The Art of Timing the Product Launch

Blizzard Activision are once again showing that while they are game makers, they also have some people at the company with business acumen. They already, very carefully a few years ago, dealt with the absurdly mis-represented “wow killer” launch of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR) with the timing of their expansion launch a couple of months after WAR, and now they are up to their old tricks again with the delay to their current expansion in development: Cataclysm. The reason; well, you may feel I’m reaching here, but first consider the costs and issues that delaying, one month before launch, a huge retail product like Cataclysm must bring. The disks and retail products will have already been made, and will currently be sitting in a warehouse (costing millions), the company has incurred the production costs (costing many millions), and the marketing machine is ready to roll, the TV slots will have been booked months in advance, as well as the magazine adverts etc. This has to be done on a schedule. Blizzard have just inserted an extra month into that schedule; why?

Where marketing hype meets reality for the first time; Betas as Marketing or Betas as Development tools?

Only on the internet could you give free an unfinished, poor quality and frequently failing advanced version of your product to a customer and expect them, for free, to product test for you, and point out areas for improvement. Only on the internet would customers sign up in their thousands of for the "privilege" of doing this. For MMO computer games, and software in general, there are a number of phases of development. You have your in-house Alpha versions. These are the versions of the product that the company keeps to itself and generally has only its own quality assurance people working on. This has been extended in some cases to include small and controlled amounts of reviewers, drawn from either reliable sources, or sources close to the company; Blizzard's Friends and Family Alpha for example. Abet, given the leaks that come out of the Friends and Family Alpha it may as well be an open beta. The next stage is the controversial one (and the main point of this post). The closed beta, usually followed by an open beta. I say controversial as the exact purpose of the closed and open beta's is very much a subject of debate. A closed beta is where you allow a controlled number of selected people (usually including leading Bloggers, reviewers and internet personalities that your marketing team has decided to target) to view an advanced version of the game, usually under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). An Open Beta allows a very large amount of people (usually with a limit on numbers though) to test the product and give feedback.

Re-examining the 3:7 Ratio

As APB closes its doors, after less than 80 days, a game which had truly awful reviews and blog posts made about it as a game, I’m starting to consider that the negative cumulative impact of information might be just as worthy of consideration as the positive. I usually, indeed, marketing in general, usually, considers the typical marketing hype machine that most products use; the spending of millions on trying to generate a buzz regarding the product, in a pretty linear way. Product + online marketing money = more sales. This involves viral marketing videos, social media, specifically targeting leading blogs with free product and so forth. In other words the marketing machine those who are either familiar with online games, or are researching the area, are generally familiar with. The forward gears are well documented in their success; but what if you slip the clutch and put the marketing hype car into reverse? I’ve read about some of the great marketing disasters before (New Coke). But sometimes the speed at which customers in the internet age seem to generate a word-of-mouth death-knell for a product reminds me that, as fast at the positive top speed of modern marketing is, the internet also allows for toxic product or service information and brand damaging information to be transmitted with equal speed.

Reflections on Social Media Workshop @ Northumbria

An interesting afternoon of reflection for me on social media. I say reflection, as I actually took nearly nothing away from the workshop that I didn't already know, but, importantly, even for a non-entry level social media user like myself, I still felt that I took something useful away from it. Certainly, as an event, it was most definitely aimed more at people who had, I feel, very little current knowledge of social media. This was I feel unfortunate, as the people in the room seemed both very aware of social media and its impact on their businesses. Indeed, they seemed like a very switched on bunch all-round, one or two of which probably could have led the workshop rather than be sitting in the audience. To be fair, it was a good event, the speakers where first-rate, and confident in their knowledge and they (as someone who knows a thing or two about how to give a talk) I felt managed to build a good rapport with the audience pretty quickly; which is always an important step in transmitting information when you've got an afternoon slot and the audience looked like a bunch of intelligent professionals (trust me on this!). So overall, I can't fault the individuals from Say Consultancy & Harlands who gave the talk. I did however feel that the audience could have been streamed a little better. They had a morning slot and an afternoon slot, and probably streaming their audience into entry level users and more advanced level users would have helped them as presenters get their "pitch level" a little more accurate.

The MMO “metagame” and consumer tribes: If you can’t grow your own nick someone elses

An interesting statistic always leaps to mind when I start to consider the “metagame” that being Nick Yee’s (2006) statistical finding that the average MMO game player spends 10.8 hours each week performing game-related tasks outside of the game. Be that just checking web-resources like Wowhead or MMO-Champion, listening to “Blue Plz!” or “The Instance”, watching “The MMO Report” or “The Guild”, or, more likely, spending hours on their guild website both signing up for various events and discussing the merits and de-merits of certain approaches to both talent specs and boss fights. I have literally witnessed in my time four and five page forum threads over two talent specs which we’re 95% the same, and two posters arguing bitterly (with increasing levels of evidence) that their allocation of the remaining 5% was more optimal than the other persons.

The metagame. The stuff players do outside of the game, which relates directly to the game. Where the consumption tribe that surrounds the game come out to play.