I have been prompted to write this by a leader column in the Economist and it is something I have alluded to in previous articles. This is something that has been brought about by changes in the technology of production and of distribution. It is something that will increase further with time. And it is something that effects all popular media. Consumers are buying massive block busters and they are buying niche products. But increasingly they aren’t buying anything else.
In video games the blockbuster are titles like Grand Theft Auto, Halo and Modern Warfare. They are primarily on current generation home consoles. And they can be the biggest media launch events on earth, now running up to half a billion dollars at retail in just a few days. They are more than just games now, they are events in popular culture that touch on many millions of people. And whilst these are good games, this is not what makes them succeed. This is easy to prove because there are equally good games that don’t become blockbusters. And the non blockbuster games sell a fraction of the numbers.
So the games that make it to blockbuster status and the ones that don’t, being of similar quality, cost pretty much the same to make. But there is an immense difference in revenues. The non blockbuster may only take a few million dollars whilst the blockbuster will take many hundreds of millions. So it has become a very high risk marketplace where a single game can make you a fortune, or a thumping loss. Which is a major reason why certain publishers are posting thumping losses.
Of course the defining factor of what makes a blockbuster is principally marketing. In this case manipulating mass conciousness to make a new game a global event of some excitement and importance. The Zeitgeist must be caught, or more correctly, manufactured. People must feel left out when they are not a part of it. And this is not about spending money to create this, it is about marketing as a craft.
If you publish a niche game you are entering a market with many thousand, maybe tens of thousands of niche games. What defines yours is, quite simply, the niche that it is in. So, having walled yourself into a niche it is impossible to attract massive launch sales. But you do have something that the old high street retail model didn’t offer. You have a long tail. As popularised in the book by Chris Anderson. Effectively your sales could continue for ever.
This requires marketing. Remember that zero marketing results in zero sales. But niche games require a different kind of marketing. You need to target the people in your niche. And you need a substantial and permanent online presence, so that people who could be interested will always find your title.
So if you are involved in the game industry in any way ask yourself the question, am I making a blockbuster or a niche title. And if the answer is neither then you are certainly wasting your time. We have seen this as middle ranking publishers with middle ranking titles flounder in the marketplace when a decade ago they could have made a respectable living.
Well, I must say that I am amazed at this. Someone has put a lot of time and money into forensically examining the truth behind Evony. And Evony’s lies are exposed open for everyone to see.
This is really interesting stuff from Doug Creutz of Cowen Group in Gamsutra. He has done some research and analysis which has resulted in this list of the top 7 reasons people buy a video game, in priority order. But be a bit cynical here, it is very well known that people tend to tell market researchers what they think that the market researchers want to hear. But nevertheless this is important stuff for everyone in the industry to know.
Genre. If someone likes first person shooters they aren’t going to buy a needlepoint game. Makes sense to me and you can see that it applies to the older media too, such as books and films.
If players enjoyed an earlier version of the game. The power of brand. But beware, it is important that you maintain the quality of what you publish under a brand name or you can come unstuck. Just ask Lara Croft. But done well it is a license to print money, just look at Modern Warfare, Grand Theft Auto and Halo for your inspiration.
Price. Ah yes, people have to work to earn the money that they spend. And they have lots of choices about how to spend that money. Console games are probably too expensive this generation for the health of the market and people are taking their spend elsewhere. If PS3 and Xbox 360 games were cheaper the market would be a lot bigger.
Word of mouth. This is why marketeers need to create a buzz and why community marketing is so important. People trust what they are told by people they know far more than they trust what a company tells them directly.
Marketing visuals. The industry put a lot of effort into this during the cardboard and plastic retail distribution era, even if the imagery sometimes got a bit over derivative. But now we have moved to online a lot of people seem to have forgotten this. How many iPhone games have great marketing imagery, for instance.
Publisher reputation. Always was worth very little. Sometimes hardly worth printing on the pack. All the effort that went into trying to create EA Sports as a brand when they should have been working on word of mouth.
Review scores. Oh how I laughed. All those self obsessed journalists and their precious review scores and it doesn’t matter. Can Edge magazine survive this? And John Riccitiello’s obsession with Metacritic shown to be a false fixation.
This list is based on facts and methodology. These are companies that: declare their current-liabilities as greater than 20 million UK pounds on their last published accounts, but where their declared profits are less that one million pounds.
And as you can see, the methodology was sound, several of these companies are no longer with us. I wonder if any more of them are due to fail?
The first are those who don’t know how difficult it is but do it anyway, only to usually fail. Obviously these people don’t last long in business. They had nearly died out until the low cost of entry to iPhone publishing brought whole new swathes of innocents to the slaughter.
The second are those who know exactly how difficult it is so they don’t do it. Instead they churn out sequels and publish their IP on every single platform imaginable. This can make you money, but every brand has a lifecycle, so they are not building any value for the future.
The third group are those who understand the importance and value of creating new brands. They use hard work, skill and craft to nurture their offspring in the world. They persevere through adversity and toil till they have built something of true value.
The biggest problem it when a publisher (let’s say EA) tries to make the transition from the second group above to the third. If a marketing team has lured themselves into the easy security of sequels and licensed products then a new, original IP will come as a complete culture shock. They need to create brand values that have resonance and which work in the market. They need to communicate totally new ideas and concepts to a global audience. The challenge is vast. But then it is never easy to build true value.
At Codemasters I worked on several brand new IPs that went on to be massive sellers and chart successes, the Dizzy series and Flashpoint, for instance. In the early 2000s we had a load of established franchises that were regular money in the bank: Colin McRae, LMA Football Manager, TOCA/Race Driver, Snooker, Music, Micro Machines etc. But we went through a phase of introducing a new brand, of doing all the hard work, then not following it up. Obviously Flashpoint is the most famous of these (an 8 year gap between releases!!), but there were others like Severance Blade of Darkness, Prisoner of War, Insane, Second Sight and Perimeter. All of which needed nurturing and treating as a brand, but which weren’t. So much lost potential.
On the face of it the Vitality Sensor is a very simple device that reads your pulse. It then sends this information, in a continuous stream, to your Wii console. This is called biofeedback. The console knows what effect it is having on you and can adapt what it does accordingly. The potential applications are infinite, limited only by the imagination of the development community. It is possibly the cleverest video game input device ever.
Biofeedback is an area of science of some respectability which is currently going through a boom. The Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback (AAPB) is the main body in the world advancing this science. Their website says: Biofeedback has evolved from a fascination in the 1960s and 70s to a mainstream methodology today for treating certain medical conditions and improving human performance. This evolution has been driven by years of scientific research demonstrating that the mind and body are connected, and that people can be taught to harness the power of this connection to change physical activity and improve health and function.
If you have any imagination you will be beginning to see the potential now. The Vitality sensor could be used as a pure gaming device, or as a pure health device. Or knowing Nintendo they will find some amazingly innovative way for it to do both.
Biofeedback in gaming goes back a long way. In about 1973 there was the bio-mechanical Will Ball Games from Charles Wehrenberg, which was about competitive relaxation. In 1984 he implemented it on the Apple 2 computer. He even wrote a novel about it which you can still buy at Amazon. In 2001 a company called Journey to Wild Divine created biofeedback hardware and software for the Apple Mac and Microsoft Windows. They are still at it and make a good starting point for anyone in the game industry trying to get up to speed. They say: With just a few minutes of practice each day, Wild Divine’s products can transform your computer into a beautiful and engaging experience of relaxation and balance, helping you to increase your energy level, restore balance and improve your ability to connect to the world around you in profound ways.
And Nintendo themselves have previous. In 1998 they release the N64 biosensor, which clipped onto the game player’s ear and read their pulse. This was used in a game called Bio Tetris which was a game within Tetris 64, which was only available in Japan. IGN reviewed an import copy of the game and they had this to say: When playing in Bio Tetris mode, there are two basic settings for the feedback function. Normal makes the game easier if you get more excited (or nervous), resulting in slower dropping pieces and a more relaxed gamer. Reverse, or maybe they should call it “heart attack” speeds up the pace of the game as your heart accelerates. While this may all sound incredibly exciting, it really isn’t all that great. Truth to be told, the bio sensor is a neat little gimmick for health freaks, but it doesn’t really add much to the whole gameplay experience. It’s a cool extra, but we wouldn’t want to pay extra to get it.
The fundamental of what we are talking about here is how the human animal connects with the electronic gaming machine. The man machine interface. The ultimate aim must be something like Tron, or the Holodeck out of Star Trek. In the meantime the available input and output methods available to us are pretty crude. This is why the gesture interface (also popularised by Nintendo with the Wii) has had such a huge impact on gaming recently. And it is why biofeedback could be of great significance to gaming. Whether it is or not depends solely on the creativity, imagination and vision of those creating the software that uses it.
It is not just the immersiveness of gaming we are talking about here. It is an expansion in the range of possibilities. Video games will be able to do far more things with biofeedback. So it could be a further step on the inevitable road to gaming being the dominant form of popular culture. And because it is Nintendo that is doing it my expectations are very high.
Now Sony have come out with their 3D plans and they are really going for it. Which makes a lot of sense to me. This forms a part of their overall corporate strategy and is not just limited to video games. Their corporate goal is a “Target revenue from 3D-related products of more than 1 trillion yen (excluding content) in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013″. So they are being pretty ambitious.
When it comes to the Playstation PS3 they have already demonstrated 3D gaming with Wipeout HD and Gran Turismo 5. In 2010 they plan to upgrade the PS3 firmware to enhance it’s 3D capabilities. In fact Sony list 3D as one of the 5 key advantages of the PS3. The other four being Motion Controller, Blu-ray disk, PlayStation Network and PSP Linkage.
It has to be said that Motion Controller and PlayStation Network are not really advantages when Microsoft’s equivalent offerings are both currently looking superior.
Back to 3D and Howard Stringer has predicted that3D games, pictures and movies will be the next ten billion dollar business for Sony. This is brave. They could end up with a competitive advantage that brings them back to being market leaders in several areas. Or the public may not think that the advantages are sufficient.
One thing that is of note for the video game side of this is that 3D eats into the system resources of any platform it is on. So, assuming that the system is running close to it’s capabilities, there has to be a trade off. There could well be a reduction in other elements of the game. Remember too that a gesture interface (motion controller) also eats into resources and you can see that there is a problem here. Using 3D with a gesture interface will be massively immersive, but we may have to wait for the PS4 generation versions to see the full realisation of the capabilities.
It is really good news for everyone in the video game industry to see Sony going for it again, we need the enterprise and innovation that they have brought to previous platform generations.
