Entries Tagged 'Anecdotal musing' ↓

Codemasters never saw their IP as being brands. Throughout their entire history there are a huge number of great one off games that never saw a sequel. Instead the focus was always on games as stand alone products with the occasional, rare, sequel. Perhaps the only exceptions were LMA, which by it’s very nature demanded annual iterations and the two externally developed games, Snooker and MTV, where Codemasters was just the publisher of someone else’s brand. This lack of brand management made the company far less efficient and far less profitable than competitors.

Statistically a new IP has very small chance of success. It is the repeated brands that make the money. Yet Codemasters published mainly new IP. Games which never saw a sequel. Games like Prisoner of War , Second Sight, Blade of Darkness, Insane and Shoot to Kill. If you look at a full list you can see how difficult they made things for themselves.

Micro Machines was a brand licensed from Galoob toys with whom Codemasters had a very good relationship. It was Galoob who had made the Game Genie the number one toy in America one holiday season. Micro Machines the game did well so Codemasters did a sequel, then another one, V3. V3 on PSX was a fantastic game and a great commercial success. It was fun in the way a good Wii game is today and became a cult favourite for gangs of students to play after the pub. So in an amazing display of brand misunderstanding Codemasters decided to drop the license from Galoob and do without for the fourth game of the series. So Micro Maniacs was born. And unsurprisingly it bombed. This was especially bad because it involved disbanding an internal development team.

Operation Flashpoint was a number one in every country with a chart including the USA, a first for Codemasters. Released in 2001 it has even now not seen a sequel. This is almost unbelievable, you could have built a company far bigger than what Codemasters is now on this brand alone.

Dizzy, I have covered this on here before.12 out of Codemasters 60 number one games had the word Dizzy in their title. It was bigger than Mario. Then they fell out with the Oliver twins, who wrote the games, in a way that meant that nobody could make any more Dizzys. One again, if Dizzy had kept going and been managed properly it would now be a brand far bigger than Codemasters and Blitz combined. To me it is incomprehensible that this was allowed to happen. The parties involved shot themselves in the foot with a tactical nuke.

Anyone who has any involvement with brand management will find all this almost unbelievable. But it is true.

You could use this story in a marketing textbook of how not to do it.

In 2003 Pop Idol was the biggest TV show in the UK and American Idol the biggest in the USA. They were watched avidly by tens of millions of people and the buzz about them was incredible. Contestants became instant celebrities and their music went straight to number one in the charts. It was a social phenomenon.

So when Codemasters had the opportunity to publish a game based on the TV programme it looked like a sure fire hit and the directors snapped it up on PS2 and PC. It was going to cost a huge amount of money for the game and for the license but the brand was so massive that we were sure to make a mint. Extra reassurance came from the success of the game of the TV programme Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The Idol programmes were far bigger so our game would be even more successful.

We went to the 2003 E3 and paid a fortune for the B list celebrities from the TV programme to briefly visit the booth. There was a huge scrum of TV cameras as we had our moment of being the biggest thing in the show. It was widely predicted that we would be a guaranteed Christmas number one on both sides of the Atlantic. 

But the game itself was a total heap of rubbish. When I first saw it I thought “Is that it?”, I thought the demonstration was just a mini game and was waiting to see the main game. It was a dire rhythm matching effort that was not as good as many thousands of web games that you can play for free. It was embarassing to charge people to play it and it was amazing that the platform holders agreed to manufacture it. One of the worst games ever published.

From a marketing point of view we adopted the strategy of not letting the press see the game. We knew that it would get slaughtered. So they could only get their hands on it when it was published which we hoped would minimise the damage. And when they did review it they said what we already knew, Official Playstation Magazine gave it one point out of five which, quite frankly, flattered the game.

Of course nobody could stop the word getting round that Idol was so incredibly awful. The game bombed, which is what it deserved. A million miles away from those Christmas number one predictions. And many millions of pounds were thrown away.

Codemaster owned one of the very first MMORPGs, The Realm. It made steady revenues but was getting a bit dated, so was unlikely to set the world on fire. Codemaster’s directors watched as Ultima Online and Everquest built massive subscriber bases and made mountains of money. They wanted some of this.

The first thing that happened is that Mythic approached Codemasters and asked us if we would like to publish Dark Ages of Camelot in Europe. So one person was asked to review the game. He reported back that it was just Everquest light. So the directors said no thank you to Mythic. And threw away a fortune.

The next plan was to take on the big MMORPGs, but in typical Codemasters manner this was to be done on the cheap. The Realm was going to be upgraded. From 2D to 3D, for instance. And then we could take on the world.

So a very small team got to work. After a while it grew a little bigger. And bigger. They decided that upgrading The Realm was a blind alley and that an all new game was needed. Dragon Empires was born. And the team got even bigger. All this without proper management or marketing analysis of what they were doing or any strict budgetary control. It just absorbed money. And the months became years and the team became even bigger.

Our marketing philosophy was to start building interest in a game 12 months before street date. So we announced Dragon Empires in September 2001, a dedicated community manager was appointed, a stream of press releases was created and we went to E3 with it in spring 2002. A year later, inevitably, we were back at E3, this time with an amazing video (cut down version here) which had cost a fortune to make. But the game was no nearer to completion. We started recruiting beta testers. Over 120 thousand of them (marketing had done it’s job right). But there was nothing  to beta test.

Within Codemasters the whole project became a standing joke. Everyone knew it was going nowhere except the directors. It was a bottomless pit into which successive millions of pounds were being poured. Even marketing started to lose the will to maintain the charade. The community manager left. And still the team became bigger.

Then Codemasters recruited a new financial director (CFO) who did a full and proper analysis of what was happening with Dragon Empires. And he couldn’t believe it. So he reported to the board and they has a collective apoplectic fit. They had sleepwalked into disaster when all around them watched. Trying to do something on the cheap had ultimately cost a fortune.

And, in September 2004, that was the end of Dragon Empires.

One upon a time Codemasters had a great football management game called LMA manager. It was the best selling game of it’s type on console and annually a new version improved on what had gone before, sold well and made a profit. Guaranteed money in the bank every year. The head of the studio Simon Prytherch ran a tight team and had a clear vision of where the game was going long term. All was well with the world.

A part of LMA manager that made it more suited to consoles than the spreadsheet type management games on PC was the actual playing of games. You made all your decisions then watched the results play out. Every year this got better with features like touchline shouts etc introduced. Then someone senior had a very silly idea. They thought that they could use this as a cheap and cheerful engine for a football action game. That we could take on Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) and FIFA, both excellent and well established games, with this management game football engine.

Then it got worse, a lot worse. To give us a unique selling proposition (USP) over our competitors it was decided to make multiple versions of the game, each club specific. So at a cost of many millions we signed up Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich, AC Milan, Arsenal, Ajax, Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Chelsea, Inter Milan, Leeds, Glasgow Rangers, Celtic, Borussia Dortmund, Aston Villa and Hamburg. Each version had the identical mechanics with a pile of club specific window dressing to appeal to the fans, supposedly.

So we had a marketing problem. In fact a marketing impossibility. Each game was intended for a different fanbase so we needed to market each individually into that fanbase. It would have needed 17 marketing teams and 17 marketing budgets. And all the money had been spent on the licenses. And the game was rubbish, really rubbish because of it’s management game roots. And we had vastly better, stronger, well established competitors in PES and FIFA. It was doomed and many of us could see that it was doomed from the very beginning.

So it bombed at retail, nobody wanted to buy it. And there was the collateral damage, Codemasters had a brand identity built on many years of great product quality, this game did massive damage to that Codemasters brand, something it may never recover from. And many millions of pounds were poured down the grid. And, unfortunately, Simon Prytherch left the company, so we lost a great talent.

Next week is Codemasters season here at Bruceongames. A series of articles look at some of the product disasters that cost the company fortunes and which, ultimately, led to it being owned by venture capitalists.

Codemasters has a unique place in the history of the gaming industry. Surviving 20 years as a family company through multiple platform transitions and economic cycles to become a business that innovated and published some outstanding entertainment.

I first joined in 1985, just after the start when they were in a small industrial unit in Banbury. The total workforce was Jim, David, Richard and Abigail Darling, Ann Pinkham on sales and me. This grew to a $100 million a year company with 400 employees and offices around the world. An incredible achievement.

In the beginning Codemasters published budget (£1.99) games on cassette for 8 bit home computers. We succeeded in getting in excess of a 27% total market share in the first year of trading, the foundation that all future success was built on. Then came the Amiga and ST. Then self manufactured console cartridges and the Game Genie. Before settling down to become a mainstream publisher.

Codemasters was built on a foundation of exceptional people. The entry IQ test ensured that you never had to deal with thickies (at least in development) and created an espirit de corps of like minded people achieving great things. There was never a lot of money thrown around (Jim Darling was far too good a businessman for that). So teams tended to be small, using their brains to come up with clever and elegant solutions. Some of the best product was when John Hemingway was development director and I think he did a fantastic job in the difficult balance between budget and creativity. Product wise it was largely downhill after he left, as the declining review scores (and chart successes) showed.

Very many people in the game industry throughout the world owe their careers to Codemasters. Certainly for a very long time having Codemasters in your CV opened a lot of doors. And with years of graduate recruitment and a willingness to promote people out of QA it was a great industry first stepping stone. At it’s peak Codemasters had a very low staff turnover, going to work anywhere else represented a step down.

But Codemasters is no longer a family company. This series of articles looks at some of the product disasters that made this inevitable. Mistakes that cost tens of millions of pounds in wasted money and lost opportunity. There were other disasters too, in employing the wrong people in senior positions and in setting up whole un-needed departments on the development side that were just ego trips. To go into these would involve apportioning blame. And though I, obviously, know where much of that lies, it is not something for here and now.

Here are the videos of the demise of Imagine. I hadn’t seen them for ages. They show the point at which game piracy destroyed the full priced 8 bit game industry. This led to the budget game era. Priced at £1.99 these were too cheap for people to then be bothered with copying them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K677jEFgSug

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78A_0HTR5E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afRu2zeBi60

When I first joined Codemasters in 1985 it was a new company and I was in charge of all marketing. As we were selling budget games for £1.99 each there was not much money to spend on anything. So I had to get the absolute maximum out of every marketing penny. Public relations became the core tool, it is just so cost effective.

The idea was to go for the broadest coverage in mass popular media with stories based on the youth and success of the Darling brothers. But which PR company could be trusted with this great story and my precious budget? Previous experience had told me that these companies vary greatly in what they deliver.

So I hit upon a crafty plan. I rang journalists who covered more mature popular culture industries such as popular music and film. And across a few different media including national daily newspapers, TV and radio. I chatted to all these journalists and asked them which PR companies looked after them well and gave them good stories. Gradually a picture emerged of a very small number of PR companies that delivered. And of these one was head and shoulders above the others. Lynne Franks. Who, famously, later became the real life person that Absolutely Fabulous was based on.

Lynne Franks were incredibly professional, hardworking and slightly zany. They also delivered massive results. Soon David and Richard were in every Sunday newspaper colour supplement with multi page features, they were regulars on weekend kids TV and they had become minor celebrities. I was still doing the specialist press PR myself and this new found fame made doing my job a whole lot easier. The games press love to write about people in the industry who are household names.

So our sales went up. A lot. We ended up with over 27% of the total UK market for computer games. In our first year of trading.

Of course this success led to us being copied. A few other game companies also went to Lynne Franks. Because they had Chinese Walls between their PR teams (from handling several different fashion designers) they were able to handle this with no conflict. But they never achieved such spectacular results as we had because we had a better story and we were first.