Old school Electronic Arts brought high profile IP licenses that someone else had built. Harry Potter, James Bond, Lord of the Rings (three British authors there), NFL, NBA, FIFA, Catwoman, etc. They then built an adequate, but nothing special, game and advertised it like crazy. Then they would make the minimum changes they could get away with and launch it as a sequel. Sometimes every year.
It was cynical and profitable but it was taking EA nowhere, they did not own the brands so they were not building value in the company. And they weren’t doing much for gaming.
New Electronic Arts creates original IP, which they own, they try and build quality too, by concentrating on Metacritic as an internal management yardstick. And they do interesting things. But there is a problem, the industry has moved on. In this console generation having a good game is no longer enough. Now you have to lead the genre. And that means building a brand, something that EA don’t have much practice of.
And so to Tiger Woods. This is the worst of old school EA cynicism.. They even gave it imaginative names, like Tiger Woods 2001, Tiger Woods 2003 and Tiger Woods 2005. It was a sausage factory producing distinctly average sausages. But all that has changed with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 for the Wii. They have obviously applied my rules for Wii development:
1) Don’t do shovelware. You are just damaging your brand(s).
2) Write Wii specific titles. Don’t port. You have to respect the interface difference.
3) Understand that most Wiis live in the lounge. And most other consoles live in the bedroom.
4) Polish, lots. Then polish some more.
5) Realise that you have to provide entertainment for the population at large. FPS titles are not a good idea.
6) You need to market completely differently. PR in women’s magazines will work a lot better than adverts in game magazines.
7) Talk to your wife/girlfriend. They understand the Wii better than you do.
And what they have created, using Wii MotionPlus, is the best golf video game ever. GameSpy said: “Tiger Woods 10 on the Wii is the definitive golf game. Beyond the high level of immersion from the Motion Plus controls, and the many months worth of entertaining game modes, this version welcomes the widest ever audience to a “sim” sports game. EA is leveraging the Wii perfectly.”
Electronic Arts have taken one of their tired old franchises and made it into a world beater. But they have missed a trick. They don’t need Tiger Woods any more. They could have called this John Riccitiello Golf and sold just as many. They could have built a brand that they own that they could manage and profit from for ever.
So whilst they have had an epiphany with regards to product they still have a long way to go to having the brand epiphany they need. When you own a genre with your own IP is when you have truly arrived. Call of Duty and Forza show the way.
It maybe a little strange to some of you this, but when you do an activity, a press release, a news conference, a video, a conference speech, or whatever, that activity is in itself news. If you just do the marketing activity on its own you are short changing yourself. You can leverage it to get far more, and often far more useful, coverage. Especially in these days of news media fragmentation and the interweb.
Here is a little of what you can do:
Mention it on Twitter and on Facebook and Linkedin groups and use Facebook events. It is worth searching for and joining lots of useful groups.
Talk about it on your various forums. The forum for the game, the company forum and the internal staff forum.
Write about it on your various blogs.
Tell your list of approved fansites and blogs about it.
Newsletter your opt in lists.
Talk about it in your podcast.
Add comments to relevant blog posts. Use Technorati to find them.
If appropriate release a video about the event.
Tell the marketing press about your marketing.
As you can see this is all just work. It doesn’t cost anything.
In the 1980s I was in charge of marketing at a couple of big game publishers. Imagine and Codemasters. The main market then was games for the Sinclair Spectrum. And Uncle Clive did not run a platform holder business model, he just sold machines. So the game market was a total free for all. And if you had the right skills a game could be written quickly and cheaply. So the barriers to entry in this business were very low. Which meant that there was a massive amount of competition.
In economics there is something called price elasticity of supply, which says that if there is a big supply of something the price will come down. We see this at the supermarket as different fruits and vegetables come into season. And we saw it with Sinclair Spectrum games. Eventually they came down to just £1.99 which, considering that physical product had to be manufactured, was a phenomenally low price. Also the Spectrum suffered from a huge amount of piracy, both professional counterfeiting and schoolboy duplicating, which was a further driver towards low prices.
One really brilliant effect of the Spectrum free for all was product differentiation. To be different to the competitors people would try anything that had a small chance of working. This led to an explosion in creativity and much of what we know as gaming today is descended from ideas that first surfaced then. For instance John Gibson and David Lawson at Imagine invented the Real Time Strategy genre with the game Stonkers. Certainly there was vastly more variety in Spectrum games than there is in PS3 games today.
And yet in a sea of budget £1.99 games it was still possible to succeed selling at far higher prices (at the time called full price games). Games like Daley Thompson’s Decathalon, Rambo and Miami Vice. These games were not necessarily better than the budget equivalents. But they were brands. And customers were buying more than just the game, they were buying into the brand experience, for which they were prepared to pay a multiple of the budget game price.
The same happens with the grease that women put on their faces. Scientist say that there is little or no difference between the cheapest and the most expensive. It is just grease. Yet the price difference is phenomenal. From just a few pounds for half a litre to £50 or more for a tiny pot of the stuff from the main prestige brands and many hundreds of pounds for a small pot of the most expensive stuff. And millions of women willingly spend their hard earned money on the stuff. Simply to have the brand experience. In fact they are buying 90+% brand and less than 10% product.
What is happening on the Apple App Store is going to become the standard for the industry. The other platforms are being forced to move to the App Store business model. Even major established consoles like the Sony PSP. So the flowering of creativity and downwards pressure on price will be across the board.
Which will lead to an explosion in proper marketing in the game industry. Some people think that game marketing is buying lots of advertising, preferably on television. This is part of why AAA boxed console games are so expensive. The people who do this are marketing dinosaurs. Proper marketing is a far broader and more subtle craft. We will need a lot of it if we want people to pay more than 99c for a game. And we should be starting by nurturing the concept of celebrity within the industry.
In an extensive interview John Carmack, co-founder of id Software had a lot to say about the next generation home consoles.
Like this site he is a fan of using online instead of plastic and cardboard to ship inventory: “I think that Xbox Live… the advent of that and the App Store with the iPhone are wonderful signs of the future of digital distribution. I think there’s a decent chance that one of the next gen consoles will be without optical media… the uptake rates of people who have broadband connects surprised everyone this generation. It’s higher than what the core publishers and even the first party people expected.”
As the title of this article says, he thinks that Sony will launch first: “The whole jockeying for who’s going to release the first next gen console is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of things. Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely. As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We’d like to see it be quite a few more years before the next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later.”
And he knows what will be inside these machines: “We do have a very good sense of where the technology is going because we talk to NVIDIA, we talk to Intel, we talk to ATI/AMD and they’re all pursuing variations on massive multi-core processor integration. There’s lots of interesting things about that, about how we need to think about things on the game development side to take advantage of that.”
All good stuff, and there is loads more in the videos.
My thoughts are that the PS4 and Xbox 720 will just be the application of Moore’s Law to the current consoles. So they will be about 8 times more powerful and 100% backwards compatible. They will have 2 to 4 Gbytes of memory and terabyte class hard drives. Obviously they will all come with gesture interfaces and there is a very high likelihood that they will incorporate 3D technology.
Jez San is one of the veterans who made the British video game industry. An assembly language programmer for several different processors, his first major game hit was Starglider in 1986, many others followed. He is also a chip designer, book author, online gambling expert and highly successful businessman. In 2002 he was awarded the OBE. He is also a life member of BAFTA.
Jez now owns or has interests in a range of companies in and around the gaming industry.
Perhaps we can start by setting context with you giving a very quick overview of PKR and Origin8.
pkr and origin8 are two very different companies.. with different goals, aspirations, shareholders etc.
pkr was started to make a new form of online poker that was more entertaining and shared some aspects with modern computer games… and origin8 was established to make iphone apps, including both games and non-games.
At Codemasters we discussed doing online gambling. The video game and online gambling industries seem to me to be the same thing but with different business models, yet the two industries live in different boxes, why do you think this is?
They are very different industries - enormously different but with some common skillset between them. in computer and video games, you make good games.. you spend a year or two developing the game itself.. then you put it in a shrinkwrap box, and sell it into distribution, and retail etc. some sales are online but most are at retail. the game, once sold, is the end of it. a sequel might come a few years later etc etc. there are no rules on what you’re allowed to put in your game, or who you’re allowed to sell to, except voluntary age restrictions. cheating in the game is common – either by patching it, or hacking it, or just playing in a way against the spirit of the game is all rife, and its a cat and mouse game to stop the cheaters.. but it is of little impact. people pay a fixed amount to buy the game, or a monthly amount to play the game (if online). the money flow on a computer game is out from the customer and in to the game sellers. the players do not expect to make money.
contrast all that to the online gambling industry (we call it online gaming, btw). Online gambling games, by their very nature are all about Money. Money has to be protected. Cheating in a computer game is a fact of life, because there’s little impact in being cheated. But when REAL MONEY is involved, the game has to be totally and utterly fair., as MONEY is involved. you cant afford to slip up. one lapse and it could be the end of the company.
The software must be developed by audited companies who have screened their employees. the key ones will have gone through a police criminal records check. The company will be licensed and regulated by a pukka jurisdiction like Alderney or Gibraltar and hopefully not by the light or zero regulated islands like Costa Rica, Curacao or some indian reservations etc. The better jurisdictions have a lot more regulation that must be adhered to and have the skilled operatives able to discern the legit companies and people from the faceless ones.. and the honest companies welcome the enforcement and regulation. there’s a lot of rules to comply with. all about protecting the innocent, the vulnerable and ensuring the games are fair.
Trust is everything! The honesty and compliance issues surrounding online gambling are a huge obstacle for a computer game or video game company entering the gambling market. in computer games we simply accept that there are cheats and try to avoid them. in online gambling we simply cant allow cheating of any kind, either by the company or its players. if ever a company was found cheating, its most likely because it wasn’t regulated properly in a safe and trustworthy jurisdiction.. and there weren’t enough checks and balances in place to ensure fair play. in proper jurisdictions, the software that is created is audited and validated to ensure it plays fair and doesn’t cheat. its vital that the customer trusts the game and the company that supplied it. Trust is everything. the customer is trusting that they can deposit their cash into the game – sometimes hundreds or thousands – or even tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.. and the game cannot allow cheating of any form. its essential that the customer can trust the game is fair and that they are playing against fair players. Players must be able to TRUST where they leave their MONEY and that the games are fair.
Do you think that there is anything that the game industry should be learning from online gambling?
The business model is more direct. in online gaming, the game supplier has a direct relationship with the customer. I wish that in computer games that this was true. the main reason i stopped making computer games was that the biggest negative of being a computer game developer was having to have a relationship with publishers and distributors at the expense of a relationship with the games player / customer. one day, computer games distribution techniques will allow game developers and game players to interact directly – without publishers and distributors getting in the way. and on that day, I will consider coming back to computer games and probably will enjoy it again.
I think that most online gaming companies can learn a lot from computer games companies.. in how to make the products better.. and more compelling.. and enjoyable etc. this is what pkr.com brings to the table. we have a poker game that’s more like a computer game yet a business model and compliance that is of the highest standards of the online gambling industry. pkr;s game of poker is a lot of fun..! its in full 3d, with avatars, and clothing, hairstyles, jewellery, poker tells and body language, moods and accents etc. you enjoy playing, because of the experience itself. it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, you will probably still enjoy it.. and that’s the beauty of pkr compared to the other poker sites which are 2d, top down, very dry, lots of text and numbers.. and are a very technical form of poker game.. whereas pkr is more of an entertainment experience. Also, and most importantly, PKR is all about the social play. it has a social network, like facebook, built into its front end.. and it encourages people to interact.. both in terms of chatting in-game, forums out of game.. plus having friends lists and keeping their friends up to date with their accomplishments. pkr is the most social of the online poker sites.. and that is our edge. other poker sites may let you chat but the chat window is one line big. you’re really not expected to chat. they usually don’t have forums as they don’t want their users talking to each other. they don’t have social networks or friends lists etc. pkr has carved its own niche among online poker.. in embracing the idea that people want to play poker and other gambling games for social and entertainment reasons, and NOT, simply, to make money.
The App Store has been the biggest success of any new platform in the history of video games and you are a part of it. Where do you see it going next?
The biggest advantage of the app store is its direct relationship between the game developer and the audience. that bit I love. but the biggest problem is that there are few if any channels of communication to allow the marketing of the game.. and the only way that games can rise to the top of the pile and be noticed is if they are priced cheap enough to be popular.. so right now, the model of the app store is a bit broken in that usually, only cheap games do well.. and there’s almost no way for a properly priced game – that compensates its authors for the work – to be able to do sell. of course, there’s a few exceptions, but that doesn’t make it a successful market. The App Store, itself is doing well because of the large number of apps and games available but each one isn’t selling as well as it should because of lack of visibility and lack of an ability to promote the game. but each individual game only makes thousands of dollars.. maybe a hundred thousand if you’re lucky. certainly not enough to pay back the man years of effort required to make a good game. very few Apps on the app store have earned $500k, and even less have got to $1m, yet the cost of producing a high quality iPhone game could easily get up to that level.
iPhone is not the only App based mobile platform. Android, PSP and Pre are there, amongst others. How do you see this market panning out?
I think its definitely the way to go and I’m hoping they have success. apple did a great job of wrestling away the right to distribute Apps away from the telcos and operators. for that they should be loudly applauded. mobile operators are very dumb, and full of idiots who know nothing about entertainment or games. they became too powerful and managed to deliberately stop a potential virtuous circle of App developers making apps that allow operators to sell phones and data plans. for ages, mobile operators were a disparate group that had little or no software available on their handsets, and what was available was often crap. now, with App stores.. this will change. Finally, the App creator and the consumer.. can have a direct relationship. Now we’ve just got to fix the marketing angle and lines of communication with the consumer.. and we’ll be there.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others are investing billions in the internet cloud. With MMOs and casual gaming our industry has moved in this direction. How far do you think that gaming will eventually become server based?
It makes a lot of sense for server based games. or even games hosted on servers and streamed to the users. there’s no compelling reason why the end user has to have an incredibly powerful hardware system, when all the power could be at the server end, and deliver to the user a beautiful and interactive game at full production values in real time – utilising streaming or thin client game engine.
This is an excellent way to go, for sure. not the only way, of course. there will always be games that wish to run on powerful home computers and consoles. but i think we’re going to see a lot more server based and/or streamed games in the future – now that our internet connectivity is finally getting fast and reliable. ive got 90 megs at home in london.. that’s incredible!
ARC has been a phenomenal success with cores now being manufactured in over 300 million chips a year, and you created it. How difficult is it to turn a technology idea into a successful company like this?
It was very difficult as it was such an innovative idea. ARC built a powerful and yet configurable microprocessor and allowed its customers to fine tune its instruction set. this kind of power in the customer’s hands has never been available before. We started ARC when we had just finished the Super FX chip for Nintendo. After creating several chips for people who never brought them out… (we designed the 3d engines for Philip’s CDI-2, and for an Apple games system that never came out, as well as a Hasbro VR machine…) So in the end we decided that it was too risky to be a tech house reliant on other people’s efforts to bring out the chips.. so instead, we built a completely configurable processor.. so that we can license the core technology and building blocks and let others customise them in any way they wanted to make their own products. We had some very large licensees and its likely there’s an ARC inside your laptop, and your set top box, and maybe even your camera or mobile phone. ARC’s main trouble was that it wasn’t an industry standard – like ARM – so it didn’t make enough revenue per license to make it very profitable. I don’t think its ever made a profit. I sold out of ARC in the last few years. It did well for me personally, in that – as major shareholder – i got to sell my shares for a decent amount of cash. ARC was once a Billion Pound company, and i once owned 20% of it (hence my position in the rich list in 2000-2004). Luckily I sold out with relatively good timing, and ive put some of the cash into new things like PKR and Origin8 (as well as Ninja Theory, Codeplay, MyDeco and some other cool companies).
What happened at Argonaut must have been very traumatic for you. Are there any lessons for the game industry here?
as mentioned, the whole business model of the computer game industry is wrong. Also, the power of the industry wrests with the wrong people. Those that make the games – the developers – earn the smallest piece of the pie and get the least credit. This is WRONG. no other media industry treats its content producers – aka STARS – so badly. You don’t go buy a Random House book.. you buy a JK Rowling book. You don’t buy a Sony album… you buy a Michael Jackson album. So why the fuck would you buy an EA game? Who cares who the distributor is. I’m very glad I’m not relying on the computer game industry to butter my bread. One day, the industry will get it right. The people who make the games need to be better credited and compensated. And the people who buy the games need to be educated that its not the distributor or publisher that matter but the people who created the games are why they enjoy what they’re playing. There are very few ‘Stars’ in computer games.. The Carmack’s and Molyneux’s of the world are very rare.. and there really should be a lot more.
You should be on Dragon’s Den with all your investments in young games related companies. CodePlay, Anthropics and The Chilli that I know of. Should game industry entrepreneurs looking for an angel get in touch with you?
sure.. I’m always happy to hear from bright people with passion and a good idea. Preferably they need to have it all figured out, including a business plan.. before they will get much out of me. I am looking for new investments. but I value innovation and a sound business model above most other things. experience counts too. I’ve got cash.. and I’m not planning to spend it in any way except very wisely. I will consider investing in new concepts and new ideas with good people. but always in things I understand (hair brained crackpots with crazy shit, don’t apply!).
This time it is called Wii Sports Resort, a collection of sports oriented mini games on the Wii. And it is selling something like a million units a week, in the dog days of summer. It will go on to become one of the best selling games of the year. How do they do this?
Universal appeal. I would not be ashamed to be seen playing this. But it would be a lot of fun for an 8 year old too.
Surprise and delight features. It takes imagination to come up with these, but they really add to the player experience. We need more of these in every game.
Polish, polish and polish. Why can’t other game developers and publishers do this? It doesn’t cost a lot of money, it just costs time. This really sets Nintendo first party apart.
Easy to get into. All great games are simple to start with. Chess, card games, scrabble and all the great classics do this. It is no good ramping the difficulty curve too steep too soon, you put off too many people. Think pick up and play accessibility, Nintendo do.
Difficult and rewarding in the higher levels. So it is worth putting time and effort into it. Just like chess etc etc.
Huge potential user base. There are about as many Wiis out there as there are Microsoft Xbox 360s and Sony Playstation PS3s put together. A lot of people who want good games to entertain them.
Build a brand, own your own IP. This is the obvious sequel to Wii Sports, itself a massive seller. Nintendo can milk this franchise forever. And they will.
Bundle with hardware that genuinely adds to the gaming experience. Wii MotionPlus takes Wii play to a higher level.
All the above is not rocket science, yet how come so many publishers still get it so wrong so often?
