Tag Archives: marketing

A prelude to a few investigations.

The larger idea that prompted the above tweet is the following: is the viewership to players ratio for any given game a factor in esports marketing ventures?

I’d like to take a look at the numbers game, so to speak, behind esports events and broadcasts. What is coveted ‘critical mass’ behind the explosive growth and inevitable decline of a game’s viewership?

I want to try to understand this particular train of thought because I’m not sure there are many marketing perspectives from the video game industry’s side of esports. Perhaps that’s why Valve hid Dota 2 behind the beta invite wall for so long? Maybe that’s why Activision could throw a million dollars at Call of Duty one year and not do the same the next year? What gave Blizzard the idea that its much smaller scene could support the reformation of its World Championship Series events against its competitor’s League Championship Series? Why did Shootmania never ascend to replace Quake?

As with anything esports-related, the scope of the initial questions that has prompted me to look into things as simple as numbers has outgrown its initial goals over time. Of course, this also means taking the time to actually sit down and watch these events, something that I really haven’t done lately. Which series of events for each game should I start with? This is the crazy question I’ll have to answer first, really.

Maybe it’ll get me excited about esports again.

We’ll see.

[contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Which game do I try to figure out first?’ type=’select’ required=’1′ options=’CS:GO,Dota 2,League of Legends,Other,Shootmania,StarCraft 2′][/contact-form]

A summary of how EA showed up Blizzard on how to ruin a product launch.

Screen Shot 2013-03-08 at 4.07.46 PMThat SimCity title you’ve heard about has finally been released. Do you even know what that game is?

It’s been on the top of a few folks’ minds recently, especially with it claiming to be a brand new model for the social gaming experience married with the sandbox simulation that gamers have come to know as best in the business.

The launch has shown its patient fans anything but the exemplary gameplay that they had expected and waiting for.

The launch is so bad that:

  1. an NFL player has challenged the collective competency of EA and Maxis in several tweets.
  2. South Korean gamers, after being generalized to be pirates, have started boycotting the title.
  3. EA is so delusional that they actually thought for one second that disabling minor features such as achievements would solve the problem.
  4. Amazon stopped selling the game.
  5. an unknown developer have asked for $250,000 USD to finance a DRM-free SimCity called Civitas.
  6. a waiting in the wings marketing campaign spanning Internet, social media and television buys has been put on hold by high command to control their tailspin of a launch.

When you compare EA’s current situation to how Blizzard’s biggest launch failure in the company’s history, Diablo III, was patently unplayable for nearly everyone–nevermind the fact that it shipped feature incomplete compared to the previous title in the series–it sure seems clear that EA had rolled the dice on their SimCity development and marketing training leading up to the game’s release.

It’s reasonable to assume that it’d be rough for a game to be successful after it is generally unplayable on the week of its release. That being said, Diablo III is doing fine after having a whole year behind it. Last evening I logged into the game after being fed up with the laggy responsiveness inherent in its MMO-styled client-server design. When I had previously stopped playing the game, I remember constantly floating around and rubber-banding with a ping of 300ms. Now that ping was only 100ms! It was relatively playable and it only rubber-banded a handful of times over the forty-five minutes that I decided I could play the game in one sitting.

And while the game could change to be something that could be moderately enjoyable within a year’s time, it seems that many gaming journalists, like the ones over at Polygon (a gaming news spin-off project from the folks who run The Verge), couldn’t wait to praise the game.

Polygon initially gave the game a 9.5 out of 10 rating on 4 March, the day before the official release. Essentially, they were professing that they had seen the light in the strategy genre, and this light had cooperative city planning at its core.

After seeing that the game was not so much a simulation of city-planning and more a simulation of what Diablo III was for a completely different title, they demoted the game to a score of 8.0 out of 10 after assessing their policy on game reviews. They modified their editorial rules to change a published rating for extreme situations such as these.

You read that right, though. Polygon awarded a broken game an 8.0 out of 10 score the day of its official release.

Only yesterday, two days after the official release, did Polygon finally revise their review for a second time, publishing a score of 4.0 out of 10 along with a lengthy bold-faced essay on why they were wrong. From the reporting that’s gone on about the game, it’s as if no gaming journalist was given a version of the game that was intended for release, and that, while there was stress-testing done at several points in the game’s development, none of the enlightening observations from these tests made its way into the product.

Not all hope is lost for honest games journalism, however. The SimCity review published by Kotaku was the only correct approach I’ve seen to the situation so far:

Screen Shot 2013-03-08 at 4.49.30 PM

Any other review is a sign you might be reading prose written by a bought-off, commercializing scammer who couldn’t give two shits about gaming as a whole or, at the most fundamental point, his readership.

There is one thing that I’m certain about: no matter what the result is from the SimCity debacle, it’s not going to change anything other than the now-diminished likelihood of another SimCity game ever seeing the light of day.

Square Enix’s thoughtless Hitman social media promotion ruined what seemed like a cool game.

Cool music-listening gal Mumbles 1 retweeted a news story about a social media campaign that was destined to fail while embarrassing an entire company.

This particular Hitman marketing campaign 2 was a Facebook message harassment tool with a minor photo-editing capability on the side mixed with a healthy dose of alternate reality. The branded product encouraged users to issue threats of hits to their Facebook friends because of a gender-specific negative stereotype. In one instance, one could choose the reason for the hit being because of a female friend’s “small tits”.

I’d love to think that the brain-dead, careless executive who approved a Facebook campaign like this is no longer employed at Square Enix Inc., but that’s more than likely not the case since they’ve retracted the app altogether based on user feedback—and hopefully someone at Square Enix waking the fuck up and coming to their senses.

In all seriousness, I’ve seen some pretty positive reviews of the game itself. The story (however bad it is) picks up with the player-protagonist searching for something or someone. The sandbox nature of assassinations and completing objectives seems pretty coherent and there’s even a Metal Gear Solid inspired difficulty ramping where the less impact you have with enemies and the less traces you leave behind, the better you rate in a performance review-style scoring system.

I was looking forward to eventually playing it on my Xbox once it had come down in price, but I don’t think I’ll give it that chance, now.

Companies like to experiment with social media because its a cheap way to get attention for whatever you’re promoting compared to traditional means. That is the easy bit to explain. The most important bit that some of these companies miss is that, early in the campaign’s life, execution and first impressions matter more than the reach any given scheme can achieve.

In my opinion, social media campaigns that include highly stylized apps that require some advance knowledge of the tone of the message are dangerous. campaigns to promote games should be directed at everyone who could possibly pick up and play the game within reason—this includes women with small tits.

It’s just too bad that mainstream video game marketers can’t get out of the habit of releasing apps or campaigns that are deep and engaging without involving some sort of boundary and crossing of the said boundary for shock value.

  1. Mumbles is a fun blogger / person to follow on Twitter. ↩
  2. rockpapershotgun.com: Hijinks! Square Enix Say: Threaten ‘Hits’ On Your Friends! (images from article) ↩