Inevitably, and for reasons explained many times on here, the Wii bubble has finally burst. In the half year to the end of September sales were down by 40% compared with the year before. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has no option but to admit: “Wii has stalled” he even admitted that the price drop has failed to arrest the decline: “With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time”. Which was all as inevitable as night follows day.
A lot of the success of the Wii was fad. People becoming lemmings under the onslaught of peer pressure. Just like the Hula Hoop and Rubik’s Cube for previous generations. And fads have very sudden endings as the zeitgeist moves on to something new.
The Wii is a very strange and paradoxical device, its hardware capability is mainly last generation yet it boasts an innovative and compelling gesture interface. Most Wiis are bought as family toys and are little used yet it has some amazing games including possibly the stand out title of this generation, Super Mario Galaxy.
The Wii has had its popularity and life massively extended by the Balance Board and Wii Fit, but there are only so many overweight middle aged women willing to pay so much in a feeble attempt to assuage their vanity. So it looks like this market is exhausted, much to the dismay of the many publishers who thought that this was a bandwagon they could jump on. The reality is that the Balance Board is panning out as being the Reebok Step mark 2.
It doesn’t help that you can buy a vastly better machine, the Xbox 360, for less money. Even Sony have tried to be more price competitive and have improved their act in many other ways. Both these machines are introducing gesture interfaces that will finally remove the Wii’s main trump card.
We have known for a long time that the Super Wii is in the way with HD graphics and a rumoured Bluray disk drive. But this is thought to be coming some time after the middle of next year and the market needs it now. Nintendo have got their timing very wrong this time.
It has to be said that the Wii has done video gaming a massive amount of good. It has taken the medium to new markets and new demographics, vastly expanding it for everyone’s benefit. They have introduced new genres of games and extended old genres in a prodigous burst of creativity. And they have continued in their fine tradition of production values that put most of the rest of game publishing to shame.
Yesterday I was at the Best of British conference in London rubbing shoulders with the good and the great of the video game industry. And once again the stark message came over that there are some people who get it when it comes to marketing. And there are big swathes of the industry who don’t get it at all.
In the 1960s and 1970s consumer marketing was perfected by huge multinational companies that manufactured detergents for washing clothes. This is a commodity product, one detergent is much the same as another detergent. So the wise housewife will buy the one that does the job for the least money. But most housewives don’t, this is because they are victims of the marketing of the detergent manufacturers.
This form of marketing involves creating and building a brand by shouting at your potential customer. And shouting can take many forms. TV commercials, billboards and print advertising were especially popular. All that mattered was getting the brand message across. This was unbelievably inefficient and cost an absolute fortune. But the detergent companies didn’t mind because they were rolling in money. Every household needs to wash their clothes and housewives were willing to pay a hefty price premium just to buy into the brand. The other reason the detergent companies didn’t mind is because there was no alternative. It was shout at your customers or nothing. So it was a war of brand against brand (often owned by the same company) in a shouting war where the winner was the person who spent the most money.
Of course the methods, practices and techniques of the detergent wars were adopted by a wide range of other manufacturers selling an immense range of other products, even when it was patently inappropriate. And it is what a lot of the game industry, unbelievably, still does today. They needlessly throw very many millions away shouting at customers.
When it comes to consumer marketing (there are many other sorts) it is important to step back and look at what you are trying to do. Firstly you have to clearly identify who you are trying to reach, you are wasting your time trying to tell the Women’s Institute about a first person shooter. Then you have to work out the message that you want to get over to these people. Finally you need to investigate what is the most cost effective way of getting this message over to them. Now this may sound very simple and very obvious, but, unbelievably, most people spending money on marketing don’t do it.
Video games are not detergent. Video games are interesting and rouse emotions in people. This actually makes them very, very easy to market, because your customer wants to listen to what you have to say. There is no need whatsoever to shout.
Which brings us to the internet. The internet is any true marketeers dream. The ability to interact in real time with your entire global customer base is something that previous generations of marketeers could only dream about. It is as good as it can get. And the tools are free and easy to use. Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube.
So let’s look at what a game marketeer should be doing, rather than shouting at people like the dinosaurs do. The first thing to remember is that the most powerful marketing tool, by an immense margin, is word of mouth. So you want people talking about you. Then you need to actively engage with your customers and potential customers. And by engage I mean listen just as much as talk. You need to generate genuinely interesting marketing content. Blogs and videos are essential. And you need to keep on top of it, keep it fresh and continuously analyse what is happening. Easy, if you have a brain.
In this world the press release is more powerful than the advertisement, because the press release is telling people stuff that they want to know. Whereas advertisements are things that people want to ignore. Press releases tell a genuine story, they feed people’s appetite for news and they can be leveraged to reach vast audiences with key marketing messages.
So we have two distinct marketing philosophies. One the one hand the outdated, expensive detergent methodology still amazingly used by some. And the massively superior methodology of engaging with your customers which, refreshingly, more and more of the industry is gradually coming round to. The amazing thing isn’t just that engagement is better in every possible way to get the messages that you want over to the right people, it is also a whole lot cheaper.
I would like to point out to Patrick and to Train2Game and to Metropolitan International Schools Ltd that there is an automatic right of reply built into an internet blog like this. At the bottom of every post there is a comment section where they can put their side of the argument, without the need for any recourse to law. This is what most people do and it gives the reader a balanced view of the issues. I suggest that they do this.
It is a little interesting that both Gamesindustry.biz and MCV have recently released traffic details. Gamesindustry.biz at over 340K monthly uniques, MCV at over 240K monthly uniques. Now both these sites publish multiple articles every day written by multiple professional journalists. So my whimsical opinion pieces can hardly be expected to compete.
Here are the numbers that analytics are telling me for the last month of Bruceongames: Visitors 100,869, Uniques 91,014, Page views 185,954.
Imagine what they would be if I had a bit more content and a marketing budget!
There is something about video gaming that a lot of people don’t understand, especially many politicians and much of the traditional press. And that is that gaming is just another form of media. Like the ballet, television, books, opera, film, newspapers etc etc. That is all it is. Of course gaming has made most of the older media obsolete because gaming has the technical advantages of interactivity, non linearity and connectivity. These represent such a paradigm shift that it is just about impossible to convert content from the old media to games and vice versa. Gaming also has the phenomenally powerful task/reward mechanic which is what will ultimately seal its position as the main method for delivering education.
This lack of understanding of what video games are has lead to them being demonised by the ignorant. And unfortunately the ignorant include prominent politicians and newspaper editors. But it has always been so, misunderstood new media is a feature of our history. The arrival of mass literacy in Victorian Britain was followed by the penny dreadful novel which were perceived to corrupt the youth of the day. American 20th century comic books were thought to be so bad that they were investigated by the Senate Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, there were public burnings of comic books (it isn’t just Hitler!) and some cities imposed outright bans. The establishment was so frightened of the early movie industry in America that The Supreme court in 1915 removed first amendment protection from films and in 1927 the industry was so scared of external intervention that it imposed the Hays Code upon itself. And of course in more recent years television has been blamed for youth violence, loose morals, poor academic attainments and obesity, amongst a plethora of other problems.
So against this background of fear rooted in ignorance it was hardly surprising that three British charities, The British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK, wasted vast amounts of their donors money on a very silly advertising campaign demonising video games, implying that they caused early death. A totally ridiculous position. This campaign was in support of a government health advertising campaign under the Change4Life banner, but the government’s adverts were completely different using plasticine Wallace and Gromit type figures.
(As a side note some sectors of the press didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story and hysterically tried to blame the charities’ campaign on the government.)
And now we have the deepest irony, pouring total scorn on the three idiot charities Change4Life has now approved a video game, Wii Fit Plus, which will be marketed under its banner. According to the BBC: “A health department spokesman said active video games were a ‘great way’ to get kids moving.”
I think that this is a great, a fantastic, example of how quickly a lot of people are becoming educated about the reality of video games. And how using false and simplistic stereotypes no longer works. A lot of this shift in attitude comes from the democratisation of the power of the press. The centre of gravity of knowledge has moved from print and broadcast to the internet. Blogs, forums, social networking, social indexing (stumbleupon, reddit), microblogging and all the websites (like the BBC, Wikipedia, Amazon and Metacritic) that invite comment and participation are the internet. The dynamic, interactive, user generated whole that reflects the humanity that created it. We can no longer be dictated to by old media and dinosaur politicians. The world has changed for the better.
I am very, very glad that I am not in competition with Microsoft’s Xbox division. They really are grinding the opposition down. And it is not as if they are attacking on one front. No, Microsoft believe in being better in every single possible way. The Xbox 360 is now, by a huge margin, the gamer’s choice of consoles from this generation. It is cheaper to buy, has far more games available and has the best online gaming service on earth, Xbox Live. Little wonder that in September Microsoft sold $404 million of Xbox 360 hardware, software and peripherals in North America alone. A phenomenal result.
Part of the success is down to platform exclusives. Halo is massive and Halo 3: ODST has done the business again through this summer. But there is also Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction, Forza Motorsport 3 and Left 4 Dead 2 with Mass Effect 2, Gears of War 3, Crackdown 2, Halo Reach and Alan Wake to come. Relentless and formidable.
There is the constant upgrading of Live to become a media hub, with HD movie rental, Facebook, Twitter, Zune and Sky Player on the way. This makes the 360 by far the most powerful entertainment hub that you can connect to your television. And it is a lesson to everyone that Microsoft are a software company, they see the Live service as being infinitely more important than the 360. The 360 is just the current box of choice, there will ultimately be far more that can use the service.
Also, quietly but persistently, Microsoft are moving content distribution away from the physical plastic and cardboard sold at retail. Online is the future and Microsoft are already there. They keep adding to the number of game titles that can be directly downloaded with a new batch just released including Army of Two, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, and Sonic Unleashed. Microsoft are making the transition gradually so as to wean both retail and consumers to the new reality. But the rumours are that the Xbox 3/ Xbox 720 / Project Phoenix will be a download only device.
As if the weren’t enough we have Project Natal on the way. An implementation of gesture interface technology that is a quantum leap beyond anything else. This will bring infinite new possibilities to how humans interact with video games and the whole online world. New levels on immersiveness will transform the potential of the medium. We are about to make a paradigm shift of epic proportions.
