Ghost Razor

In the last year or so there’s been a mounting interest in gaming media on casual games.  Publishers have no doubt been looking at the casual game space for several years prior - and understandably - as the current industry is valued at approximately 2.25 billion dollars and rapidly increasing.  You know what I think would be great?  If every time people talked about the casual games industry I didn’t see the picture below.

I know that Bejeweled makes PopCap a crapload of money.  It came out 6 years ago.  The sequel, pictured above, came out 3 years ago, but really it’s the same game.  There is other stuff going on, really cool stuff too.  And if there isn’t, that market segment is screwed, because you can’t sustain an industry when all anyone ever talks about in the media is one match 3 game that came out the same year as the Gamecube and original Xbox. 

Industries - especially fledgling industries - need their heroes.  Industries need companies who compete with each other, and those companies need to be able to point to examples of brilliance and say “That right there, that’s what we’ve got to beat”.  You need more than a 6 year (and climbing) window between iconic landmarks of innovation to grow an industry.  Now I’m not saying that nothing interesting has happened in the last six years in the casual games space, I’m saying quite the opposite, but the gaming media needs to stop pointing to that particular casual gaming poster child and bring some of the other orphaned children out of the cold (Like Desktop Tower Defense!).

Am I just deaf and blind, or is there an ongoing reason for this?

Tags: Marketing by Morphix
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There’s a phenomenon that seems to be emerging of late. I’ve never noticed this to happen earlier than a couple of years ago, but if anyone could point out an example of it, I’d appreciate it. This phenomenon is a scourge on the industry, and any gamer who’s interested in playing a certain type of game near release is liable to be sucker-punched by it.

Here’s what happens:

A developer licenses some Intellectual Property, which has a fixed cost.  They come to the conclusion that the best way to maximize their return on the investment of these fees is to distribute the title they’re working on across as many different platforms as possible.  Some developers (I’m looking at you, Ubisoft) have IP internally that is powerful enough to compel them to make games for many platforms as well, presumably to sell more titles and thus earn more income.  This is all well and good, certainly I don’t have any qualms with releasing titles on multiple platforms.  However, not all platforms are created equal.  We can therefore expect a certain level of negotiation with respect to things that are affected by the limitations of that particular platform.  Obviously a game coming out for PS3 or 360 would need to have its graphical capabilities, etc. scaled back if it were also being released for Xbox.  A game coming out for the Wii might need to have the interface modified somewhat to accommodate the Wii’s unique controller.

What should NOT change, however, is the overall game experience.   When a game is publisher and has a certain name, but is released on multiple platforms, customers assume that regardless of which platform they choose to purchase the game for, They are purchasing the same game.  When this fails to be the case, if the different versions of the game are significantly different from each other, but all have the same cover art, same name, same advertising campaign, you are creating brand confusion.  Perhaps some examples will better illustrate what I mean.

The year is 2004, Spider-man 2 comes out.  Despite the fact that most games based on commercial blockbusters are complete critical failures, everything I heard about this game is that it’s phenomenal.  Metacritic gives the PS2 (and Xbox) version of the game 80 out of 100, a reasonably good score.  The game is acclaimed for having the free roaming nature of GTA, but in three dimensions.  Swinging around Manhattan, freely exploring the city sounds like a great deal of fun.  I buy the game for PC, because at the time I was travelling and didn’t want to drag my consoles around when I could play on my laptop.  One would at this point assume I was buying the same game.  After all, there’s certainly nothing you can do on a console you can’t do on a PC.  If one wanders over to Metacritic and looks up the score on the PC version of this game, the score of 42 might come as a bit of a shock.  Why is the score for the PC version of the game nearly 40 points lower than the console versions?  Because it’s an entirely different game.  One is no longer free to explore the city at will (the major selling point of the first game), in fact, you’re restricted to where you shoot your webs by little floating web icons which hang inconspicuously in the air.  The entire PC game can be finished in two hours, and there is absolutely no reason to backtrack.  Why Activision decided to release a PC game which is entirely different from the console version (and much, much shittier), and throw it under the same brand, when it would have been much simpler just to port the console version over, is beyond me.

Case two.  Splinter Cell:  Double Agent.  I’m pretty sure this title is an inside joke, because there are actually two different versions of this game.  Version 1 was developed by Ubisoft Shanghai, the folks who brought you Splinter Cell 2, and was released for PC, 360, and PS3.  Version 2 was made in Montreal (Splinter Cell 1 and 3), and came out for Xbox, Gamecube, PS2, and Wii.  The general storyline is similar, but major sections of the game are changed.  A big feature in version 1 were levels where Sam is instructed to perform some menial task by the terrorists, who will return in a given timeframe.  In each of these levels, Sam must complete the task, but also use the remainder of his time to discover new plot information, and to perform covert tasks for the NSA.  Version 2 completely omits these levels, but instead has entirely new levels which are not present at all in version 1.  The plot in version 2 is also much more throughly fleshed-out, so many gamers playing version 1 may complete it and be left scratching their head.  Despite this, there’s no real indication that the PC version of the game might be significantly different from the PS2 version of the game.

I’m completely fine with having two studios create similar but not precisely the same game for different platforms, simultaneously, but please, brand the game differently.  Brand identity is the sole discriminating factor game developers have to identify their organizations and products.  By creating multiple products which are similar, but fundamentally different, and branding them identically creates confusion which erodes the value of your brand.  This is especially true when one of the products is extremely inferior to the other.  Understandably one would want to leverage the cost of their licenses to get the most profit out of the equation possible, but if you have to mess your brand up to do it, you’re selling a piece of your hard-earned soul that you may not be able to get back in the long term.

Stop making a game for 8 different systems, giving it the same name, but having it be a totally different game.

Tags: Industry, Marketing by Morphix
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I was just reading an interview with Peter Moore (The head of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Division, and coolest ’suit’ of 2007) and came to two realizations.  Firstly, Peter Moore is really awesome.  He has a way of articulating answers to questions which is at once both professional and clear-cut, unfettered by marketing jargon.  Secondly, developers used to pay companies to obtain licenses to use their brand!

You’re looking at companies that are just lining up down the street to be involved in the game environment.  I look back at the old days in my previous life at Sega, when we were actually paying for licenses of consumer-product companies to put in the game. I think about Crazy Taxi [Dreamcast], things like KFC and Pizza Hut…. Boy, the shoe is on the other foot now, no pun intended. The ability for us to be able to have control of this demographic and bring that to consumer-product companies…it’s a powerful tool.

It’s somewhat ludicrous that a development company spending the millions of dollars it costs to make a game would fritter that money away to place brands inside their game… especially brands like KFC or Pizza Hut.  In theory, the only reason you want to do this is that in some way the inclusion of those brands will sell more of your game and earn you more revenue than it cost you to license those brands in the first place.  Nobody wants to buy a game just because they can deliver a tasty pizza to someone (although that’s not universally the case).  Product placement in a video game feels the same way it does in movies.  If done well, the fact that you’re essentially being marketed to doesn’t detract from the experience of immersion, in fact in certain cases it can add to it.  If, on the other hand, what you’re delivered is a garish, in-your-face product placement, my reaction is one more of disgust:  not an emotion you want tied to your product brand.

Two examples that come springing to mind of horrible product placement would be the iPod and iTunes in Blade Trinity, and Reebok shoes in I, Robot.  Blade Trinity contains a lengthy shot, what felt like around 30 seconds of Jessica Biel loading music onto her iPod, which she always uses when she’s killing vampires…

Yeah.  At this point in the movie you pretty much want to get up and leave.  The experience is so out of touch with what you’re looking for in a vampire movie that all suspension of disbelief is lost, and you’re irate at both the producers of the movie, and the product itself, causing exactly the opposite reaction intended.  This effect is so profound that politicians should place ads for their opponents in movies coming out near voting time.

In I, Robot, Will Smith is putting on some sneakers for an entire shot, in which one of his buddies comments on how nice they are, whereby Smith replies “Thanks, Vintage 2004 [The year the movie came out]”.  If ever you wanted to smack Will Smith, that was the time.

These pitfalls can just as easily happen with video games, if not more so.  There is a place for such ‘in your face’ use of brands, and that place is parodying the brands themselves for comic effect.  Sierra did this to great effect in the Space Quest series with Monolith Burger, satirizing the stereotypical behaviours and appearance of McDonald’s employees.  The effect, rather than bringing you out of the game, made you laugh, which was the whole point of the Space Quest experience.

It’s about time things have turned around financially, and that product companies have realized the huge potential of marketing through video games.  Video games are a particularly powerful channel because the target audience is generally of more narrow scope, and the brand exposure is more prolonged than a movie (hard to find a game only two hours long).  As a result, marketers can acheive a significantly deeper penetration with a target group that genuinely might want to buy into their product; and they should have to pay through the nose to for that privilege.

Tags: Marketing by Morphix
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This is kind of old news, but it’s the first I’ve heard about it.  Last august at the 2006 Leipzig Games Convention, Sony was handing out snap shot cameras, branded simply with the Playstation 2 logo.  These cameras turned out to be an innovative marketing technique for the upcoming SCEA survival-horror game Siren 2 (Forbidden Siren 2 in Europe).  The film in the cameras had been pre-exposed with ghastly images, thus giving the appearance of ghosts the foreground when the actual photos were developed by the individuals taking the photos. 

 The final shot reads only:

The horror is closer than you think.
Forbidden Siren II
Out now for Playstation 2

This campaign was the brainchild of TBWA (The agency responsible for the iPod commercials).  Shortly after the end of the GC event, traffic to the Siren website tripled.

This further prooves that these types of guerilla advertising which can be quite inexpensive (compared to billboard or TV ads, a la Gears of War 2), can also be remarkably effective. 

I’ve posted on Guerilla Marketing Techniques Previously

via [I believe in adv]

Tags: Marketing by Morphix
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I always thought it would be a neat idea to create additional content for a game by way of Alternate Reality Game type materials, and use it as a profit center. For example, frequently AAA games will release Art Books as a premium buy for people who are really hardcore about a product (Blizzard does this frequently). I think it would be significantly more interesting if such books were sold over Amazon.com or eBay under the pretense of being integrated into the storyline. Clearly this isn’t possible in all games, but in a significant number it would be.

Imagine, for example, one made a game based on the Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft. If the designers of the game were to include part of their story bible, as well as some art work or concept sketches into a book, and call it the Necronomicon, sell it on eBay under some pretense of finding the thing somewhere, and leak the existence of such a book to the gaming press.

Well that’d be kinda cool.

This stealth-marketing ploy could even be possible pre-release to drum up a few bucks. The caveat there would be that the publishing channels one would have to go through would be less conventional, such as Lulu.com. Even so, this isn’t necessarly a bad thing, and in fact opens this up as a possible revenue channel for Indie game designers as well.

And here at GhostRazor, we’re all about the little guy.

Tags: Game Ideas, Indie, Marketing by Morphix
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