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.
At Codemasters, just a few year ago, most successful games contained some sort of license: MTV Music, Colin McRae Rally, LMA Manager, DTM and TOCA Racing, Micro Machines, American/Pop Idol, Pete Sampras Tennis, World Championship Snooker, Brian Lara Cricket etc etc. It was a formula and it worked but Codemasters was not building much equity in its own brands whilst it was paying a lot to build other people’s brands.
Jim Darling, the company chairman, had an interesting take on this, he thought that all these brands should have been paying us for the exposure they were receiving. And he had a point, more people worldwide probably knew of Colin McRae from the games than they did from his rallying (which is actually a niche motorsport).
So it is interesting that Codemasters (with the exception of the high risk F1 game) have moved away from these licenses. Colin McRae is morphing into Dirt and TOCA into Grid, for instance, brands that Codemasters owns/will own and can build equity in.
And it is not just Codemasters that has done this. It is a massive industry trend. Electronic Arts for instance was once license central with Harry Potter, James Bond, Lords of the Rings and a whole raft of other licenses as their bread and butter. Now they have moved to publishing their own IP and making their own brands. This is industry wide as any examination of the charts, compared with just a few years ago, will tell you.
Now some of this is the big global film companies getting into gaming and so pulling back the licenses for their own use. Some of it is conscious decisions by managers to build equity in their businesses by owning and building brands. And some of it is the fact that the game industry is big and strong enough now not to need to ride on anyones coat-tails. Especially the coat-tails of old media which is in rapid decline.
The big problem for the industry is that this switch really is a different business model and there is much to learn about building and managing brands. So marketing becomes a lot more sophisticated with the need to communicate core brand values to the consuming public. This business model transition has caught some publishers out, which is one of the main reasons we are seeing publisher losses at the peak of the cycle. But in the long term it confers massive advantages to the whole industry. We are growing up.
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.
