the good that they can do?

It really does the industry no good at all when the popular press are wound up enormously with hype about a product that really isn’t up to much. And yes, I am talking about Second Life here. It is not very good for social networking and it is not very good as a game.

Yet a friend of mine who has a very senior position in the FCO told me that they were treating Second Life as being an important commercial phenomenon that offered huge marketing advantages. Many other organisations were taken in by exactly the same picture. Some have wasted large sums of money to have a big Second Life marketing presence. Virtual embassies for instance. Which are delivering little or nothing.

So whilst it may have nine million registered user accounts, when you go there it is empty. And now we find that users are spending an average of just 12 minutes a month on the site. So it is not giving people anything that they want.

Meanwhile there are very strong and persistent rumours that Google is to release a virtual world. They already own all the tools necessary, it is largely a matter of bundling them together. If this is the case it will make a great vehicle for all their advertising content. And provide very stern competition indeed to Second Life.

So do you use Second Life? Tell us about it.

It seems to make no sense. A studio is just a collection of individuals who work as a team, so bringing them into the corporate Microsoft world could do more harm than good. There is another way and that is to sign up good studios for exclusives. This would cost a lot of money but a lot less than buying them. It also allows for much more flexibility.

Of course this article is prompted by the news that Bungie have done a buyback of the company from Microsoft. You would wonder why Microsoft bought it in the first place when they could have just paid them to do the Halo series. Just as they will now, presumably, pay them to produce more exclusive 360 content.

Also you must look at Rare. This cost Microsoft $377million. You really must wonder if this was value for money. Or, more importantly, what they could have done if they had spent that $377m in other ways.

So do you think that studios work best when they are independent? Or that Bungie are fools to cut the safety net that Microsoft provides?

In 1983 at Imagine we realised that the company was being killed by piracy. We had plenty of anecdotal knowledge that nobody was buying legitimate product any more, they were just making tape to tape audio copies. And we could see that our sales were being badly hit, it was only the fact that we had geared ourselves up for export that kept us going.

So we looked at technical protection and we looked at making the instructions photocopier proof. But, nothing looked like working. So we came up with the idea of the megagames. Basically the idea was to have part of the game on cassette as normal plus another part of the game on a chip which plugged into the computer. You needed both bits for the game to work and whilst the tape was easy enough to copy the chip wasn’t.

So it would beat piracy and force people into actually buying our work instead of stealing it. Another added advantage was that we could make the game much bigger and potentially better, hence we called them megagames. Which in turn gave us the advantage that we would have a great USP with games far better than our competitors could make, until they caught up with the technology.

In those days a game was usually written by one person. For the megagames we made teams of our best people with support from artists and sound people. David Lawson asked me to come up with names. Bandersnatch I just stole from the Lewis Carol poem The Jabberwocky . For the other game I decided on a two syllable word and sat down with a piece of paper and wrote down lots of cool and interesting first and second syllables. These I mixed and matched to come up with some new words. Psyclapse was the one I liked best and was also chosen by the others.

To market the games we decided that we wanted very powerful visual imagery. So we went to the famous fantasy artists Roger Dean and Chris Foss and gave them a game each. Not only to come up with the packaging image, but also a typeface for each game. For advertising we decided to start before the games were available in a series of wind up adverts. To make them really stand out in the media they were used in we decided to major on white space. All of this worked well and we whipped up a huge amount of interest.

Which was a pity as the process of making the games was going nowhere. So we had to extend the wind up campaign. And then the company went bust, killed largely by piracy. So they never happened.

But they had an influence. Other publishers worked at copy protection from other angles, dongles became a common way to protect commercial software. Art and imagery became more important in game marketing. Roger Dean went on to be involved in many more games. The technical teams took the ideas behind the megagames and used them elsewhere. The term megagame entered the english language.

Piracy is still a problem. It was endemic at the end of the original Playstation generation. Now the approach to keeping it under control is far more professional. ELSPA in the UK do a very good job. Unfortunately the legal system still does not treat IP theft the same as it treats the theft of physical objects. Which is wrong as they are both the result of man’s labour. The solution to the 8 bit tape piracy that Imagine had suffered turned out to be budget games. At £1.99 they weren’t worth copying.

So a little piece of gaming history. Comments, as ever, are more than welcome.

Sega have a great competition. You write an advert for Sega Rally on your vehicle and send them a picture of it. They pick the best photo and the winner gets a rally experience, a PS3 and a copy of the game. Done well this could get advertising slogans seen all over Britain. The problem is that they only have 5 submissions on their website. So either they forgot to tell the public or nobody wants the prize.

Maybe I should go and get my Caterham dirty and apply my marketing mind to a slogan. A rally experience could be fun.

So have you tried any zany marketing ideas? And did they work?

 A total of 800,000 Sony Financial Holdings Inc. shares have just been sold  by Sony at 400,000 yen each, raising aproximately $2.8 billion in new funds for them. According to Bloomberg the money is going to be spent on their Bravia TVs and on Playstation. So it could very well be used to finance the much rumoured imminent PS3 price drop to $399.

Not that this will do PS3 much good as there still is no reason to buy one, whatever the price. And whatever price Sony drop to, Microsoft can always stay cheaper. Firstly because the 360 is cheaper to make and secondly because Microsoft have deeper pockets. Already you can buy a 20 GB 360 premium in the UK for just £199.99.

Meanwhile weekly 360 sales in the UK just doubled to put it ahead of the Wii. So much for all those pundits who said that Halo 3 wouldn’t be a system seller.

I have now seen three different sets of analysts who say that Sony are going to come from behind to beat Microsoft this generation. I don’t know if they are looking at the same market as me because I will be amazed if this happens. Sony are chasing after a very rapidly moving target.

So what are your thoughts on this current console war?

 edited to add: