This makes absolute complete and utter sense. People buy perceptions, not reality. And people are far more concerned about peer pressure than they are concerned about their own judgement.
There is a make of car that is distinctly average. In fact some of the smaller models are not very good at all. Yet it manages to sell extremely well despite selling at a premium price. Because people want to be seen behind the badge. They will pay thousands of dollars in premium to buy just a few dollars worth of chrome and enamel badge. And most people buy silver and grey ones, because that is what everyone else does. All due to the power of marketing. The brand is presented as sporty which is just the image every housewife wants when she does the school run. Customers just don’t realise when they are victims.
If you are a game developer and you tell your mum about the game you are working on then that is marketing. Marketing is any communication. So it is a fact that a game with zero marketing will have zero sales.
Over the years I have never seen a game get the sales that it deserved just for its quality. Yet I have many times seen a game get far more sales than it deserves because of its marketing. And I have also seen many good games fail because of bad marketing.
Just look at the five games I was writing about yesterday. They are virtually identical yet they have massively different numbers of players. The difference is just the marketing. Marketing is more important than the game, this is a self evident truth.
Yet still there are very many game publishers who do not understand this. Many self and small publishers on the iPhone App Store, for instance. There you can see that marketed games sell well, non marketed games sell badly. It has precious little to do with the quality of the game. (Unless it is a total dog).
Now EEDAR has done research in the game marketplace from which they say “Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores”. And actually the difference is even bigger than that, because the scores form part of the marketing!
So there you have it. If you want to sell more games and make more money then send me an email and I will come and sort it out for you!
We have at least five games originating in China now that are remarkably similar to each other. Evony you know about, Kingory I have written about before. Fog of War, Napoleonic War (Nap War) and Lords Online are pretty much the same game again. OK the maps and story are different each time, but much of the rest remains the same. Empire Craft has also been written about here.
Nap War “is owned and operated by SOHO Union International Ltd (SOHO Union)”. “We started our business as a small enterprise in HongKong, making our first product called Fog of War: Napoleonic War. Now SOHO has approximately 100 employees worldwide with each one showing great passion, remarkable creativity and efficient teamwork in their efforts to achieve our goal.”
Lords Online is an announced and reviewed game from IGG Inc (I Got Games) who are well established and already publish a range of games. And once again it is pretty much the same game. IGG are substantial, well established and well funded and seem to have offices in China, Hong Kong and the West.
So that is five iterations of pretty much the same game that I know about. So there are probably more, with even more to come. All come from China. All allow you to buy game achievements instead of earning them by playing the game. And several of them are marketing by using the high profile, high cost, Google advertising route.
One wonders where these games are coming from. Who actually wrote what is the original game and how it ended up in what seem to be so many different hands. Also the business model they seem to be all adopting. Is that imitation or are they working to a template?
And what are their chances of success? People are not stupid and the internet allows a flow of information so the gaming world will quickly realise that these are all pretty much the same game. At Evony most players have deserted the game once they have sussed it out, after this will they even bother with the others? And then there is the small number of players willing to pay a considerable amount of money to play these games. Are there enough of them to go round and so finance the high risk Google advertising strategy?
The game industry turnover at retail revolves around a small number of blockbusters. October this year was very light on these, as is the whole of Q4 this year. A lot of this can be put down to the industry running scared of Modern Warfare 2. People don’t even want to launch in the same quarter as this.
Music/dance games were largely a fad and that is now over. Sales have more than halved in this sector.
Another high value sku, Wii Fit, is tapering off in sales compared with the craze that it was last year.
I would like to say a big thank you to all the many people who have contributed to this fund, I have been more than pleasantly surprised by the response. Every amount, no matter small, will help, it all adds up. And whilst I am truly appreciative of everyone’s generosity I have actually been shocked at how much some people are willing to donate to this cause.
The third issue is just plain freedom of speech, the foundation of our democratic society. What I wrote about Evony was the truth and fair comment. This supposedly American company has not acted against me in America, they would be laughed out of court because of the Constitutional protection of free speech. However British libel law was designed to protect the rich from the gossip of their servants. And it is an extension of this British law that is in force in Australia. What this means is that Evony can make many strange and outrageous claims against me and I have to go to great lengths to disprove every single one in court, to the satisfaction of a jury. This obviously puts me at a massive disadvantage in the case.
And the amazing thing is that I have actually caused them no harm whatsoever. When I wrote my article less than a million people had joined the game. In the few short months since that has risen to over ten million. Admittedly most of those have since left the game, for obvious reasons. So it looks like the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity is true. It seems very likely that my writing has driven more people to go and try the game. In other words I have had the opposite effect that they are claiming.
But Microsoft has caught them! They have quietly been using Xbox Live to check every machine on there (20ish million) to see if they have been modified. And now they are banning all the thieves. Microsoft say a small percentage have been banned. The BBC is reporting that it is 600,000. Rumour on the web has it at nearer a million.
An Xbox is absolutely brilliant with Xbox Live. It is the biggest and best gaming portal in the world. Take away Live and an Xbox is substantially degraded in what it offers. So taking Live away from the thieves makes their Xboxes close to useless.
So the thieves are screaming in anger all over the net. Which is exceptionally funny to watch as they have been caught red handed. They have no options now but to go and buy a new Xbox and start a new Live account. So that’s possibly a million extra Xbox 360s that Microsoft will sell this Christmas. The profit on these will probably not get them back what they have lost to their games being stolen, but it is a contribution. Also their timing is brilliant, just as the biggest game ever, Modern Warfare 2, is launched. No wonder the thieves are so annoyed.
Overall this is one of the better moments in the ongoing war between those who work to create brilliant games and those thieves who try to steal that work from them.
