Entries from February 2008 ↓

You should never market two games in the same way, to do so is to totally misunderstand what you are doing. Each game is an individual that needs loving care. And so should be nurtured in it’s own special way. Only by doing this will you realise the full potential of that game in the market. This is what the people who have developed the game and those who have invested in it deserve.

So let’s  look at the first 8 criteria you look at when formulating your marketing plans for a game:

• Genre. We live in the age of the me too alien shooting game. But customers still play many different genres. These customers will have different demographics but importantly they will have a different emotional engagement with the game. Tetris engages but not in the same way as World of Warcraft.
• How good the game is. Obvious really. If it is excellent you rub it in every-one’s faces marketing wise and thank development for giving you an easy life. If the game is less good you have to work for your wages. But don’t give up hope and abandon it, you are a marketing professional so must still do your best.
• Content. Obvious and yet not so obvious. You would market a game set in Paris differently to a game set in New York. Some marketing people don’t really know the content of the game that they are marketing. Don’t make this mistake. Violence, sex, race, political and religious issues can work for you or against you. It is up to your skill as a marketeer.
• The time of year. Game sales follow a seasonal curve. Unfortunately games releases follow a similar curve. Christmas is for blockbusters, anything else gets lost and we don’t yet have the tradition of a summer holiday hit, like the film industry does. Other than that every season has it’s benefits and downsides. My favourites would be about three weeks before the clocks change in the spring and a week after they change in the autumn. Leisure behaviour changes radically at these two times.
• Price-point. Again seemingly obvious. But remember that sometimes you will sell more at a higher price, because people will think that it must be better. Console games are generally overpriced as a result of the current business model so the attach rate is quite low. This means that you have to make every purchase very special indeed. Make the customer glad that they opened their wallet.
• What the competitors are up to in general (Sega Rally was launched against Halo 3!). Blockbuster suck the market dry. They may bring more people into the stores but those people are only there for one purpose. Looking at competitor release schedules may help you make a one week change that significantly increases sales.
• What competitors are up to in your genre. Customers are not going to buy two racing games in quick succession, or two shooters or even two platform games. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones never released against each other, follow their example.
• USPs of that game. This is incredibly important. You may not even know what they are until you lever the knowledge out of development. Once I marketed the first game in which motion capture and Dolby surround sound recording were done simultaneously. The press loved that when I told them.

To be continued next Wednesday with 9 more success factors in game marketing.

• Creative Britain: New Talents for a New Economy. The British culture secretary Andy Burnham thinks that computer games are a good thing. Unfortunately his boss, Gordon Brown, thinks that they cause knife crime (without any evidence whatsoever to support this view). By the time they realise how important we are we will all be in Canada.
• Video and music come to Steam. There is no stopping the guys at Valve. They could well become the number one portal in the whole of gaming. Every time you hear news from them they are getting it right.
• Phil Harrison leaves Sony. You have to think this is a bit careless of Sony. Phil is one of those thinkers who shape the industry and there aren`t that many around. Their loss is going to be someone`s gain.
• Executives of Game, the UK retailer sell shares. And you can`t blame them. High street retail is ultimately a broken business model for video games. They have got out of these shares pretty near the top. Well done.
• Secure PC gaming could lead to cheaper game prices. Obviously if the overwhelming majority of gamers who now steal their PC games actually contributed towards their development the economics would change radically.
• Jagex launch casual gaming site. Makes perfect sense. If you look at the trends in gaming and look at Jagex´s skill with browser games then this should be a license to print money.
• More facts and figures on PC game piracy. You have to be an ostrich not to take this on board and understand the consequences. If people can steal games then they will.
• Xbox live to focus on family. Looks like Nintendo with the Wii and DS have changed the industry forever. The real annoying thing is that we could have done this a long long time ago. It is amazing that the industry has taken so long to realise that the vast majority of the population do not want to shoot aliens.

Most of the knowledge available to keen gamers about the gaming industry can be of a pretty low quality. This is because that knowledge is third or fourth hand. As a very minimum it has been “spun” by a marketing department (I have done loads of this) and then “interpreted” by a journalist. But there is a way round this, keen enthusiasts can get their knowledge directly from the horses mouth, if they read the right blogs.

Whilst there aren’t many blogs from the publishing side of the video game industry there a quite a few from the development side. And they are excellent. These are the guys who actually make the games that everyone plays, so they know what they are talking about. And when they analyse a game they do so with an authority no magazine could match. These guys are the complete opposite of the fanboy, they are intelligent, informed and incisive. There are quite a few in my blogroll but here are a random selection:

• Mainly About Games. Informative and well written it has a nice personal feel to it.
• Dopass.com. Short entries not just about gaming. Funny at times.
• A path through possibility. Irregular updating but well worth a read for some incisive commentary.
• Japanmanship. An incredibly good read of a Western developer’s life in Japan.
• Magical Wasteland. Refreshingly irreverant.
• Survival Horror. Does what it says on the tin.
• Gamedev.net. A big and serious site with a lot of good content.
• Seven Degrees of Freedom. Very nice diary style blog.
• Random Encounters in Imaginary Realms. Just cherry picks the good stuff.
• Cheeky. Sparse and interesting development diary.
• Life In The Rain. Often long interesting personal articles.
• T=Machine. Wide ranging blog with much that is happening at the sharp end online.
• Black Company Studios. Semi diary semi event driven articles. Nice.
• .mischief.mayhem.soap. A serious game developer’s blog.
• JakeWorld Blog. The life of a game developer.
• Gamefeil. Games, comics, diary.
• Scientific Ninja. Technical stuff here.
• Devbump. Aggregation of gaming articles.
• Nimblebit. Game development diary. Lots of technical stuff.
• It’s Bezness time. Bedroom developer diary.
• I love it, I feel like Sisyphus. On start-ups, game development and programming.
• Bruceongames. Game industry from the publishing perspective.

For anyone with any interest in games the above blogs are just pure gold. Japanmanship, for instance is written by a game developer who works for a Japenese games company, lives in Japan and speaks Japanese. If you want to understand the game industry in Japan there is no finer source of knowledge. It amazes me when fanboys with a millionth of his knowledge and experience argue with him on forums.

Note to bloggers, journalists etc, feel free to copy and paste the above list or even the whole article to anywhere you want.

If anything handhelds are more interesting than home consoles. They are undergoing rapid technical change, there are more companies involved and everything happens at a more rapid pace. Also the potential is far bigger, the Nintendo DS has sold more than the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PS3 and the Microsoft Xbox 360 all put together. Once again this is all supposition and conjecture.

Firstly the Sony PSP. This has been a success as a media player but this makes no real money for Sony. It has failed as a game machine due to piracy and so is a broken business model. Sony desperately need to bring out an all new replacement with a touch screen and no UMD. It may well come from their phone division, there have long been rumours of a PSPhone. Ultimately they will want a handheld that integrates with PS4 and with Sony Home. Of all the players Sony have the core competences to win. They are already in the phone business and the games business so it is mainly a matter of integrating existing expertise.

The Nintendo DS is on the way to being a broken business model. They are losing customers far faster to the R4 than they are gaining them through selling more machines. The new DS Ultralite model due this year will not fix this problem. They need a new machine with a different philosophy towards content. They know this, they have the expertise and they have the development funds. Expect the replacement for the DS to be a very special machine indeed.

Microsoft is following a well thought out grand strategy. Some people think that Zune is just an excellent me-too MP3 player. It is far more. Expect successive generations to evolve phone and gaming features. This will ultimately be an Xbox Live machine and will integrate even more with Xbox 3 so you can carry your home gaming experience with you. Microsoft have already admitted this by saying that XNA will work on Zune in the future.

With iPhone and iPod touch Apple has created excellent portable gaming machines, this has not happened by accident. We are headed for an age where recorded music is free, so Apple is looking for new profit generators for iTunes. We are currently at the beginning of a gold rush as the major publishers race to own space on this platform. With regular new generations of machines you can be sure that Apple will bring the gamer more and more to the forefront. It is where the money is.

Then there is Nokia. By some measures this company is, on it’s own, bigger than the games industry. So in the handheld gaming market they could exercise enough muscle to blow the others away. If they wanted. And they seem to, they had their fingers very badly burned with nGage Mk1. Yet they have just come back for more with nGage Mk2. This time it is a software standard. And this time it will run on a lot of phones. If they wanted they could put it on more phones than the combined capacity of all the other players in this market put together. So potentially this could be the biggest. But then I thought that about nGage Mk1.

As you can see it is a complex situation and anything can happen. So it probably will.

On November 29, at the Reuter’s Media Summit John Riccitiello said: “Is it ripe (for mergers), or has it already been picked? I would argue that it’s been largely picked.” So he was telling the world that consolidation in the video games industry was pretty much all done.

Then on December 2 Vivendi bought Activision. Which relegated EA to the position of number two global games publisher. And confirmed the trend that big global media companies need to be in gaming and are buying the industry out.

So on December 10 this blog asked the obvious question, who is going to buy Electronic Arts? Because it really does look like a juicy target for one of those massive media companies like News Corporation. How to acquire a powerful worldwide gaming presence in just one purchase. A typical Rupert Murdoch move.

Then on February 7 there were rumours that Viacom was going to buy Take 2 for $1.5 billion. Which made sense in the overall scheme of things. But it turned out to be so much hot air. Nevertheless, with these things there is rarely smoke without fire so Viacom were probably thinking about something.

If they were they have had a shock because on February 15 Electronic Arts put in a near $2 billion bid for Take Two. This was rejected so EA upped the bid slightly only to be rejected again. EA even have a special website to explain what they are doing. The proposed merger would bring the classical consolidation advantages of removing duplication, especially in sales, marketing and distribution. They would also be able to get rid of wasteful competition in sporting games. Best of all it would make EA the number one publisher again and make them so big that even the biggest predator would have to think twice before trying to gobble them up.

As the December 10 article here said: “The main way to remain independent is to rapidly become a lot bigger.” So, does John Riccitiello read this blog? 

This time I’m going to Spain, back in the office on 10th March. Articles have been written in advance (except for news). They are:

• 26.2 The next console generation #2 Handhelds
• 27.2 Some great development blogs
• 28.2 Eight news stories 28.2
• 29.2 Success factors in games marketing #1
• 03.3 A free marketing tip for Jagex
• 04.3 Wiihabilitation
• 05.3 Success factors in games marketing #2
• 06.3 Eight news stories 6.3  
• 07.3 Wikipedia is useless

We are gradually attracting more visitors, the record day is now 12,947 absolute unique visitors. Though obviously it is usually a fraction of this, we have had a fair number of days over 2,000. At the time of writing the Technorati authority is 121 and rank is 52,589, Google page ranking is 5. Not too bad for six months and proof that you can market on a very small budget. (Currently zero).

If you like what you read here then please tell others. This is still only reaching a very small fraction of it’s potential readership. And if you are new please look through some of the past articles, you may find them interesting.

Thank you very much for coming here and reading the blog.

A winner emerged from this tussle far earlier than was expected. Mainly because the PS3 was used as a Trojan horse to get Blu-ray drives into homes. This cost Sony a lot in low initial sales of the PS3 and in financial costs ($3 billion). It was an expensive victory. So what does it mean?

• Firstly consumers can see a clear format victor which takes the confusion out of the market. This will lead to a faster acceptance of HDTV. So more TV sets will be sold sooner and more Blu-ray players. The manufacturers need this because so far the uptake of HD video players has been very low. Many people seem happy with upscaled DVD, the films cost a lot less.
• Microsoft will have to be very careful that the public don’t get the wrong idea and think that this is a victory of PS3 over 360. Some people are stupid enough for this to hit sales regardless. If Microsoft don’t dispell such misconceptions then sales could be badly hit.
• It could bring the tipping point of the HD consoles taking off sooner. So both Sony and Microsoft (with it’s imminent Blu-ray add on drive?) could suddenly be selling a lot more consoles (Amazon are reporting a 75% increase in sales of the 40Gbyte PS3). There are over 100 million customers waiting to trade up from the previous generation. This is not good news for Nintendo.
• Sony have an advantage over Microsoft because the PS3 has a built in Blu-ray drive. People will buy PS3s just to use as a Blu-ray player. So it’s average game attatch rate will be hit. Microsoft know all this so will price cut sooner.
• Microsoft now have an even bigger incentive to accelerate the end of the plastic and cardboard distribution model. Expect Xbox Live to get better, sooner. Expect bigger add on hard drives for the Xbox 360 to be offered. Sony know this so will put more into their Home offering.

It is very difficult to predict how all these elements will pan out, there are so many economic, commercial, technical and marketing factors involved. My hope is that the reduction in confusion helps everyone prosper.