I worked on the original Operation Flashpoint at Codemasters (I am even in the game!). At the time we were mainly a console publisher and were being hammered by PS1 piracy and the console transition. Things were so bad that 20% of the entire workforce were made redundant. And there was nearly zero marketing budget for Operation Flashpoint. So we concentrated on the online community and PR. And we got Flashpoint to number one in every country with a chart (and presumably loads more as well). So it pretty much saved the company.
That was way back in 2001. We had created a world class gaming brand. Yet, amazingly, no sequel has yet been released. This must be one of the most successful attempts not to make money in the history of the games industry. When I left Codemasters in 2005 I was sure that Operation Flashpoint was the biggest brand that the company owned, more valuable than all it’s other brands put together. And I was sure that it was possible to build a world class publisher on the back of it. But it is now 8 long years since the original release.
But, after many delays, we are promised that a sequel will be released this autumn, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. An opportunity for Codemasters to take on the world. But there is a big problem and that problem is Modern Warfare 2, the latest Call of Duty title, which will be released at around the same time.
Modern Warfare 2 is published by Activision, the world’s biggest game publisher. The Call of Duty brand first surfaced in 2003 to critical acclaim, scoring 91% on Metacritic and 92% on Game Rankings. Activision have milked the brand with four main versions and numerous expansion packs and spin offs. The fourth version was called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and was the catalyst for splitting the brand in two. Going forward Call of Duty and Modern Warfare will be two separate brands.
So the marketing team at Activision have done the exact opposite of what Codemasters have done. They have milked the Call of Duty brand for every penny possible and built it into one (or two!) of the world’s greatest game franchises. For example Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released in Q4 2007 (with Metacritic and Game Rankings both giving it 94%) and so far has sold around 13 million units, making it one of the world’s biggest selling games.
As you can see things are very interesting. Can Codemasters revive the Flashpoint brand and take on Modern Warfare 2? Or will they just be struggling for the crumbs that fall of the edge of the Activision table?
I have possibly mentioned before about the real world people (including myself) who lent their likenesses to characters within the worldwide number one game Operation Flashpoint in 2001. This garnered us significant publicity as our local MP, James Plaskitt agreed to be in the game when visiting me at Codemasters. A successful marketing ploy. Now someone has kindly sent me a link to a montage of the faces used.
I have written on here before about the Dizzy brand. It is one of the biggest ever video game brands in Europe and especially in the UK. There is a whole generation out there who are aware of the Dizzy brand. I am especially proud because I did the marketing that created the sales and built the brand. Though this was made a lot easier by the fantastic games the Oliver twins created. I am less pleased about the silly feuding that killed the brand off in its prime and the lack of vision to bring it back.
There is still a big and active Dizzy community out there, 20ish years after the event. A testament to the enduring quality of this brand. And the purpose of this little article is to publicise this by letting you see an email I received:
Hello Bruce,
I’m Alexandru Simion, author of the DizzyAGE engine. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a set of tools designed to create classic Dizzy adventure games:
Every year we have an Easter competition bringing in new and wonderful fan made Dizzy games. This year we’re happy to have The Oliver Twins among the sponsors. As in 2008, they offering three invitations to their Blitz Games Studios.
I saw your blog post about how you tried to put The Olivers and Code Masters together to bring Dizzy back and I’m sorry it didn’t work. When we visited them last year, Philip and Andrew told us how much they wanted to reach an agreement with Code Masters. Well, maybe one day we’ll see it done.
I was also wondering if, considering your interest in Dizzy games, you are willing to have a post in your blog, about DizzyAGE and our competition. It will probably bring in more people and who knows maybe some of them are going to create some great Dizzy games. If you need more details, please let me know.
Every day the average person is bombarded with thousands of marketing images: on the bus, the train, in magazines and newspapers, on television, the web and in just about everything they do. It is a total onslaught. Obviously virtually all this imagery is ignored. We have become so shell shocked that we learn to create powerful filters in our minds that prevent all this unwanted imagery getting in. So most of the time most marketing spend is wasted.
Of course when we are working on the other side of the fence we want to get past these powerful filters and get our marketing messages into the minds of our potential customers. And the way to do it is creativity. Just take TV adverts that you have seen recently and ask yourself which ones you remember. The answer is always the most creative ones. This is why creativity is the most important talent that a marketeer can have. And it is why me too marketing and marketing by rote are an almost complete waste of money, they don’t have what it takes to get past those filters.
However there are dangers in creativity. The main one is being too clever and creating a great advert but failing to get over the key messages and the brand. This happens all the time. There are quite a few great TV adverts I have seen that have caught my attention but I cannot remember what they are for.
So here is an exercise for you. Get a game magazine that covers your sector of the marketplace and get three felt pens of different colours. Firstly go through the magazine with one pen and write physically on each advert a score out of ten for creativity. So if is something that really catches your attention give it a ten and if it is yet another piece of me too drivel give it a zero.
Next take a different colour felt pen and go through the magazine and score every advert again, this time for getting key messages and brand across. Features and benefits.
Finally go through the magazine with a third felt pen and score according to how likely you are to want to play the game after seeing the advert. So now you have three numbers written on every advert.
To make it more interesting get one or more colleagues to do the same exercise on the same magazine. With no consultation allowed between participants. Then have a meeting going through the adverts one by one justifying to each other the scores that you have given.
You will now be empowered. If you have done this right you now know exactly what you have to do to be better than your competitors at getting past those filters and selling more games. So less of your budget is wasted.
In February 2008 the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl (SSBB) on the Wii was being treated by some sectors of the game playing community as if it were the second coming. They were little short of hysterical about how this was the greatest thing ever and how it would dominate the market for the year.
Against this background I wrote an article on here putting SSBB into context. It is a truly excellent game (currently it is the fourth best Wii game on Metacritic with 93), which is something that gaming always needs. And though I said it would be massive I said that it would not be one of the biggest games of 2008, just like Super Mario Galaxy (metacritic 97) hadn’t been one of the biggest games the year before, and for the same reason. The Wii is mainly owned by very casual game players and SSBB is a game for serious game players. So there is a mismatch of the game against the owners of the platform it was on.
I went on to say that many gamers games on the HD consoles would do better than SSBB on the Wii and that casual games, such as Wii Fit, would do better than SSBB on the Wii. In fact I said that Wii Fit would still be in the charts long after SSBB was forgotten. All this was sensible analysis based on my knowledge of the market and experience.
The article set off an amazing tirade of abuse from the fanboys. The article received vast numbers of comments from them, most of which were personally rude and abusive towards me. Obviously I deleted them. But I left a lot of the non abusive comments for posterity just so people can see how misguided fanboys are. The ignorant abuse wasn’t limited to here, it was elsewhere on the interweb. Just look at this thread on VGChartz for example.
But now it is nearly a year later and we can look back at what actually happened in the market. I was right and the fanboys were wrong. In the UK all formats chart for the year SSBB only managed to come 36th. And like I said would happen it was beaten by lots of gamers games on the HD consoles. GTA IV at number 3, for instance. And the casual games on the Wii massively outperformed SSBB. Mario Kart at number 2 and Wii Fit at number 5 for the year, for example. And as I pointed out, these casual games keep selling for far longer, Wii Fit is currently the number one best selling game in the UK.
So the fanboys have egg all over their faces. Will they be contrite and apologise for their abuse? Will they revisit their thread on VGChartz to say how wrong they were? Hardly likely, is it?
The fact remains that the Wii is a brilliant toy and so the vast majority of its users are casual, but when it comes to serious gaming the Xbox 360 is by far the best console, with the PS3 also being significantly better. And you don’t have to take my word for it, just look at what the serious gamers on rllmuk forum are saying.
Britain has produced some of the best game development talent in the world. Partly because of our creative, inventive and anarchic national psyche. And partly because of Clive Sinclair who made a whole generation of schoolboys understand assembly level programming. So you will find expatriate Brits in just about every game development studio in the world.
And Britain once owned some of the best development and publishing companies in the world. Much of the development of gaming as an entertainment medium happened in Britain because of these companies. At one stage it looked like we were gunning to become the number one nation in the global game industry.
So lets look at the reality today. Most of the British development and publishing industry is foreign owned. And the industry is not growing anything like it is growing in other countries. After many years of holding the number three slot behind America and Japan we have now been relegated to fourth by the Canadians. But we won’t be fourth for long, soon we will be sixth as the video game industry ramps up massively in Korea and China.
And you all know what caused this national disaster, firstly some abysmal management (many of whom I have met and some I have worked with) and apathetic government (which I dealt with for years). The brilliant development talent was badly let down. Lions led by donkeys. Which is why so many of them voted with their feet and emigrated to lands where their talents are better appreciated. When I go to Linkedin people search and put Codemasters (where I once worked) as the company and Canada as the country it brings up a list of people who I once worked with in Warwickshire who now add value to the Canadian economy.
But despite the awfulness of the current situation there is a time of opportunity coming up that could reverse our fortunes. The first is that most other industries are in a dire state. Only gaming and government bureaucracy are thriving. So lots and lots of really talented people are being made redundant and coming onto the job market. Which means that we can pick and choose the best. We have an opportunity to replace amateur marketing and management with top level proven professionals with the ability to dynamically propel our industry forward. An influx of talent could be the blood transfusion that the withering body of British gaming needs.
The second opportunity is that this loathsome, ordurous, abysmal, execrable, abhorrent, incompetent Labour government will soon be gone. And with them the reliance on the City to be the engine of the British economy. The incoming Conservatives cannot possibly be as bad. They only need to be reasonably competent to be unimaginably massively better. And with them should come a more balanced view of the British economy. Especially bringing much needed emphasis to manufacturing and to knowledge based industries. And gaming is a knowledge based industry.
The British are brilliant at knowledge based industries. In fact much of what the City did was a knowledge based industry. It was just misapplied to high stakes gambling instead of to goods and services that people really want and need. And there are a plethora of world class knowledge based companies that prosper in Britain despite the best efforts of the loathsome, ordurous, abysmal, execrable, abhorrent, incompetent Labour government. Companies like ARM, Ricardo, Atkins, WPP and so many more. We have a fantastic heritage and foundation on which to build and any government would be foolish not to.
So who could make sure that we take advantage of these two massive opportunities? Who will be the catalyst to be at the centre of things and make sure that UK gaming prospers as it could and should? The answer of course could well be the trade associations, ELSPA and TIGA. But do they have the clout and intellectual horsepower to do the job? Time will tell. Really, as I have said many times before, we need a Games Council just as all the other creative industries have their Councils to promote them and look after their interests.
And will this happen, will the British game publishing and development step out of the gloom into a bright sunny upland of opportunity, jobs, profit and contribution to the national economy? Despite the fact that they very well could I doubt that it will happen. Firstly the amateur management are well entrenched and know their limitations, so they see anyone with competence as a threat. They don’t realise that the key to success is to always employ people better than yourself. And I see no evidence that the incoming Conservative government realise the economic importance of the games industry. Everything their senior members say about games is negative, misinformed and plain ignorant.
Everyone knows that you sell more of something when it is cheaper, the economists call it price elasticity of demand. So in the days of budget games for 8 bit home computers we sold, quite literally, millions of games. At one stage at Codemasters we had over 27% of the total UK game market.
But there was also another mechanism coming into play here. At the time piracy was rampant. Vastly more games were being stolen using tape to tape copying than were being bought. But the budget games were so cheap at £1.99 (later £2.99) that they were hardly worth copying. For a bit of pocket money you could have the real thing.
Fast forward to today and we have a retail boxed PC game sector that is being torn to shreds by the thieves. Many publishers have abandoned the market, sharply reducing the amount of new titles available. And the price mechanism is in play. These games are sold for lower prices than their console equivalents. Partly because there is no license fee to pay to a platform holder and partly to give better value to discourage piracy. But even this is not working.
Because PC games are not controlled by a platform holder the publisher can do what he wants. This means that they can have a second bite at the market by re-releasing games at budget when the full price sales have died down. This is good because even people who have stolen the game previously will be tempted to splash out a small amount to own the real thing. Also it has the benefit of damping down the secondhand market, which has to be good from the publishers point of view. So PC budget gaming has grown to be a significant part of the market.
But now we are seeing a significant shift. Increasingly publishers are not bothering trying to sell a game at full price. Piracy has just made this a waste of time. Instead publishers are going straight to budget. So we are now in exactly the same position as we were with 8 bit home computer games on cassette. Budget has become the only viable business model for stand alone boxed PC games at retail.
