Sony are running third and last in this generation of home consoles, having made more mistakes than a Bush presidency. However here at E3 2009 they started showing signs of getting their act together. But is it too little too late?
There are 364 games coming to Playstation platforms over the next year, presumably they are missing out new years day. And there is a lot for the PS3 in there: Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker, Gran Turismo 5, Rock Band: Beatles, God of War, Agent, Final Fantasy XIV Online and Modern Warfare 2. Just for starters. Impressive stuff.
The Playstation 3 answer to the Wiimote and Natal was announced but is nearly a year away. It is an extension of Playstation Eye and consists of a stick with buttons on it and a glowing orb on the end. Quite frankly this already looks like old technology compared with Natal’s whole body interface, voice input and face recognition (presuming it all works as advertised).
But the PS3s biggest problem is that it is always trying to play catch up with the Xbox 360 and failing. Most critically because Sony persist in selling the PS3 at an expensive price point that is difficult to justify from the consumer perspective. And after what Microsoft presented at E3 this year one can only see the PS3 dropping behind further.
In the light of the tour de force that Microsoft presented at this year’s E3, it is very difficult for the other platform holders to compete. And Nintendo didn’t.
Nintendo are in a poor position. Their home console for this generation, the Wii, is the least capable, being just an upgrade of the previous generation GameCube. It has been incredibly successful because of it’s innovative gesture controller and a small number of high quality platform exclusive games. But it lacks the equivalent of an Xbox Live or even a Playstation Network. And its main party trick, the gesture controller, has now been trumped by the Microsoft Natal. The Wii also does not support HDTV and does not come with a hard drive.
Sales wise the Wii has peaked in most markets and in Japan it is very weak. It now looks very expensive compared to the Xbox 360, a competitor which has a lot more to offer.
So Nintendo announced Wii Fit Plus, a new 2D version of Super Mario Bros, presumably aimed at children, Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Wii Vitality Sensor, a device to read your pulse. Hardly setting the world alight and showing all the signs of a platform nearing the end of its life.
One has to wonder firstly how long the Wii can sustain its premium price and secondly how close we are to seeing its successor, the SuperWii.
On the handheld front the DSi is getting good initial sales, presumably from existing DS owners upgrading. However it is now looking positively archaic compared to the more modern phone based devices like iPhone and Android. Nintendo need to act quickly not to be left behind in this market.
The BBC have a really good interview here which is well worth watching. And I must admit that the more I read and think about this, the more impressed I am.
The Wiimote will now be seen as interim technology, a side story on the road to the whole body interface. Having face (and emotion) recognition in Natal is a big step forward with huge gaming potential. Allied to the whole body scanning and voice recognition we have something that is of groundbreaking importance.
Natal has immense possibilities way beyond recreational gaming. Sports coaching, medical rehabilitation and military training spring immediately to mind. In fact any human activity where you have to build neuromuscular facilitation.
The limitations put on the human imagination by previous gaming interfaces have all been swept away. A lot of clever and creative people are going to do a lot of clever and creative things with Natal.
In 2002 Sony brought us the Eyetoy peripheral but failed to capitalise on its potential. At the 2005 Tokyo Game Show Nintendo revealed their Wii gesture interface that was probably the biggest ever single step change in video gaming. Now Microsoft, after a long gestation, have taken both these ideas and developed them several steps further for the Xbox 360, adding voice control whilst they were at it.
If this works as well as portrayed in the video above then it will be little short of revolutionary, the imagination of game designers can take flight in limitless ways. Removing all control input limitations means gaming can go places we would never have dreamed of.
From a hardware point of view the change in abilities that this brings the Xbox 360 are so great that it is almost like they had launched a new console. But the upcoming Xbox 720 will still be on schedule, Moore’s Law and competitive pressure will make this inevitable.
And competitively, if Natal works as advertised, the Wii will be in severe trouble with its main party trick trumped. And the Playstation 3 is looking distinctly old generation with no gesture interface. All this could change over the next 48 hours as Nintendo and Sony make their E3 announcements. We live in interesting times.
Just now the movie industry is producing 3D films at an unprecedented rate. Partly because they now can, with digital distribution and digital movie projection. And the TV manufacturing companies are switching to a variety of 3D technologies in their latest models. So there is a groundswell out there and gaming will be a part of it.
The 3D game I saw was using active glasses and was far more effective than the old coloured lens technology. And the results were deeply impressive. It was like going to the theatre having only previously seen the cinema. The whole experience was vastly more immersive. And as this is one of the things we strive for in gaming Blitz would appear to be on a winner with their technology.
I am told that the journalists who have tried this have written it up very positively but then their readers have responded with very negative comments. This is because you really are in no position to form a judgement on the experience till you have tried it yourself.
Mail get in a froth about a video game again. If this was a book or a film they wouldn’t bother, but because they totally misunderstand interactive media they write this stuff which is mainly a diatribe of their prejudices. How about this: ‘Even worse, it could end up in the hands of a fanatical young Muslim and incite him to consider some form of retaliation or retribution. He could use it to get worked up and want to really “finish the game”.
Three out of the top five iPhone Apps are games. No surprise there. And number one is Tap Tap Revenge with 32% of users downloading it, which is nearly 5 million downloads. Another fact for industry professionals to put on their shaving/makeup mirror as a daily reminder of what is really happening in this business.
Wii is the least used current generation console with the Sony Playstation PS3 the second least used and the Microsoft Xbox 360 used most. Makes total sense with the Wii being mainly a casual use toy. Then of the two core HD consoles the 360 has more and better games as well as a vastly superior online service in Live, so it is bound to be used more.
I thought it was about time just to helicopter a bit and look at some of the principles of marketing video games. An overall view of this art/science.
The first thing to understand is that with zero marketing a game will achieve precisely zero sales, no matter how good it is. Once you have told someone about a game you have started marketing it. In fact word of mouth is an immensely powerful marketing tool, especially amongst some demographics, such as school children. And it is a tool that marketeers try and propagate using techniques such as viral marketing and online community marketing.
This is how Google’s greatest strength has become its greatest weakness. Basically they started off with the best search engine in the world. And, by sheer product excellence and word of mouth, it became massive by far the most successful product on earth in its genre. But all the marketing was happening without Google themselves putting much effort into it. So when Google came up with other products they did not succeed to anywhere near the same extent. Because Google don’t have the necessary marketing culture. They expect products to succeed by their own, just like their original search did. This is one of the reasons that Google Lively failed, nobody knew what it was and what it was supposed to do, it was a marketing failure far more than it was a product failure.
The next thing to understand is that the more marketing you have for a product the more you will sell. Until you reach the law of diminishing returns. This is great for games because, after you have paid for development, most games cost very little for each additional unit of sale. So as long as you are spending 99 cents or preferably less for each incremental dollar of sale you are ahead. Once you realise this you can see that most games are under marketed. Of course the big problem comes with console games where you are paying a big license fee to the platform holder. This massively increases your incremental cost per extra unit of sales. Giving you a business model where there is far less freedom to market and where it is very easy to get badly bitten.
Another thing that is important to understand about marketing is that there are a huge number of tools available to the marketeer. TV advertising works completely differently to radio advertising and both of those work completely differently to specialist press advertising. And advertising is just one small aspect of marketing. Having the right visual imagery, good assets, creativity and the right attitude towards your customers are all vitally important. These you can utilise in your PR, videos, websites, virals, direct mail, communities, merchandise, competitions and a myriad of other tools. Taken together these are known as the marketing mix.
The power of different elements of the marketing mix changes over time, with what you are marketing and with the nature of your creativity and marketing content. Twenty years ago television was king with print just behind. Now both of these appear to be in terminal decline. Ten years ago online video was nothing, now it is immensely important. Some marketeers live in the past and don’t adapt to these changes which means that they under perform and waste money. Certainly the extent that certain global games publishers continue to throw money at television seems inept.
As a little side track here is what is wrong with advertising games on television:
Adverts are largely ignored. During advertising breaks people channel surf, get another beer, go to the loo or chat amongst themselves. So you don’t get the viewers that you are paying for.
There is now widespread advertisement skipping technology. So people just never get the opportunity to see your advert.
A lot of the demographic targeting of TV programmes is fairly random. So you can be spending a lot of money to tell grandmothers about your first person shooter.
Gamers tend to play games instead of watching television. So they have voted with their feet to not see your advert.
The problem is that some people are instructed to burn their way through big budgets and they lack the imagination or hard work to spend it in better ways than television. I knew a game marketing person who was obsessed with movie advertising, he also was throwing money away for reasons very similar to the television reasons.
Back on track the number one most important element of any marketing is creativity. You are trying to get some (often complex) features and benefits over to a certain group of people. Most often these people don’t know that they need to receive these ideas. In fact they might even be wanting to reject your ideas. Try telling a Playstation fanatic that an Xbox 360 is a better console. And these people are being bombarded with many thousands of marketing messages every day. So how do you get yours through? With creativity. If what you do is different enough it will attract far more attention. But also it has a slightly higher probability of failure which is why too many marketeers do boring, safe, money wasting, “me too” marketing. They are cowards who would rather waste their employers money than take a little risk.
Now a bit more on targeting. You really have to know who you are trying to reach and you also have to truly understand the message you are trying to reach them with. “We are great” and “Buy this” are not always the best messages to be using! The message and the audience are fundamental to getting the best results for your effort. But have an open mind. The video game industry held itself back for years by targeting a certain small demographic. It was only when Nintendo had the brilliance to realise that a wider demographic could be entertained interactively that the rest of the industry saw the error of their ways. And some still haven’t.
Which brings us nicely to market research and analysts. These are excellent if you approach them with your brain switched on. Firstly market research is telling you history. And if you are a good marketeer you will be trying to change the future. Then there are the analysts. It is best to treat these as being wrong most of the time. Fo example they have all certainly got both the Wii and the PS3 wrong repeatedly in this generation. The good thing about reading the output of analysts is that they bring different thinking to the table. And the more different ways you can think about problems the better. Just don’t believe their predictions.
There is one whole aspect of game marketing where the whole industry is pretty useless. And that is using people. The great public out there would far rather know about other people than they would about anything else. We have the massive cult of celebrity to prove this. Yet the games industry marketeers insist in talking about things instead of talking about people. A lesson other IP marketeers in industries like film and popular music learned to avoid many decades ago. If you make your chief game designer famous then the press will be far more interested in his latest haircut than how many FPS his latest game is running at. As an industry we will get there one day, but our under performance in this area is doing us no favours.
And remember that having amazing marketing knowledge and experience is not enough. You need to bring enthusiasm, commitment and sheer hard graft to everything you do. And you need to carry your team and all the other stakeholders with you. When a whole development team have put huge chunks of themselves and their lives into creating something then the marketeer is honour bound to ensure that he does everything in his power to ensure that it has the highest chance of success in the market.
