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?
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.
ABC Radio in Australia is the equivalent of the BBC Radio 4 in the uk. They have a programme called the Law Report, presented by Damien Carrick, which looks at the important legal issues of the day. They have just broadcast a programme about the Evony LLC Vs Bruce Everiss case which concerns articles written on this blog.
I have written on here before about Kingory. One of a number of Chinese browser MMO games that is just about identical to Evony. In other words the traditional game mechanic has been subverted to generate the maximum revenue.
I have mentioned before the plagiarism that these games often seem to have. So it is interesting to see that Kingory freely uses the image of Kung Fu Panda on their registration page. They must have a very good relationship with Paramount Pictures to have received permission for this commercial use of their IP. Or alternatively Kingory just used it. What do you think?
There are a lot of doom and gloom headlines around at the moment. Lots of development staff being laid off, games selling far less than expected, major publishers making massive losses and release schedules that look a little thin. What is happening here?:
The industry have become even more lemming like than normal. We get a successful game like Guitar Hero and suddenly everyone thinks it is the second coming. Other people do “me too” imitations whilst the owner of the original title flogs it to death with countless variations. Then we have the inevitable, a Beatles game that flops. Publishers are just not thinking from the customer’s perspective, people really don’t want all these similar titles.
Annual iterations of popular titles. Another way of flogging a successful IP to death, try and get the customer to fork out every year for a slightly updated version. This is incredibly inefficient as you end up with lots of customers just buying alternate iterations. Or being turned off by the cynicism of the whole exercise. Leave 2 years between releases on popular franchises.
The customers are moving to online faster than the publishers are. Lots of publishers have misread just how quickly the market would change. Apple’s App Store getting one and a half billion downloads in a year and Evony getting 10 million registered users in just a few months whilst boxed cardboard and plastic retail games gather dust on the shelves is the new reality.
Unwillingness to experiment with new IP. This is just pathetic. So many publishers now are just sitting there flogging their old IPs to death because they think it is safe. It isn’t safe at all, those IPs will not deliver for ever. Publishers need to build value in their business and the only way is with new IP. Sure it is risky, but publishing is about risk. And these days you can experiment on a cheap to develop platform and then if it works move the IP to the expensive to develop platforms. And the Apple App Store has loads of brilliant new ideas for IP.
Awful marketing. By and large the industry markets incredibly inefficiently with advertising that preaches to the converted. Instead they should be trying to engage with the public so as to switch their spend from other pursuits. Nintendo have done this incredibly successfully but the rest of the industry have failed to take this on board.
Mid generation lethargy. Most publishers have now released all their franchises for this generation of platforms. So they are waiting for the next generation platforms to release them all again. In the meantime they can’t think of anything for their developers to do.
Piracy. The 360 is being hit quite hard with this now. Microsoft really to need to put a whole pile more IP protection into the Xbox 3/720/phoenix, especially if it is a mainly, or all, online machine.
Recession. A convenient excuse. Most of the world is out of recession now (except for the UK, which has the worst run major economy). And even in recession people give up paying for their entertainment last.
So it is the management’s fault. And the few well managed companies are making hay.
You may think that with tens of millions of bloggers and millions of forums that we live in an age where there is a free flow of knowledge and information. That you can go to Google and get a balanced and rounded view on any subject by reading the results of a search. And you would be very wrong.
The mechanism for the wholesale denial of free speech is the English libel system. Here are some of the factors at play:
A plaintiff can sue you for libel and make a whole list of grievances. They don’t have to prove that any of these are the truth. It is up to the defendant to disprove each claim to the standards required by a court. So the whole system is weighed very heavily in favour of the plaintiff.
Going to court to defend a libel claim is immensely expensive and there is no legal aid. Many cases now get to over a million pounds in legal fees.
Libel tourism is a reality with plaintiffs now making London their city of choice when they want to take action because the libel laws here are so repressive. This alone should tell you that there is something wrong.
Once you realise the above you can see what the mechanism for suppressing free speech is.
A company does a Google search to see what is written about it on the internet.
The company gives a list of all the stuff it doesn’t like (whether it is the truth or not) to an English solicitor.
The solicitor writes letters to all these websites threatening legal action.
The solicitor also writes to the website hosting company threatening legal action.
The owner of the website and/or the owner of the hosting company immediately remove the content, they have no option because of the financial consequences of the threat.
The internet is censored and no longer tells the truth.
This mechanism works for getting the truth off the internet as well as lies, because it is not tested. The authors and site owners are in no position to defend their content. And once the content is removed it is removed for the whole world. So a heavy handed bully in London will deny free speech in America, Canada, everywhere.
This mechanism is now being used on a massive scale. Solicitors in London are making a very nice living by processing large numbers of these threatening letters. Vast amounts of internet content is being removed. And of course it is the bad guys, the people with something to hide, who use this mechanism most. So the world is denied the knowledge that it most needs for people to protect themselves.
What is deeply ironic is that the blogs and forums that are being acted against have a built in reply mechanism. So when somebody sees something that they think is wrong then they can say so. This happens millions of times every day. These sorts of websites are far closer to a conversation in a pub than they are to the printed newspapers that the libel laws were intended for. So all sides of an argument can be discussed.
And so to Bruceongames. The success of this blog means that it now comes near the top in many Google searches. And I am often saying what I think about companies. (In law this is called fair comment and is allowed). So I have been threatened with libel action now by two companies. Evony and Train2game. Evony are taking the action in Australia because it is almost the same as English law (and there is a reciprocal arrangement for collecting judgement) but I have the added inconvenience of trying to defend myself on the other side of the planet. Train2game seem to have succeeded in removing a lot about themselves from the internet. I have also temporarily removed my article about them, even though it is 100% truthful, whilst I consider the implications. Another successful censoring of the internet.
