| Set On Stun |

Lately, the geekiverse has been all aflutter about Sega’s upcoming game, Aliens vs. Predator.  In fact, few movie franchise video games have really generated more excitement.  In my personal opinion, the first AvP game was probably the best AvP game to date.

With the release of the new trailer (be fore-warned it’s violent, with graphic mutilations, impalations, decapitations, evicerations and puppy-kicking) most of the major video game blogs have reported on it.  The comments on these articles range from excited “OMFG!” to “This is just over the top torture porn”.

As usual, this got me thinking about the marketing of this video game.  Is this blatantly over the top imagery designed to whip up the excited masses into a frothing heap of first day sales?  Does blatantly promoting the violence somehow make gamers look bad?  Is Sega’s marketing brilliant, reprehensible or just somewhere in between?

But first… watch the new trailer.

Got it?  Good.

First, the basics.  All marketing needs to start with an understanding of the target demographic.  Marketers do the research to figure out their audience, their purchasing habits and the desires they want fulfilled.  In this case, these are people (mostly male) who’ve consumed a considerable amount of sci-fi horror material.  They’ve seen the Alien and Predator series along with the AvP movies that followed them.  A portion of that audience reads the graphic novels, played the games and continue to debate in fan forums.

The second part of marketing that I want to focus on is the fact that marketers are tasked in describing what the consumer will actually get when they purchase the product.  Some games, like Brutal Legend were promoted as a kick-ass slash game through the “Metalverse”, some of them were visibly pissed off when they found out that there were significant portions of the game that were RTS elements… a genre that has yet to penetrate the console market successfully.  I can understand why Brutal Legend was marketed in the way it was marketed.  The reaction to a RTS console game is rarely well received.  From that angle, the marketing failed.  They pushed a product that didn’t give the consumer enough information to fulfill their expectations.

This looks a bit too well lit to be an Aliens vs. Predator game... but damn it's cool

In this case, the marketing of Aliens vs. Predator gives a tight group of the gaming demographic EXACTLY what they expect and what they desire.  This new trailer is probably one of the better trailers I’ve seen for a video game of that sort.  It communicates clearly, mixing what appears to be ingame scenes, pre-rendered scenes and actual gameplay footage into a bloody montage.

In fact, one of the quick scenes that’s stuck in my head is the part where you have the “mouth view” of the alien as it rushes in to separate a marine’s face from the rest of his head.

Yet is this a cheap attempt to gain media attention, to excite gamers by giving them what could be the bloodiest moments in the game?  Probably, but for the right audience, this is exactly right.  This is exactly what they want.  Fans of the Aliens and Predator stories (like me) have come to expect this over the top brutality in our comics, games and movies about this particular universe.

I’ve watched it dozens of times… and I don’t think I could get enough of this game.

However, Sega needs to watch it… if this game sucks, then this same trailer which is damn good video game marketing could become a touchpoint of fan anger if the actual game doesn’t live up to the standard that it’s presenting.  So even good pre-launch marketing could immediately turn into bad marketing if the product doesn’t live up to the hype.

I’m a huge fan of RPGs in general.  I spent hours and hours playing Daggerfall, in fact I still have an old PC where I can play it every once in a while in all its pixelated glory.  When I fired up Dragon Age: Origins, I was lost in the stories of the downtrodden elves who were essentially gentrified into the slums of human cities.  I both envied and pitied the plight of the powerful mages.  I managed to play through every origin story until my last one as a dwarf fighter noble.

I’d remembered Nick Yee’s Daedalus project about the perception of beauty, attractiveness and race.  So I decided to find out what life was like as a dark-skinned dwarven noble.

I was immediately plunged into the intrigue and deception politics of the dwarven court, it was well written, complex and satisfying.  Yet there was something that pulled at me.  There was something wrong.

My father, my brother, my best friend… the arena master, the two dwarven girls who agree to a threesome.  All fair skinned.  Once I made that connection, I tried to find another dark skinned dwarf like myself.  While I’m sure there are dark-skinned dwarves at some point, I couldn’t find a single one in the origin stories.  It seems I wasn’t alone in noticing the lack of pigmentation in dwarven society as the blog Brain Dump also noticed.

Why was it overlooked or disregarded by the Bioware team?  Did they not notice the discrepancy?  Did market research show them that the RPG population was so completely dominated by whites that they didn’t need to represent other skin-tones in the game?  Is it really so difficult to make the skin tone of the player character a hitch to which the other familial pigmentations are attached to in a sort of variation of tone?

I ended up chatting with a few friends of mine from Spark Plug Games about the technical feasibility of making the player character’s skin tone a factor in dynamically generating any familial skin-tones.  They said it wasn’t hard to do, games make much more dynamic calculations and decisions on the fly than just rendering a series of colors.

I still couldn’t really pin down why it bugged me so much.  Then, it hit me.  Sort of.

I’m white.

I don’t live in an area where I’m the different one.  Where I grew up, my race never really was an issue.  I wasn’t the different one.  However, now that I’m in a mixed-race marriage where my wife has described to me what’s embedded in the experience of being the one that’s different, the one that’s had to be very conscious of her pigmentation, I realized I was uncomfortable because this game had made me experience something I’d never experienced before.

I became the outsider in a world separated by pigmentation.  Sure, no one in the game treated me differently, they made no differentiation to me based on my skin color.  Yet, I felt it.  My character was different than my own family, than my friends, than every other dwarf I related to.

What I experienced at that moment of revelation was two-fold.  I was drawn into an emotional and empathetical experience by a video game.  For only a few moments, I felt a fraction of what it may be like to be the outsider, the one who’s different.  It made no difference to how I was treated, I was different and it mattered to me.  I didn’t want them to recognize my difference, I didn’t wanted to be treated differently… I just ended up looking for some other character that looked like me.

The second thing I noticed was that whether it was intentional or unintentional on the part of Bioware to make the pigmentations on the families static, to not place any (that I noticed) black dwarves in the origin experience seemed to me a slight injustice.  I know that even with this slight experience, I cannot even come close to relating to anyone who’s suffered a real injustice for their race, but if a video game can give me that experience, I can recognize the amazing potential to teach people, to have them experience life from another perspective and ultimately, contrary to some punditry out there, raise more thoughtful and empathetic people… even if they’re playing a bloody good game like Dragon Age.

A while ago, an article on GameIndustry.biz caught my attention.  Matt Martin’s review of the EEDAR, Electronic Entertainment Design and Research group showed that more money spent on video game marketing turns a better return on investment than media reviews or the actual game development.

Speaking at the Montreal International Games Summit, Jesse Divnich delivered what could be considered a heretical, yet data-supported claim.

“You can make the greatest game and it won’t even matter. I know that’s discouraging to developers at first but it’s very true”.

“Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores. There’s a giant myth out there that reviews scores are the most crucial to a videogame. The reason why that is is the information is readily available – we can go to Metacritic – and we see games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty succeed and we see they have a high quality score and we make that correlation. But the truth is, marketing actually has much more of an influence to game sales than high scores.”

In every single meeting I’ve been involved in where the marketing of a game was discussed, the primary focus was on making sure that the reviews from the enthusiast media and the aggregates were high.  The prevailing wisdom was that high scores had a direct corollary effect on the overall sales.  Review sites have spent a significant amount of time to develop ways for publishers and developers to track and trend the game, calculating varying data points like UGC, page views, time on page and other factors.

Media sites have shown developers that once a positive review is out, the user chatter increases as well.  However, all this really amounts to is buzz and interest, not sales.  The effect of the EEDAR research has on these measuring strategies promoted by the media sites could force developers, publishers and ostensibly the ad agencies they hire to re-evaluate the obsession of the review.

From a purely anecdotal perspective, listening to the Joystiq podcast the other day, they made the comment about the NPD numbers as it related to Halo ODST.  This game trounced all other entries in the field, yet it in the middle of the road compared to the other Halo games reviews.  (Halo ODST: 83 - Halo 3: 94 - Halo 2: 72 ) They noted that the marketing campaign for Halo ODST was massive and that was more than likely the primary mover to influence gamers to actually go out and buy that game.

For some perspective, Halo ODST sold more than 2.5 million copies in the first two weeks whereas Halo 3 sold 3.3 million copies in the first 12 days.  At first look this may appear that the better critical acclaim for Halo 3 would support the idea that a better reviewed game would support the idea that a better review would translate to higher sales, however… while the details of how much money was spent on each campaign are not available, Halo 3 had some massive cross-promotion, with Mountain Dew featuring a Halo 3 themed drink etc.  For Halo ODST, the marketing campaign was massive, but didn’t have the overall reach and crossover to all the other areas where gamers were likely to encounter that message.  Lastly, the marketing campaign for Halo 2 wasn’t nearly as massive as either of those campaigns.

This brings into question another assumption about the gamer population, are we really as marketing averse as we think we are?  Are we really immune to the forces of marketing?

Yes (but only if you define marketing in a particularly narrow way)

Gamers tend to be less susceptible to traditional forms of marketing compared to other groups, however, we crave content, media, conversations, images, op-eds, previews and a myriad of other forms of communication to consume.   This is also marketing.  Gamers are pre-programmed to consume the kind of social connection marketing that’s evolved over the internet, social media and mobile applications.  We eat this stuff up at a phenomenal rate.

This data doesn’t suggest that developers skimp on a good game, just balance out the emerging data that shows that when a game is marketed to the right people, when there’s plentiful information and content to consume, gamers are more likely to buy.

There’s very little question at this point about the ubiquity of mobile integration with digital life.  On a broad scale of the mobile market, the phrase Apple’s adopted for their App Store is “There’s an App for that”.  On September 28, 2009, Apple claimed that 85,000 apps have been downloaded  from Apple’s iTunes over 2 billion times.  This alone is not new information.

That’s the App marketplace for just the iPhone, not counting RIM Blackberry, Android or any other smartphone.  Analysts predict that the total smartphone penetration will reach 28-30% of the market, with an estimated number of users reaching 1.6 billion smartphones.

Wireless Expertise forecasts that the global mobile app market – including games – will be worth $4.66 billion in 2009, rising to $16.60 billion, in 2013.

With this said, the emergence and subsequent potential domination of the mobile market will become highly competitive, potentially lucrative and absolutely exciting.  Since this is a blog about video game marketing, I want to take a step back and specifically focus on the mobile gaming market.  Currently, the top mobile gaming platforms are:

• iPhone/ iPod Touch
• N-Gage
• Android Phones
• Sony PSP/ PSP Go
• Nintendo DS/ DSi
• Game Boy

Some of these are devices, like the Sony PSP or the iPhone, some of these are application platforms that are loaded onto phones like the N-Gage.  Nevertheless, while the iPhone has done much to launch the mobile game revolution, its success is based on older platforms like the PSP and Nintendo’s Game Boy and DS devices.

Enough with the history, on with the measurement:

There are several critical, interdependent aspects to mobile game marketing.  In marketing anything, especially to a group as tech-savvy, vocal and opinionated as gamers, the product has to come first.  The game design document must be clear and focused.  Is the point of the game to have fun (Witch’s Workshop), be social (iMob/ iVampire), inform (Horoscopes) or recreate an interactive experience around a known property (Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles).  Once the direction and characteristics of the game have been agreed upon, the features need to support the overall goal of the mobile game.  From that point, the marketing can really begin.

The first thing to consider is the mobile gaming marketspace.  When you combine the ubiquity of mobile platforms, the affordability of the games, the ease of entry and the growth potential and profitability, you’ll end up with a cluttered marketplace.  This is true with mobile games and to some extent, 3rd party Wii games.  When marketing a mobile video game, the first thing to do is cut through the clutter.

• The Game

The game itself has to stand out, there are hundreds of Peggle clones out there.  When playing iMob, iVampire or any other mobile MMO, there’s a lot of replication.  In terms of iMob and iVampire, it’s the same damn game.  There’s some imagery and text differentiation, but the core structure is identical.  Games like iMob rely on peoples’ impatience in leveling up to entice a microtransaction to purchase items, energy and other things.  If the game you’re making is a clone, marketing that game will boil down to, “Did you like iMob?  Then try iVampires, it’s like iMob, but with Vampires!”.  Not a particularly strong value proposition to the user.  It’s ok if a game is like another game, but cloning other popular games diminishes the marketing efforts to cut through the clutter and almost guarantees a short game life.

• The Price

The price of the game is critical.  Naturally the goal is to make a profit on the game itself or drive interest and revenue to another property.  If it takes $100 to make and market a mobile game, then at the price of $0.99, after Apple’s 30% cut on the sale, you’ll have to sell just over 150 apps at that price to start making a profit.  When you consider that the mean price of apps on the Apple store is $2.65 and that the average price for apps are on a steady decline from $3.15 to $2.55 determining the price point can be tricky.

the market for anything more expensive than that will be a tough sell for most application users.  While these numbers may indicate a reason to despair, according to Flurry mobile analytics,  setting the price point at the right spot (with a free trial version) can actually increase revenue once you lessen the price point barrier.

When marketing a mobile video game, it’s important to balance the numbers of installations with the price in order to maximize installations and profits.  Sometimes, just giving the application away can be a way to capitalize on the user’s activity in order to cross-sell, create ad supported units or create partnerships with other businesses to make up the development and marketing costs.

• The Key Performance Indicators

Simply put, KPIs for mobile applications are slightly different than for traditional web analytics.  The strong indicators for the success of an application is the number of installations over time, the rate of application usage, the rate of application deletion and if the game has any social network integration, the number and rate of social network contributions.  I need to look at how often people are using the app, are they using it daily, weekly, monthly or do they just download and forget about it?  If I find that it takes about a month before most people delete the application, I’d consider pushing small updates to the application once every 3 weeks.  If the abandonment is generally after a week, then there may be a core flaw with the application itself.  At its core, the KPIs for mobile applications are about loyalty.  Once again, Flurry has an excellent chart to show users’ loyalty to different types of applications.

We see here that mobile video games have a higher than average rate of use, but they fail to deliver on the retention rate.  Finding creative solutions to enhance the retention on the mobile application can transform further application marketing, monetization and renewable revenue from the app.

• The Virality

How does your game spread?  Is it because it’s a featured app?  Is it because it connects to social networks like Twitter or Facebook?  Does it have the ability to email or text your contacts?  If it’s a social game, how can your game leverage your existing network to spread the game?  This is a tricky question that has a crappy answer, it depends on the game.  This is a question that needs to be answered during the design and documentation phase of the game development.  Games like Doom really don’t have a mechanism for social spread, however, Spore might benefit from posting your critter on your Facebook profile.  Allowing your impressive high score to populate a Twitter post could entice other people to try to beat that.  When its appropriate for the game, it’s important to find relevant and natural ways for that game to replicate itself and become its own marketing machine.

• The Social Networks/ Community Management

When putting out a mobile video game, whether its on the PSP or the iPhone, leveraging the community is an essential function.  First and foremost, it provides a place for people to connect and ask about tech support, resolve issues and provides a place for people to share their scores, tips, cheats and experiences with other people.  One of the better successes for this type of mobile game marketing is the community that surrounds the game Pocket God.  It’s a game that combines cool and unique gameplay with a fun, personable and responsive community around it.  If the platform allows it, such as the iPhone, the game can integrate with any of the networks you’ve joined.  A few months ago, I was working on a mobile game project in the works and had a fantastic chat with the smart and attractive guys at Spark Plug Games about how to integrate and leverage social networks into a game, at what points should those social triggers happen and using the mobile game to feed the web game, and how to use the web game to feed the mobile game.  Talking to them was one of those experiences for me that revealed to me how absolutely big the potential for social gaming across platforms, social network integration (such as the gaming network GamerDNA) can be for not only marketing the game, but community creation and other aspects that gamers find standard in console or PC games.

• The Cross Marketing

Cross marketing should always provide value for the click.  In fact, it’s critical to think beyond the click.  There are several ways to cross market in a mobile video game, that generally apply to demo or free applications.

1. In the game iMob and iVampire (I keep using them as an example, don’t i?), they have a bar that’s below the character information screen and above the game information section that promotes their other games.  It has creatives like “Download Fighter Jets and get 10 points and a free spiked sword”.  When a game like this relies on the microtransactions of their points, the appeal for a few free points is pretty high, you already know that you’ll be able to play the game and of course, when you’re all out of energy points in one game, you can play another game to get your fix.
2. If I’m playing a free game that’s level based, the loading screens can become dynamic landing pages for other apps, sites, events or pretty much anything that fits with the demographic that plays the game.  This is essentially the ad-supported method.  I’m playing a free platformer game on the iPhone, I go from level 1 to level 2, and since the game is about zombies, my load screen could be a geo-tagged ad to go see the new movie Zombieland.  As a marketer, I know that my load times could be anywhere between 10 and 20 seconds, that’s a good way to engage a captive and interested audience with a locally relevant, interesting way to promote other things through the application itself.  My personal feeling is that if you’re selling an application or charging for a service, it’s probably not the best thing to advertise to them too.  (It’s like how I would like to see a free ad-supported Xbox Live or a paid ad-free Xbox Live… that would just make sense).
3. Capitalize on a game that already has a planned obsolescence.  This would make sense for a more media oriented campaign.  When the new Star Trek movie came out, I noticed that there was an app for it, and they wanted me to pay for it.  While I understand that it had “extra” material, extra content and it was a neat comic prequel mini-series, it just seemed to me that it was, at its core, an ad that I had to pay to see.  Essentially, I couldn’t find a single person who had it, we all thought it was B.S. to pay for what was essentially an advertisement.  If this app would have been free, the options for SMS, email, regular and phased updates, media delivery could have kept people eager for more information and a level of cool interactivity could have kept the Star Trek brand, movie and products in front of more eyeballs.  Yet, they chose to sell the fancy ad.

So, there you have it.  For me, it’s a small step in a very big world of mobile gaming.  I know that I’ve only touched the surface of mobile game marketing.  As always, in marketing, the devil is in the details.

I’ve waited for a while to actually bring this article to life.  It’s a massive topic and it’s full of complexity and dynamic technologies with companies working feverishly to push the limits of the platform in order to create more compelling mobile experiences.  The next aspects I want to explore about mobile game marketing is how search and media marketing online and through offline partnerships can affect the sale and download of mobile apps.

As my friend and partner in crime Shawn said earlier about Bethesda’s game WET, it’s a unique and amazing departure of a studio to experiment with something unique, something new and something that they’re not known for.  From the people who brought the lush and amazing stories of Tamriel, in its Elder Scrolls series, comes WET.  When I first saw this at the Bethesda booth at E3 09, I was riveted.  It was a game that looked like the perfect blending of the grindhouse movie style, action games, compelling story and a non-idealized female assassin.  As opposed to the hyper-sexualized and non-utilitarian focused fashion obsessed video game assassins that we find in other games.

So, keeping in line with the tradition, Rubi bears very little resemblance to the traditional female video game assassin.  She’s hot, but she’s tough.  She’s practically dressed and armed.  One of the reasons I like her is because she looks like a professional assassin.

To really create the mood of Rubi, the music comes into play.  This is what really enhances the game design, the character design and the story design.  Without the music, the game can fall into obscurity as has other games that don’t really capture your interest.  While the game has its absolute flaws, what it remembers to do is pull you in with its style.

Kotaku posted a really cool video about the nature of sound design to capture that grindhouse feel, keep the story going, enhance the action and give the game a look and feel that I don’t remember any game really having before.

For me, marketing is about influencing behaviors and emotions to entice action.  This could be compelling ads, it could be a personality that expresses themselves over social media, marketing is not always about selling units.  In this case, it’s all about creating an environment, a story and a character that will draw you in, make you remember other media (like a Tarantino flick) and give you an experience that ultimately, can be sold.

In this case, the music of WET is nothing short of brilliant, it mixes some of the old school 70’s music, some hip-hop and even some lonesome spaghetti western influences.  As Bethesda has promoted this game, the one thing that stands out in my mind is how effectively the music of WET has permeated my experience and perceptions of the game.