You have had some success on iPhone with a relatively small number of high priced titles and have recently set up 8Ib Gorilla for lower priced titles, which is highly commendable. However given the scale of what is happening on iPhone you are barely scratching the surface.
The AppStore has been open for a year, it has seen the biggest success of any new gaming platform in the whole history of video gaming. There are now about 65,000 apps published and there have been over one and a half billion downloads, how many of these are yours? Yet you are the world’s number two game publisher.
Electronic Arts is a publisher yet most App developers are not using publishers. I suggest that you find some very good reasons to change this, and quickly. Developers should think that it is better to come to you to publish their iPhone games than it is to go directly to Apple. Here is some of what you can do:
Provide tools and libraries to speed up development. Cross platform should be essential, for Android, possibly for nGage and for other upcoming mobile platforms such as Zune.
Commission Apps so people are writing the right things. Don’t overdo this as EA doesn’t necessarily know best.
Market the Apps you publish. Most Apps fail through a lack of marketing. You can use a wide variety of low cost methods to get global recognition of everything you publish
Finance as necessary. Most Apps are home written, so need no finance. But a few do. Also some developers may prefer a one off payment to waiting for royalties.
Your initial, very short term, target should be to publish an App a day. Very quickly you can gear up to what the market will bear. There are an infinite number of niches available for Apps, so there are lots of markets to go for.
The next step is to talk to Apple (and Google, for Android) and build a solid MMO business model. You think World of Warcraft is big, in a couple of years time there will be several iPhone MMOs that are bigger. Probably. One or more of them could be yours.
Unless you go for this full bore you are just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, and speed is of the essence.
Whilst on the subject of Microsoft, how about a comparison with Sony and Nintendo. Now that is interesting, two on the way down, one on the way up but still well behind. Notice the pre Christmas bumps in activity for all three. And how the Nintendo bump was smaller in Q4 ‘08 than in the previous two years, whilst Microsoft had a negative bump! You can see a lot in these little graphs.
This is all interesting and useful stuff. What would be interesting is if anyone has managed to read these two articles without typing their own search terms into Trends. It really is addictive if you have an enquiring mind.
To show just what people care about in the world here is Afghanistan compared with Wii! Afgahanistan is well ahead in news but nowhere when it come to what people are searching for.
As you can see Trends applies a fantastic metric to the performance of any company or brand. It is a brilliant tool for any manager and every marketing professional. You could even use it as a basis for people’s bonuses!
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.
The need to play is an irrepressible part of the human spirit, we all do it all our lives. We make games out of the most unlikely daily chores. And we use the most unlikely things as toys when we play.
Here is a video of a traditional English game using a cheese:
So it should come as no surprise when the hottest thing on the interweb becomes used for games. Even though it was never designed for this task.
The University’s ‘Creative Networks’ is hosting a talk by Bruce Everiss who will speak about his experiences in marketing and establishing two major video game companies, Imagine and Codemasters. He will be appearing at the event which is being held on Thursday 28 May at Millennium Point, Curzon Street at 6pm.
In the digital age, we are all Marketeers and, in the current challenging economic climate, finding innovative ways to promote and distribute content via new media platforms is all important.
Bruce has been involved with the home computer industry since its start in the late 1970s and his commitment to the medium has helped to establish the U.K. as one of the world’s most important software producers. Furthermore, as an internet entrepreneur and marketing expert, he has raised the industry’s profile beyond the attention of enthusiasts and into the psyche of a much wider audience.
Creative Networks was established in 2004 as a regular monthly hub of networking and expertise for creative companies and freelancers in the West Midlands. The event is free, anyone interested in attending should email creative.networks@tic.ac.uk or call Dave Taylor on 0121 331 7457. Alternatively, register online at www.creativenetworksonline.com
It is a very simple fact of life that the thing that most people are interested in is other people. Just look at the mass obsession over Princess Diana or Jade Goody. And as marketeers we can take advantage of this interest to get our messages communicated more easily to the people we want to reach.
I know about this because I have done it a number of times. At Imagine in Liverpool with David Lawson, Mark Butler, John Gibson and Ian Weatherburn. But most of all with Eugene Evans, who even got invited to No 10 Downing Street to meet Margaret Thatcher. Then at Codemasters with the Darling brothers, who got to meet the Queen as a result and with the Oliver twins. It is interesting that the Darling boys were in business with their father Jim for 20 years, but I didn’t make him famous. When the government came to hand out honours the boys both got CBEs and Jim got nothing.
The master of building and using fame in the British game industry is Peter Molyneux (he has an OBE, can you begin to see the connection here?) who has been relentless at self promotion for a long time. It has made him a lot of money and sold a lot of games so you can’t knock him for it.
The thing about being famous is that you transcend the industry so you reach a whole level of new and different media. Also you become a respected voice and your name appears in the strangest of places. Just as Jade Goody’s has in this article.
So here are some tools:
Press releases. Just about every press release has a quote in, Rob Uncle is delighted with the deal: “We are going to make a lot of money here”. This will not work to make him famous. To make him famous he needs to say something startling: “This game will cause the rotation of the world to stop at 9AM GMT tomorrow”. Or, and this is much better, the press release needs to be about him: “Ace programmer George Eek simulates Kylie Minogue with artificial intelligence breakthrough”. If you keep your ear to the ground in your organisation and keep your creativity switched on you will soon come up with suitable stories.
Interviews. These are great for lazy journalists and excellent for getting your messages over. Hence the eternal popularity of the TV chat show. In our industry we are always dealing with secrets so people love to read interviews to see if they can get enough information to double guess such stuff. So it is worth promoting people for being interviewed all the time, everyone wins.
Articles. Perfection, your would be famous person gets their message over in their own words. And each time they do it they accumulate more fame. This humble little blog you are reading has brought me more fame than 30 years of working in home computers and video games in fairly high profile positions.
Public speaking. A lot of people are shy of doing this. No need, treat it as if you are talking to one person, but revel in the power of getting your message over in the most immediate and personal way to key audiences. GDC and E3 are typical events where you can become famous in half an hour. Look at how the arch marketeer, Steve Jobs, uses public speaking as one of his main marketing tools. And look at how Microsoft use it in breadth and depth in their organisation to get their messages over.
Videos. I cannot begin to over emphasise just how important videos have become in marketing. And most marketeers are well behind the curve of what is happening in the real world. Videos become a lot more interesting when you put people in them, so once again you can build fame. Any marketeer in an international publisher should have no problem in getting literally millions of views for a video. That is a lot of influence.
Publicist. Max Clifford in the UK is perhaps the most well known, but there are plenty more. These people use their press contacts to carefully build and manage your fame. They know what can and what can’t be done. And the best of them are brilliant at their job.
In all this don’t forget the message. It has to be interesting enough to catch and hold people’s attention whilst at the same time getting your key marketing messages across. Most importantly, go and do it. Our industry is lagging well behind in creating our own celebrities to represent what we do. If we did more of this we would be taken a lot more seriously in the world. And it is one of the easiest forms of marketing to do.
