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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.

Madden NFL 10 as in 2010 will soon hit store shelves in a flurry of promotion and marketing ploys aimed right at the denizens of football fanatics who have bought the 9 other versions of the game this millennium. A remarkable feat when you consider that when you strip away all the bells and whistles this is really just a football game. But don’t tell the Madden gamers that.

What makes this football franchise so enduring? There are variety of factors but clearly the ever growing fan base, the endless tweaks to the core game and  the social network that has come out of this series certainly play a crucial role. Throw in an annual competition (with a big payout in Vegas) and requisite tour around the nation to recruit the top gamers, mix in the cool factor that has actual football players who are fans of the game as well and you have a game that sells just by name alone. A game that started 20 years ago and still uses the Madden name even though its namesake retired from broadcasting last year.

Of course there’s so much more.

First you’ve got the corporate endorsements of folks like Wal-Mart and Gillette who get to have their brand connected with the game. Gillette is even making limited edition team razors so when you shave next to to the fathead on your wall in your team jersey it will all be complete. Electronic Arts has already served up a preview of the rosters, offering email updates and now making the aforementioned social network even stronger, they created a Madden 10 group for Facebook. That’s not even counting the bevy of commercials that are running on national television. Additionally EA also has ESPN locked in so you’ve got the premiere sports network promoting the premiere sports game. It’s a marketing machine to wonder and behold. This is a videogame that has become as much about the release of the game than about the game itself.  And if you’ve been watching football in the last few years you’ll see that the videogame-esque replay has now taken on a life of its own where the commentators use a sports sim to show the play or the strategy of something that just happened in real time.

Madden NFL 10 has essentially become such a benchmark in the release roster for games that you’ll see that very few other publishers have opted to release a game that week. Even if you’re foolhardy enough to do so, you’re going up a behemoth of marketing that can devour anything in it’s path. And with the relsease of Madden the floodgates get officially opened to the bevy of games that we’ve been hearing about all year.  What EA has successfully been able to to with this franchise is make it more than a game. Madden is now a brand that anybody who knows anything about games can recognize, even if they’ve never played.  And with this well planned and multilayered marketing strategy, this title shows no sign of slowing down.