Entries Tagged 'Marketing Tips' ↓

You should never market two games in the same way, to do so is to totally misunderstand what you are doing. Each game is an individual that needs loving care. And so should be nurtured in it’s own special way. Only by doing this will you realise the full potential of that game in the market. This is what the people who have developed the game and those who have invested in it deserve.

So let’s  look at the first 8 criteria you look at when formulating your marketing plans for a game:

• Genre. We live in the age of the me too alien shooting game. But customers still play many different genres. These customers will have different demographics but importantly they will have a different emotional engagement with the game. Tetris engages but not in the same way as World of Warcraft.
• How good the game is. Obvious really. If it is excellent you rub it in every-one’s faces marketing wise and thank development for giving you an easy life. If the game is less good you have to work for your wages. But don’t give up hope and abandon it, you are a marketing professional so must still do your best.
• Content. Obvious and yet not so obvious. You would market a game set in Paris differently to a game set in New York. Some marketing people don’t really know the content of the game that they are marketing. Don’t make this mistake. Violence, sex, race, political and religious issues can work for you or against you. It is up to your skill as a marketeer.
• The time of year. Game sales follow a seasonal curve. Unfortunately games releases follow a similar curve. Christmas is for blockbusters, anything else gets lost and we don’t yet have the tradition of a summer holiday hit, like the film industry does. Other than that every season has it’s benefits and downsides. My favourites would be about three weeks before the clocks change in the spring and a week after they change in the autumn. Leisure behaviour changes radically at these two times.
• Price-point. Again seemingly obvious. But remember that sometimes you will sell more at a higher price, because people will think that it must be better. Console games are generally overpriced as a result of the current business model so the attach rate is quite low. This means that you have to make every purchase very special indeed. Make the customer glad that they opened their wallet.
• What the competitors are up to in general (Sega Rally was launched against Halo 3!). Blockbuster suck the market dry. They may bring more people into the stores but those people are only there for one purpose. Looking at competitor release schedules may help you make a one week change that significantly increases sales.
• What competitors are up to in your genre. Customers are not going to buy two racing games in quick succession, or two shooters or even two platform games. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones never released against each other, follow their example.
• USPs of that game. This is incredibly important. You may not even know what they are until you lever the knowledge out of development. Once I marketed the first game in which motion capture and Dolby surround sound recording were done simultaneously. The press loved that when I told them.

To be continued next Wednesday with 9 more success factors in game marketing.

I have been there far too many times. When the marketing pie for a game is sliced up. So much for print, so much for point of sale, so much for online and so on. The division of the money owes nothing to science (or even art) and owes just about everything to politics. Of course the result is that marketing departments often deliver horrendous value for money. But nobody seems to mind.

As a rule of thumb (and ignoring games that are extremely good or extremely bad) 50% of the sales success of a game is down to the marketing department. And 50% is down to the game itself. So it would only be fair if the spend was split equally between the two. This is where small publishers are at a huge disadvantage, there is no way that they can spend anywhere near as much on marketing as they do on development. Big publishers have a powerful global reach and so can afford, if they want to, to spend far more on marketing a game than making it.

At Codemasters the greatest marketing success we had was when the company was in dire straits. Piracy destroyed the PSX market in just a few months and suddenly we had no income. A lot of people lost their jobs because there was no longer enough money to pay them. And we had to market Operation Flashpoint with a budget that was close to zero. So there was no pie to be sliced.

What we did was to engage with our potential customer base using PR and online and especially community. The driver was the monthly press release. This was then used as the core of the monthly email newsletter and as the focus for online discussion. We gradually built an online following that became like a snowball rolling down a mountain. So that at launch Operation Flashpoint was the number one PC game  in every market with a chart. A global success.

In fact having a big budget for marketing usually leads to far less value for money. The marketing department feel that they have to burn through the money. So they do really silly and expensive things like TV advertising campaigns for gamer’s games. The waste of money is horrendous.

If you market every game the same or just using the obvious tools out of the marketing mix your campaign will just disappear amongst all the other campaigns doing the same thing. So you need to spend more and you have to be on top of your game with everything you do just not to get buried. Whereas if you do something different you will get noticed and get far more marketing exposure for a fraction of the spend.

Richard Branson understands this. When building Virgin Atlantic airline he pulled off a series of high profile stunts with speedboats and balloons across the Atlantic. He spent a fraction of the marketing budget of competitors like British Airways yet got many times the marketing exposure.

In the game industry I have always been a fan of Larry Sparks (now VP Marketing at Square Enix) who has pulled a lot of excellent game promoting stunts. One time he got a group of people to change their name by deed poll to that of an upcoming game. This got the game a huge amount of coverage and cost very little indeed. We need far more of this in the games industry. The games are fun and the marketing should be too.

When I was at Codemasters I followed closely the announcement of Steam by Valve in 2002. The growing pains, the successes and the opening up of the platform to other publishers. Steam was so clever, so obvious and so clearly the future that I would have liked Codemasters to do a “me too”. Unfortunately the directors had other things on their minds. So I tried to get them to at least put our PC games on Steam. And they didn’t.

Since then Steam has gone from strength to strength and it is now one of the most important platforms in the whole video game industry. With 15 million active users, probably about the same number (or maybe more) as Xbox Live has. But every Microsoft Xbox 360 purchaser gets a month’s free membership of the Xbox Live gold service. So Steam is outperforming. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the spend per user is far higher on Steam than it is on Live.

Gabe Newell, the MD of Valve was one of the Microsoft millionaires and was the producer of the first three versions of Windows. He has said that he wants to have every PC game on Steam. Why not? Each one is just a bit of space on the server so the marginal cost of each extra game is minimal. However the utility this provides for a Steam user is fantastic. The ability to sit down and, on a whim, play any PC game. Outstanding stuff.

Now Valve have made a simply stunning announcement. They are making a whole pile of powerful and important development tools available to the development community. For free. Steamworks includes real-time stats, anti piracy, auto-updating, community and matchmaking utilities. This is an amazing gift and will save PC developers very many millions of dollars. But it is not altruism. The effect of this will be to make more and more PC development Steamcentric. And to raise industry standards for all the mechanics behind a PC game.

I have to admit that if I were a publisher of PC games I would not bother any more with the plastic and cardboard boxed game at retail business model. It is too much work and it opens you up to so much piracy that you are shooting yourself in the foot. It is a concept that has reached the end of it’s life. Now it is far better to give the game away for free like EA are doing with Battlefield Command. Or use Steam. It will be very interesting to see which of these two mechanisms works best.

So Steam has the potential to become the standard global platform for PC gaming. This is absolutely massive. There are a lot more PCs in the world than there are game consoles. Also the barrier to publishing is very low on Steam. So we would see all sorts of great, amazing, fantastic new stuff which otherwise would never see the light of day. This is the opposite of the console gaming model which has a massive barrier to publishing and which lays a dead hand of censorship on games, both of which contrive to stifle innovation and so hold the industry back.

Of course Valve could make Steam available for consoles. Now that would be interesting.

In the meantime the value of Valve as a company is immense. Gaming is growing to be mainstream entertainment and will become bigger than television and film combined. There is a very good chance that Steam will become one of the most important cornerstones of this immense industry. I wish I owned 0.001% of Valve!!!

Once upon a time business was simple and you looked your customer in the eye, so you knew exactly who he was. Nowadays a single video game can sell millions of units all around the world and the physical item passes through several hands between the publisher and the end user. It is therefore rather easy for the publisher to have no idea whatsoever about his customers. So easy in fact that it is very common. And it shows.

Knowing your customers is a very, very good idea. It enables you to develop and tune your products better. It enables you to target them better with your marketing. It enables you to outperform your competitors when seeking their affection or their money. And it enables you to look after them better.

One mistake I have often seen is for industry professionals to assume that potential customers are just like themselves. So they make games for industry professionals. Who, quite obviously, are a very narrow market. Hence the obsession with producing gamer’s games instead of mass market entertainment. Another mistake is to assume that a bigger company knows what they are doing and then copying them. The blind leading the blind.

There are several companies that make a living out of analysing the game industry. Unfortunately they all got their predictions for this generation of consoles very, very wrong. In fact they predicted the reverse of what actually happened. As a result their pronouncements are now greeted with much derision on the forums. They have a long road back to credibility.

Focus groups are good. Every game should have one. They are great when you are developing a game because they stop developers making obvious mistakes. However they carry a couple of small problems. One is that they tend to tell you what you want to hear. The second is that the makeup of the focus group reflects your preconceptions of the customer demographic, and you can be very wrong.

My favourite is to find out for myself. I regularly walk into game retail here in the UK and everywhere I travel. I look at the retail displays and talk to the staff and sometimes to the customers. If you are actually listening and paying attention you can learn a lot this way. Certainly it is the first thing to do when visiting any new territory.

But the best, scientifically, is to ask a randomly chosen audience a series of questions. It helps to bring in experts to compose the questions and to compile the results in a meaningful way. You can get a research firm to do it by phone. Or you can do it yourself online. Perhaps with an incentive for co-operation.

Finally there are the members of your community liaison team. They spend their working lives liaising with your community. It is in their job titles. So they know far more about your customer base than anyone else in the building. Not that many in marketing realise this.

All this will give you knowledge. And remember that knowledge is power.

Codemasters currently have a recruitment advert for Director, Community paying £90,000 PA. This is interesting to me because I had to fight like mad against strong political opposition to create this department at Codemasters. Not that I invented community liaison. All I did was to take something from our MMO department (where it is essential) and adapt it for boxed console and PC games. So it is nice to see that it is now accepted and warrants it’s own senior management. It ought to be because, quite simply, it is the second most cost effective marketing tool (after Public Relations).

From a marketing point of view the internet is either a fantastic opportunity or a fantastic problem, it is up to you. It offers you something immensely powerful that has never been possible before, the potential to have a two way interactive relationship with every customer (or potential customer) in real time. This is just immense. And nobody has worked out how to get the best out of it. Yet. In the meantime your community liaison team are the people who wield this incredible marketing tool.

You will notice in the preceding paragraph that the term two way is used. A lot of people forget this. Community liaison is a dialogue. And you had better be listening. It is for this reason that I always wanted to involve the people in community liaison in wider marketing discussions. Because they have the immense input that they know what the customer is thinking and saying. Far better than your market research people do.

Another wonder of community liaison is that is so cheap to do that it can be done for every game, even if the game is only on XBLA. And it isn’t just for publishers. This is something that developers can do. They can do it to increase the value of the games that they make and they can do it to improve the profile of their company. Every game should have a development blog and a forum as an absolute minimum.

As you can see this is a new, exciting and rapidly developing area. So it is easy to become enthused. And quite rightly, with a good attitude community liaison can give you a great marketing advantage.

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.

I have said before that gaming needs more celebrities. It is just so obvious that people relate to other people far better than they relate to anything else. So by making a person and a product synonymous you can gain huge marketing advantages. It is something that Peter Molyneux has done to great effect for many years. And he has the sales to prove it.

It is something I have always tried to do with my computer game marketing. Eugene Evans at Imagine and the Darling brothers and Oliver twins at Codemasters are the ones that spring immediately to mind. But over the years I have put a lot of game development people into magazines and on to television. It has worked so well that I am amazed that more game marketeers don’t do it.

So it is very, very nice to see that the Ubisoft marketeers have made a celebrity of the producer of Assassin’s Creed, Jade Raymond. She even has a fansite. Obviously it helps that she isn’t unattractive, but that is true of most things in life. What also helps is that she is coherent, telegenic and obviously intelligent and so communicates very well in the media.

Of course this has attracted some negative publicity. But this goes with the territory. It is absolutely inevitable that if you have a public persona, no matter how good, there are some that will advance their own agendas by taking a swipe at you. It is the price you have to pay and something you just have to learn to live with. But the upside is so massive that it is easy to ignore the denigrators.

Which brings us to Jeff Minter. His recent game Space Giraffe has been outsold by Frogger on Xbox Live Arcade. And he is not happy. To the point where he had a massive late night rant on his blog. And the power of celebrity is such that this created a lot of worldwide publicity. Which will certainly have helped sales of Space Giraffe.

So are you a marketeer and do you use celebrity?