| Set On Stun |

From Gizmodo’s liveblog.  I’ll take a look at the gaming aspects of the new Apple iPad.

So, there it is. The Apple iPad. "meh" so far unimpressed.... c'mon Jobs, bring on the games!

At this point, I’m watching the liveblog event on Gizmodo and within minutes, tweets and status updates are furiously scrolling past, “OMGZZORS will TEH Twitt3r Breakz?”  There are comparisons to Roman emperors and all sorts of fascinating geekery happening.  So far, nothing about the iPad and gaming.

Instant critique: It’s not widescreen formatted (lame)

Instant like: It supports HD even in YouTube.  (neat)

It looks good.. but no widescreen? WTF?

Some technical stats are in:

The iPad is 0.5 inches thin, weighs just 1.5 lbs, 9.7 inch IPS display.  It’s thinner and lighter than any netbook.  H.264 up to 720p @ 30 frames per second.  This part, I like.  However, it STILL seems like an amped up iPod touch.  Sound is done in glorious mono.. wait, what?  MONO?  I’m sure that stereo headphones fix that problem.

This is no surprise... but still good. Can it handle 2 handed multi-touch? How will that change gaming?

First look at the app store.  Calendars, Contacts and Maps.  No Games yet….

Urge to kill.... Rising... no games!

Alright, here are the games.  You can play in tiny mode or full screen with low rez.

I'm still in the "meh" territory.

Not bad. but not impressed.

GameLoft is on the stage and they’re showing the game Nova, which is already on the iPhone.  In this game, on the iPad, you can slide your fingers across to throw a grenade, you can slide the D-pad up and down the screen and potentially customize UI elements.

You can “interact with the game world in ways that weren’t possible before”.  Not sure what this means, but i’m sure its a more sensitive multi-touch.

Alright, I'm almost hooked. For this iPad specific game, it looks really nice and there are some interesting UI/ Touch capabilities.

EA is taking the stage:

EA is showing Need for Speed and it looks damn good (not as good as the Xbox or PC versions though)  but it’s better than the iPhone.  Basically, if you play an iPhone game really close to your face, then you get the idea.

Mingames and other aspects to MLB on the iPad.

Jobs said that the guys from EA only had a few weeks to put these together, “Imagine what they’re going to do in the next few months.”

I’m intrigued.  The iPhone did a lot to put gaming into a new, more casual and widely distributed audience, which significantly changed the game space forever.  With the larger capacity, more sensitive multitouch, the HD capabilities, the iPad should present an interesting challenge to game designers, developers and game enthusiasts.

@ferricide (from Gamasutra) tweeted:

“so hacky iPhone ports will be all over the app store at launch. devs: let’s think ahead instead.”

While it’s really cool, and there are some aspects of the iPad that I’m liking… it’s not a game changer.  It looks gimmicky (from a gaming perspective) the good thing: it’s bigger than a PSP or DS, it supports HD and will have massive gaming support.

The bad news is that it’s probably going to be prohibitively expensive and you’ll still have to deal with the draconians at the Apple App Store.  (just don’t say “fuck” in your app… as Trent Reznor learned).  Another thing is the excellent critique that the iPad is not a Mac, it’s a giant iPod touch and that it’s proprietary innovations stifle competition and boost up a business that’s become more closed than Microsoft.

Well, I think that the gaming section of the iPad is pretty much done.

Overall impressions: it’s an interesting and fairly useful piece of tech.  However, it seems to me to be the “segue” of computers.  It’s not a smart phone, it’s not a laptop, it’s in between.  It’s got some decent functionality, but I’m not sold.  I can easily predict that the games will be significantly more expensive and, at first, shittier due to the flood of ports.   I’m just not convinced that there’s a need or a vulnerability in the gaming world to accept this.

Lastly, it’s priced at $499.  Which is more expensive than any console… but considering, this isn’t just a console.  Overall, not a bad deal, most pundits were expecting closer to the $1,000 mark.

Doesn’t suck.  I kinda want one, but I don’t think this is going to revolutionize gaming or the industry in the same way that the iPhone did.  Not even close.  However, I still feel like a jerk-wad for saying “iPad” out loud.  I now remember how I felt saying “Wii” for the first few days.

Image Credits: Gizmodo

Update: They’re using AT&T.  Dammit.

Update 2: More detailed pricing structure from IndustryGamers.com

“The $499 model gives consumers 16 GB of storage, with WiFi built-in. Then for $599, the storage steps up to 32 GB, and $699 brings it up to 64 GB. A 3G model will cost an extra $130. So that means for $829 you can get a 64 GB model with 3G. “

Update 3: Gamasutra has a very good article on the gaming aspects of the iPad.

This sucks to report.  Earlier last year, Crispy Gamer bought the gaming social media site GamerDNA for a bunch of money, it had also raised over $8 million dollars as well last year.

As VentureBeat reports, once you raise that much money, the investors expect a strong return on that investment.  While details are unclear at the moment, what’s known is that all of the editorial staff at Crispy Gamer have been laid off and it’s CEO, Chris Heldman has resigned in protest.

Personally, I really enjoyed Crispy Gamer, it’s ethos didn’t allow any advertising money from game companies and it strove to give independent analysis on the game industry free from influence.

Once I started reading Crispy Gamer, I found its unique insight and the personality of the writers to be a refreshing change from most gaming editorials.  While I’m not one to say they were better than others, what was clear was that their passion, intelligence and independence really showed through.  They were able to become a clear voice for gamers in a short time with their excellent features, writers and analysis.

While it’s unclear as to what’s going to happen with GamerDNA, Crispy Gamer is still live, but it’s no longer being updated.

Hopefully, something good will come from these ashes, but that may come much later.

I’m sure some people will come along and question the wisdom of spending that much money to acquire GamerDNA at a time when money is tight across the industry, but from a consumer perspective, Crispy Gamer kept its integrity, kept its reviews worth reading and had the guts to call out influential players in the gaming industry.

Update: In my previous entry, I’d made the association that they’d raised the $8 million to buy GamerDNA, that was not the case.

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.

going going gone

breaking the door, breaking the door!

So as we enjoy the annual gorgefest that is Thanksgiving weekend there are a good chunk of us out there who will be burning off some of those calories battling the crowds looking for deals. How does that translate in the gaming world?

As we highlighted in a recent  post, the marketing machines have all slowed down to a crawl now that all the big-budget releases have hit the shelves (sorry Tony Hawk: Ride!). So as we with the websites start to spend our collective keyboards looking back at 2009 and picking our games of the year, consumers can look forward to the next few weeks of “crazy” deals that retailers far and wide will be offering in an attempt to move some of this year’s top titles. How crazy? Well, it’s not Dr. Frankenstein trying to reanimate an 8-ft corpse with electricity crazy but it is impressive and somewhat comical to see what stores consider deals and what they’ll do to try and move some of this merchandise. All this in a year when videogames as a whole have dropped in sales and the signs of the recession finally made its way to the seemingly recession proof industry.

Everyone from Target, to Wal-Mart to Toys R Us is serving up their own slice of the gaming pie with deals ranging from markdowns on new releases (a $40 game instead of a $60 deal — $20 bucks is not a crazy deal by any measure but hey it’s still 2o bucks) to the crazy bundle deals. Bundle deals like buy an Xbox Elite and 6 games for $300 — now that’s a deal except you don’t choose the games. The 6 games alone would cost you half the price of the console but the bigger question is, would you buy these six games anyway and will it be enough to get you to spend $300 on a new console rather than just $40 plus tax on a game? Maybe the uninformed present or the gaming nube but us gamers are a little wiser to those kind of deals.

It would seem that both last year and this year, in our current economic situation, the keyword is deal and if it doesn’t really sound like one then too bad retailer. On the plus side you have proof positive from the Modern Warfare 2 sales that people are willing to spend money on a game but does that scenario play out in holiday shopping? On the down side this may be a situation where because consoles and games are such high end items anyway that the gift givers may opt for the gift card which means the recipients may or may not choose to buy game stuff. The classic “I don’t know what he owns” utterance means a gift card is an easy out. But that means all these doorbuster deals are moot.

As to whether this holiday shopping season will salvage the sales slump will be determined in a month or so but for now retailers are certainly doing their part to make it happen.

I’ll be honest, I hadn’t heard of the Deep Sleep Initiative before I read today’s ECA newsletter, to make matters worse, I’m a huge fan of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), you know, games that use the real and virtual world as the platform.

There are two things that struck me when I read Bitmob’s article on good customer service.

I was immediately intrigued by the Deep Sleep Initiative.  I read the review Jay Henningsen wrote and had to check it out.  I downloaded the PDF and started scouring it.  It’s almost Lovecraftian in tone, with scrawled images, diary pages, lost child pictures and near-madness inducing imagery.  Just merely scanning the material in the PDF (here’s the PDF from Dreamers Often Lie) led me to deeper curiosity.  I then found the reverse dated blog for the Deep Sleep Initiative.  Again, what I found was brilliant.  I had to pull myself away from what would be an irresistible, nearly primal and gravitational force to focus on my other, more immediate tasks at hand.  Nevertheless, with the mystery now firmly lodged in my brain, I’m going to pursue this later on tonight.

However, this being a blog about video game marketing, and me being a professional marketer, it struck me how cool it was for the development team to respond to Jay’s email.

He received emails from Nicole Epps (Designer/ Programmer) and Karin Ray (Designer/ Creative) thanking him for his response.

Tracy and I were down in Culver City for Indiecade when we got it, and seriously ran around reading it to everyone at the festival. We pretty much made the game for players just like you and we were beyond ecstatic that you liked it (and my dopey interview). I’m really honored and humbled that you not only took the time to play our game but even emailed us! You rock!

Not only was the enthusiasm from the staff immediately felt in the response, I immediately “liked” them.  The fact that they would take the time to respond to someone I’d presume that they didn’t already know, was phenomenal.

This is a clear example of how a game and a company can use the power of direct, human conversation and response in a genuine fashion to cut through the clutter of so many games out there.  When I read the emails, I noted that they were in Culver City, not too far from where I live and I had an almost immediate desire to meet them, talk to them and pick their brains not only about their particular game, but alternate reality games in general, the indie game industry and other creative things they may happen to be doing.

I could be wrong on this, but their response seemed less of a “social marketing strategy” and much more of a genuine appreciation of one gamer’s feedback.  To me, this is the holy grail of all marketing.  Companies like Valve have a great reputation for interaction with their consumers, Penny Arcade hosts massive fan events for gamers which, at its core, is designed as a giant and fun “thank you”.

The only problem that I could see is how does a company, as they grow, expand and adopt more responsibilities, maintain that level of personalization, of genuine appreciation and customer contact.  But for now, for the designers of the Deep Sleep Initiative, the press they’re getting, what I’d imagine as a much higher rate of interest that they’re getting is well worth the effort of sending two thankful emails.

I don’t often promote games, products or other gaming things on my blog because I want to remain somewhat neutral in my analysis, but I encourage you to take a look at their game.  I’m just entering their alternate reality game and what I’m finding is a satisfying, challenging, maddening and fun experience.