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Denver, 4:42 AM
Wed Dec 30
51 posts in the last 24 hours
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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
12/17/09
If someone with low critical spirit looks at it, he/she would think that all that the companies do to sell games is to launch ads and promotions and the rest is just the "spontaneous interest" of the buyers, but that is absolutely not true. To begin with video game press is nearly 100% based on promotional items provided by the companies, excluding some video reviews. Look at kotaku, for example, most of what they show about games are videos and screenshots provides by the marketing departments. "Oh!, the Bad Company 2 trailer looks amazing". Of course it does, it's edited for that purpose. Then you read the comments in massive sites like Gametrailers and half of them are "OMG, that game looks amazing!!!!1", long before the release date. Is that word of mouth?
The usual promotional campaign start months before the game is released and the goal is to blind the possible buyers with "information" on the game. By the time the game is released millions of gamers are already hyped and talking between them about how cool that game would be. And marketers are experts on doing this, they use psychologists, anthropologists, etc., people who know our minds better than we do, to create the most efficient marketing campaigns that the money can buy. What I mean is that ads and promotions is only "what we can see", but you can expect all kind of dirty tricks to make us salivate for their products. Some years ago, I saw a documentary about these techniques, and one of them was to create accounts in sites and feign interest on the products they were paid to sell.
So those "Word to Mouth" and probably even "Game Reviews" categories should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
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I bought a PSP just to buy Monster Hunter from reading comments (with additional research) on the kotaku post that started from the neat wallpaper that showed all the monsters in the game.
It was the comments on a Borderlands post about Gearbox's Twitter promotion that got me to take a closer look at the game and move it from a "meh, not in my consideration set" to a day-one purchase.
PR plays a HUGE role in game marketing and probably has the best ROI of any media dollars spent.
And I say that as a writer on game marketing that despises every single press release that makes it to my inbox.
But that's the sauce that ends up generating the word of mouth.
12/16/09
PR just hooks the early adopters. In the end, word of mouth is king.
12/16/09
Good call on Monster Hunter though.
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Also, might be one of those things where ads have maybe bad feelings associated with them so wouldn't want to tell anyone you think they are working.
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Though this doesn't matter for big name games. For the new IP games its probably better for them to release a demo as early as possible so that if it's good, the positive word of mouth builds up.
This is exactly how WoW became so successful at lauch. The game got very little marketing its power was strong word of mouth. I heard about how good the game was from a friend playing the Alpha, I wasn't at all interested until he told me. The early and long Beta served well to get people talking about it. So many gaming sites and forums had dedicated WoW discussion threads long before its release.
12/16/09
The problem is if you try and rush a demo out there's the possibility it'll go out without enough polish. A bad demo can really torpedo a games reputation before it even launchs. Betas work fine because they're played over an extended period of time and are generally patched and improved. A demo though you'll probably blitz through in 20-30 minutes and not pick up again. That's all the impression you're going to get from that demo so it has to be a good one.
12/16/09
That's where Nintendo wins by making games aimed at everyone rather than a small niche of everyone, and possibly where others lose by targetting too narrowly.
Seems to me that because of the broad appeal of the Wii there are going to be lots of situations where the influence multipliers you need to reach to spread word of a game are not themselves part of the games target audience. To take an easy example, in a game targetted at young children your influence multipliers are likely to be their mothers, but it is likely the same sort of thing for a bunch of other possible target markets.
There is also the matter of what happens when the influence multipliers are affected *negatively* - and this is potentially a real problem with selling archetypical 'mature' (i.e. blood'n'violence) games on Wii - the more you advertise the gore to your target market the more you are likely to be negatively influencing their wives, sisters, uncles and other people who might have a say.
Something that Ritticellio guy needs to have his chaps and chapesses think about a bit more.
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Seriously, how many people bought Modern Warfare 2 just because they loved the original Modern Warfare? How many people bought Assassin's Creed 2 because it improved the great idea of the first? How many people will buy StarCraft 2?
12/16/09
BUT YOU DO NOT
HIT
STARCRAFT
All jokes aside, this is a great observation. Sequels give a consumer assurance that the game will be as good or better than the previous game and, considering the price of games today, will convince a person to choose it over an original title such as Brutal Legend. It really does make sense for the consumer, but it's hurting the industry when the year's top titles are just building on the last game, especially when they use the previous game's engine.
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Joe the Sunday Gamer will not ask Bob the 24/7 gamer about Kenka Bancho, he will ask about Modern Warfare 2. So the actual effect of advertisement is probably much higher than what the consumers acknowledge.
12/16/09
This is why I've been preaching the cut of marketing dollars across the board... target these multipliers and SELL to them, they don't buy based on your shameful release date videos (I'm looking at you, FFXIII).
(Ok, we're all buying that anyway, bad example...)
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That must make the writers at Kotaku happy to hear.
12/16/09
Number Two: Word of Mouth
Number Three: Reviews
I find that I don't agree with most users about games, so I let the game do the talking or I just consult my friends. Really though, an actual review is integral to my purchase.
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Would MW2's greatest sales of all time launch day happen without advertising?
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I think MW2 was word of mouth, the game is a sequel to a popular game so I think that it had less to do with advertising.
Of course filling blogs, sites, etc with it till it released (which I will never forgive kotaku, almost half a week with 70% MW2 and 30% other games) helps but most of it is word of mouth.
Just look at the Wii sales, yes sure there is advertizing but a great percentage of the sales are easily by word of mouth.
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[www.google.com]
12/16/09
My basic point is you almost always have to do some hard labor to get your name out. You can't sell something no one knows about and word of mouth doesn't travel far without a good head start.
12/16/09
I was responding to you saying "I cannot just make something, tell a few people and expect it to grow on it's own." That is the concept behind viral advertising: you *can* make something, tell (or show) a few people, then let a form of "grass-roots" advertising take hold.
It's true that "you cannot even get started without advertising" but even "word of mouth" is advertising, it's just not *paid* or *controlled* advertising. Most websites work on this concept, I've never seen a paid ad for any of the sites I visit regularly but they are all quite popular. Some have even gotten book deals ( [maddox.xmission.com] is a good example, because I love the site and would like to make it more popular through the words of my fingers).
I didn't intend for this to be a rant, but the whole marketing industry is such bullshit. Everyone assumes that huge ad campaigns are necessary because they seem to work, in the sense that some things that have huge ad campaigns sell well. All the heavily advertised products that fail and all the little-to-non-advertised products that succeed are written off as exceptions because most people in management are either stupid (the Peter Principle) or too scared to take real risks. People assume they won't get fired as long as they do what has always been done.
12/16/09
I will have to disagree with the huge campaign necessary in certain situations though. This mainly being directly related to me.
I'm not afraid of taking chances. Well, I'm completely broke so chances are really all I have so I suppose it doesn't apply :). Anyway, by taking a chance I spent 2 1/2 to 3 months working on a web site 17 hours a day + weekends...real burn out stuff. It's an e-card site....but I made it with a purpose. I was sick of seeing the only thing I could send someone for a "virtual card" was a tiny flash video with some annoying sound effect and music all bordered by advertisements (even on the pay sites). I wanted something clean and nice and "classy". I also wanted to be able to have gamer/geek and pop culture related cards. This was a personal project as well as an idea to bring some sort of income into my life.
So after nearly passing out from exhaustion with the crazy schedule I set for myself, my web site was born ([thecardchest.com]).
Now I'm fully aware that this is a niche product and perhaps something more mainstream would work for pure word of mouth advertising, however I will state my case.
After release, I sent e-mails out to everyone I knew...offered free cards to them all. Posted on my facebook account about it. Drew some nice pictures about it and waited....
Well, the only sale I got was from a friend who opted out of the free cards I offered. Around this time I was completely out of money.
So I sold my car to pay bills etc and used $50 to run some ads on google. The first day running the ads I got 2 sales! Well...that was about it for the sales from my ad.
It has been over a month since I ran the ad and there have been consitent visitors from it. Around 5 to 20 per day. From this I get maybe 1 or 2 sales a week. So word of mouth IS working since I have not advertised since....
however
If I had the money to run more than just a couple days worth of ads I am certain this can take off. The small amount of money invested helped a lot and logically I'm thinking a larger amount would help more.
Let me get back to my point. Having a niche idea is hard to sell without ads. At least it's been hard for me. A lot of people view my site and say it's neat, but want me to "bring the funny" with crazy bouncy smiley face and annoying music...they want what the other guys sell, which is what I do not want. But...the occasional person that is looking for what I have to offer LOVES it. How do I reach that niche market when the mainstream is not going to pass the word around because it is not a mainstream product?
I suppose I am completely biased being in a situation where I think I strongly need advertising, but at the same time I think my situation could apply to many and makes me believe that word of mouth is the exception rather than the rule.
Edit: Oh, and I don't know if this would apply as viral marketing, but I spend another entire week making a borderlands fan page to showcase my work:
[thecardchest.com]
I also really liked the game ;).
12/17/09
Maybe a larger marketing campaign would help you, maybe the total market would only net what you would pay for the ads. Unfortunately, there's no way to know these things in advance, even the best marketing research will only give a vague idea (and would be prohibitively expensive). I didn't mean to come across as against all advertising, I agree that it's obvious that some is necessary. My problem is with large corporations spending absurd amounts of money with no way of quantifying if they actually made money by doing it. Modern Warfare 2 is an excellent example, the game was going to sell ass-loads no matter what they did with advertising. The only way to really screw it up would be to release garbage. Yet they still plastered the marketplace with very expensive advertising, in the process hitting consumers who will never, ever buy any video game or only like sports games. A little targeted marketing to gamers would have notified the people who cared that the game was coming and any who were somehow missed would have easily heard about it from people they know that did get hit with the marketing. This could have been done for practically free just by sending screen shots and videos to gaming-related websites. It's a big enough game that any magazine that expects to survive and any decent gaming website will contact the developer or publisher and request/beg for details. On the flip side, a game like Braid might be fun as sex but just doesn't have mass-appeal-style gameplay, so all the advertising in the world wouldn't move the sales needle very much. Mr. Blow might have to work a little harder to get the gaming media to notice him, but a TV ad would almost certainly cost more than it would bring in.
In summary: some advertising is good and necessary, but most is a waste of money. I have more little rantlets on the topic, but I doubt they're interesting/useful to anyone who doesn't live in my head.
FWIW, you should look into optimizing your Google search position. I couldn't find the site just by searching "e-cards" (gave up after 5 pages of results, I'm sure it's somewhere in the 104,000,000 results) and even "e-cards card chest" (I didn't have the quotes in the actual search) has it listed third and marked as a flash file. On a separate note, I'm on dial-up and would never have waited as long as I had to for the site to load if I were actually looking for e-cards as I did to check out what you have going on. I love the concept of browsing virtual card shelves and dial-up users may be a dying breed, but there are parts of the US that have no other realistic options (satellite is stupid expensive). I shop Amazon and NewEgg fairly regularly and, even with quite a few images and other stuff going on, they provide a reasonably smooth experience. Anyway, unless it turns out that you're actually a real jerk, I wish you luck with running your business. Business management in general is a bitch and these aren't the most affluent of times. But, hell, maybe you'll get people to check out and talk about your site from posting here. The best word of mouth advertising flows naturally.
12/17/09
Yes, people do pay for e-cards. My sister ironically has an account for americangreetings.com. A site that sells the similar bunch of e-cards with a tiny viewing area surrounded by a cluttered page. The main competitors would by hallmark,americangreetings, and jib jab.
On advertising, I'm not sure how much of this went to ads but JibJab got over 9 million in funding to start selling e-cards. Then in the following couple months they sold around 9 million at around $1 a piece. I have no idea how much they have sold since then...
Do I need 9 million to get this thing going? Hell no. A thousand dollars would probably be enough to jump start this where people actually know about it. I wouldn't even know what to do with 9 million funding!
If I showed up in google results for the keyword e-card...I could retire :). It's pretty saturated so will be quite a while before I'm up there. I've looked myself before through over 100 pages just to see and nothing... It's all about getting links of links and links. Getting people talking about it. Or being a ruthless spammer and bot commenting like some lesser places I won't (myspace, facebook aps) mention.
I am going to implement some tricks I learned for showing flash sites to google with keywords soon though. That could help.
As for the topic at hand, I think we eventually ended up on the same page. I agree there is over advertising and sometimes wonder how it could all be worth it (jibjab's 9 million venture for one). However there are some cases where you are too small and need the extra push to get off the ground.
EDIT: Oh and also, thank you very much for the kind words. It's been an interesting discussion.
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If the game is good.
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A free game nets you a "meh, I had fun" comment.
$100 gets you a "First day" comment.
$500 gets you a post where I actually describe the gameplay and how much I think it kicks ass.
$10,000 Gets an attempt at the creation of a meme based around your game and unabashed love for your product in any article it pops up in.
Message me for payment and contact details.
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