Squandered Opportunities
Written by John J. Xenakis for
CFO.com,
Dec 27, 2000.
While an explosion in computer games provides many marketing tie-in
opportunities, most are not exploited.
Go to the Microsoft gaming zone (http://www.zone.com) on the
Internet, and play the game "RadioShack RC Riot," and you'll be able
to play a car-race game in which all the cars are graphic duplicates
of remote- controlled cars that are available in Radio Shack retail
stores. But why bother to head out to your local Radio Shack, when a
mouse-click or two lets you order one of the Radio Shack cars online?
Or play "Adrenaline by Toyota," and race a Toyota Truck around the
Track -- and enter a contest that lets you win a truck.
"Toyota went back and tested people who played the game, and brand
recognition was much higher than for people who just saw a TV ad,"
brags Ed Fries, Microsoft's VP of games publishing.
These are just two examples of advertising and tie-in opportunities
with games that are starting to appear, now that we're entering a year
where the size of the computer games market is expected to explode.
Computer games go through cycles of about five years, with the
duration of the cycle determined by the relative success of game
consoles that you hook up to your TV sets. Different companies have
been the market leaders in each of the last few cycles -- Atari,
Nintendo, Sega, and Sony have all been leaders in previous Cycles.
This year, Sony is looking to repeat its past success with the
PlayStation console with the PlayStation 2, which was just released a
couple of months ago, and so far they seem to be succeeding.
"When the PlayStation 1 was launched in September 1995, they sold half
a million units by year-end," says Edward Williams, investment analyst
with Gerard Klauer Mattison, a New York City-based investment bank.
"By contrast, Sony will sell over one million PlayStation 2 units by
year-end, so they've sold twice as many units in significantly less
time."
That's true despite the fact that a chip shortage has kept the PS2 in
limited supply, he noted. "The raw demand for the PS2 game system is
huge, and they'll have shipped over three million units by March,"
says Williams.
But Sony doesn't have the market to itself. Microsoft will be shipping
its new X-Box console in the fall of 2001. It also plans a massive
marketing campaign with the intention of having the X-Box console
dwarf the PS2.
And analysts expect Nintendo to come out with its Game Cube -- a
video-games console -- early in 2002. Nintendo targets a different
demographic, young children, as opposed to the children in their 20s
that are targeted by Sony and Microsoft. The three companies combined
are expected to create a surge in gaming an order of magnitude larger
than we saw in the last explosion, in 1996.
A new game-console cycle means a lot of new business for game
developers, and that means lots of games -- not only for game consoles
but also for online gaming systems and standard PCs. This means that
there will be an explosion of new games coming out in the next two
years.
As I put together the holiday edition of this column, on the topic of
computer games, I was astounded by how many obviously excellent
marketing opportunities there are for tie-in's with games -- and how
these opportunities are being ignored and squandered.
In two specific cases, although the games themselves were marketed
successfully, the opportunity to market tie-ins with the games was not
used.
Consider, for example, the very peculiar story of the game Deer
Hunter, from games developer Infogrames (http://www.infogrames.com). Analyst James Lin, of the investment bank Sutro
& Company tells what happened: "WalMart wanted a game that would
appeal to deer hunters, and found that there was nothing on the
market."
Infogrames responded by putting together a super-cheap Deer Hunter
game that did little more than let you shoot at a deer as it passed a
fixed target. "Deer Hunter 1 and 2 sold over two million copies
combined," says Lin, "just because the game appealed to deer
hunters."
The company is now on Deer Hunter 4, and it's a mainstream game,
according to Infogrames VP of development Steve Ackrich. "We try to
make the experience as close to real hunting as possible, and now we
also have bird hunting and other types of hunting. There are a lot of
people who like to do these sports," he says.
Let's look at another story. When I was writing an article about
computer games back in the 1980s, I received a review copy of Links, a
golf-playing game from Access Software (now owned by Microsoft). I
installed the game and played it a few minutes and thought, "Boring!
Booooooooring!"
Well I was sooooo wrong. Access put me in touch with some users:
fanatics who went out to the real golf course in the morning, and then
played on the virtual golf courses on Links in the evening, as well as
people who set up and participated in online golf tournaments.
The special appeal was the golf courses themselves. Links had highly
realistic versions of the country's major golf courses. You could
watch a golf tournament on TV and follow along in the game, or you can
simply try out the course yourself by playing the game.
The latest version, Microsoft's Links 2001, actually contains a golf
course designer module, permitting a local guru to design a virtual
version of a golf course in his home town and make it available to
other local golf players!
A Visceral Connection
What these examples have in common is that they show games that, while
their tie-in potential has been left dormant, they are successful on
two levels: they're fun to play and their content appeals to the
players on a visceral level as well.
The market contains lots of so-called "first- person shooter" games
(games in which the person playing just shoots at things). But of all
of them, Deer Hunter selectively appeals to people who actually go out
and hunt deer. Similarly, while there are many sports games, golf
games selectively appeal to golf players.
It's this visceral connection that seems to me to be largely not
exploited so far. This looks like a marketer's dream to me, as the
games target specific niche markets that might be hard to reach in
other ways.
In fact, I believe that games could even be used to advance political
causes. Take, for example, both sides of the gun control issue. A
game like Deer Hunter could be used as political support for
gun-control opponents. So could Hitman Codename 47 from Eidos
(http://www.eidos.com), in which you have to plot out a long,
complex strategy before you can accomplish your mission of shooting
the bad guy.
What about games for those who favor gun control? I haven't seen any,
but it would be an interesting challenge, and I can imagine one: The
town of Happyville is having a crime spree because there are too many
guns around.
Your job is find all guns hidden around town; each time you find one,
the crime rate drops and the standard of living goes up. Maybe you
could even get this incorporated into a special version of Simsville
(described below).
The point of all this is that marketers, whether for consumer products
or politics, have a potent method to find and single out the people in
their target markets. Marketers can take advantage of games that have
a visceral connection for their users. People tend to play such games
because they remind them of themselves in some way.
There are many ways for marketers to exploit such connections, and
they're not all that expensive. Banner ads on online game services
such as http://www.zone.com or http://www.uproar.com cost only
a few hundred dollars, and there are literally hundreds of thousands
of people who use these services every day.
Although top-selling games cost millions of dollars to develop, simple
niche games can be developed for just a few hundred thousand dollars.
These games could be tailored to suit a marketing message and can be
sold in stores, made available in online gaming services, or even be
installed on an organization's own Web site to draw traffic there and
keep people from leaving.
The fact is, today's video games, whether they're PC games, console
games, or online games, are loaded with possibilities for tie-in
marketing. You can see this easily by looking at some of the major
games available today:
Blizzard's Diablo II (http://www.blizzard.com) and
Interplay's Baldur's Gate II (http://www.interplay.com) are
examples of fantasy role-playing games(RPGs). You play as one of the
characters in the game and move along the terrain, picking up various
objects as you go. Most of the objects are weapons, such as swords,
and defenses, such as shields. Both enable you to fight various
monsters. However, objects can be anything -- money to buy other
things, food that restores your health and strength, or potions to
give you additional powers.
If you haven't yet seen how realistic sports games are getting,take a
look at NHL 2001 or Madden NFL 2001 from Electronic Arts
(http://www.ea.com). Sports games in the past were played with
frozen-faced, stiff players making only two or three types of plays,
but no longer. Watching someone play these games, you almost think
you're viewing a live game on TV. And they have a variety of
strategies, so that the plays seem as intelligent as those of real,
live players.
If you're one of the millions who got hooked on Myst a few
years ago, a new version of this adventure game, RealMyst is
now available from Cyan (http://www.cyan.com), with breathtaking
improvements. In Myst, you could only look at a building from a single
angle, while the RealMyst buildings are fully rendered in 3-D. That
means you can walk around and explore them from any angle, as if you
were on that strange, lovely island for real. (However, if you hated
Myst, you probably won't like RealMyst, since the way the game is
played and the puzzles are similar.)
Possibly the biggest single category is that of real-time strategy
(RTS) games. In these games, you create whole armies, navies and air
forces, consisting of large numbers of units and ready to wage war
against opposing armies. What's fascinating about these games is that
you have to provide control from all levels. That means that while
you have to set large armies in motion, you sometimes have to direct
individuals in hand-to-hand combat. This year's best are Starcraft
from Blizzard Entertainment Inc. (http://www.blizzard.com) and Age
of Empires II from Ensemble Studios (http://www.ensemblestudios.com). We're all waiting for the delayed but
highly anticipated Warcraft III, also from Blizzard.
For many, the best game of the year 2000 was The Sims from Electronic
Arts, a game in which you simulate an entire family. You create a
"Sim" to be a person that you control -- male, female, fat, thin,
whatever characteristics you want. You build and set up the Sim's
house; you make sure that your Sim's basic needs are met. by
providing for a job, food, furniture, a bathroom, a bedroom, a
kitchen; and you have your Sim flirt with the neighbor Sims, in the
hope of their getting married and having kids. Simsville is the name
of the hugely anticipated sequel, scheduled for 2001. That game will
be a mixture of The Sims and the old SimCity; in Simville, you'll be
the mayor of a town, and you'll be controlling not only individual Sim
families, but also the entire town's health.
A different kind of simulation is the action game Crimson Skies from
Microsoft. Controlling vehicles has always been fun, whether it's
been on Nascar Online (http://www.nascar.com), or on Microsoft
Flight Simulator, which has been letting you fly increasingly
realistic virtual airplanes since the 1980s. In Crimson Skies,
Microsoft has added a complex story line: The U.S. didn't do well in
the 1930s Depression, and the national highway system never got built,
so goods have to be transported by huge zeppelins. Your job is to fly
around in planes and knock out the inevitable pirates. Some unusual
features: Planes take off from and land on the zeppelins; and you can
get close to another plane and board it while flying.
Hasbro Inc., recently acquired by Infogrames, is marketing popular
traditional games and quiz games, such as Monopoly, Frogger and Who
Wants To Be a Millionaire. According to Steve Kleynhans, analyst for
the Meta Group, computer games are becoming considerably more mature,
in many ways. "Next Christmas will be stellar for the gaming
community," he says. "The big thing [about the new games] is being
totally immersed in the game, feeling a part of it. A good graphic
presentation, rich and textured, is essential. But now we're seeing
that being extended to a much richer audio experience in games."
Whether it's video or audio or something else, the number of
opportunities for product promotion are endless.
One thing I'd like to see done in terms of tie-ins to games is
something similar to product placement seen in movies. But I'd only
favor it if it were done in the right way. For example, any user
spending $50 for a game would resent having to stare at a Coca-Cola
ad throughout the game.
But how about this: there's a can of Coke in one of the rooms, and
the player picks it up and drinks it to gain points, and then throws
the empty can away and never sees it again. Coke has a very effective
ad that doesn't linger and cause resentment, and hopefully the game
will be a few bucks cheaper to compensate for the advertising. It's a
win for everyone.
(This is a modified version of an article that originally
appeared on
Dec 27, 2000
on
CFO.com
at
this location.
)
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