No Such Thing as Bad Publicity? A Look at a Mordern Warfare 2 Leak

I couple posts back I talked about the L4D2 cinematic trailer that was "leaked" onto the Internet. I use quotation marks because it's pretty well known that -- especially among online sources -- it's popular to say that some video was leaked in order to make it some more risque and get people to click. The truth is that many times the content was purposefully fed to certain sites before others.

In the case of the L4D2 trailer, the "leak" of the final cut just a few days before the release of the pre-order demo is fairly suspect. After all, it was all polished up and already packaged into the demo by that point, and "leaking" the trailer was probably a way of helping to drive pre-orders, since a early demo release was made available to everyone who pre-ordered the game.

On the other hand, G4TV posted a story yesterday about what I would venture to say is a more legitimate "leak." This leak showed game footage from the upcoming Modern Warfare 2 (the newest installment in the Call of Duty franchise) in which the player controls a terrorist. Spoiler warnings abound, so read at your own risk.

In the level (reportedly the beginning of the game), the player is with a group of men who murder innocent civilians in an airport. The level seems to consist primarily of capping innocent people, including the clearly injured who are trying in vain to hobble away as you shoot them in the back. This is where CNN's video ends. Based on other internet reports, after the airport killing spree, the group then exit to the tarmac where they pass a pile of dead bodies, and shoot some cops.

Then, in classic Modern Warfare style, the character you are playing is flat-out murdered in a cutscene.

This is obviously some strong stuff, and it's predictable that folks would take issue with it -- especially people who don't understand gamer culture, or even believe that videogames turn kids into killing machines. The footage itself has been removed, likely due to a DMCA take-down notice, further validating it as a real leak. Leaks like this one can pose particularly troublesome problems.

Successful advertising almost always depends on having some semblance of control over your brand's image. Whether that means directing each and every move, or just getting the ball rolling in the right direction, there is some planning that goes into it. Leaks of such charged and unsettling gameplay take away that control where it may be needed most: it's pretty easy to see how tempting it would be for news sources (especially those unfamiliar with the game industry, or even hostile towards it) to take the footage out of context. I can see it already: "Violent Shoot-em-up Encourages Kids to Become Terrorists and Kill Civilians!"

Aside from not being able to closely manage the effect the controversy may have on their image, Infinity Ward (the publishers of  Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2) now has to spend time and capital guarding against any further leaks before the game hits shelves on November 10th.

Pre-Launch Character Creation: a Uniquely Game-centered Way of Advertising

Set to release next week (November 3rd), Dragon Age used a pretty interesting concept as part of their pre-launch advertising. As Brendan Sinclair of GameSpot reported on the 13th, potential players can visit the official website and use the Character Creator feature to physically design Dragon Age: Origins protagonists. These characters can be fully exported to the actual PC retail copy when the game is released.

This is an advertising technique that is distinctly unique to the gaming industry -- it can't really be replicated in book publishing or film production. My guess is that, aside from getting already devoted fans excited, the idea is to help build a sense of attachment to whatever character you make, so much so that you'd be willing to purchase the game to see them "brought to life." On the other hand, it also can express the overall "tone" of a game fairly well using visual cues: the quality of the graphics engine, the style of the fashion, the art direction of the character models, and so forth.

This isn't the first time EA has hyped a game's release by giving players a sneak peek at its character creation tools. The publisher released Spore Creature Creator in advance of Will Wright's Spore, as a free download (with limited features) and as a $5 retail package.

Though Spore might be one of the most over-hyped games in history, it's possible that this tactic of allowing people to see the character creation process assisted in building the raging wall of buzz that surrounded the game pre-release. Though the character creation tool doesn't allow for a taste of gameplay like a demo might, it can be more easily downloaded from something as user-friendly as an official website, and promises a sort of continuation between a prospective customer's online behavior (designing up a quick character), and their gaming behavior.

Sales Follow-Up on World of Goo

Last week I posted about the temporary Pay-What-You-Can offer for World of Goo, and on this past Wednesday GamePolitics.com reported some of the numbers that the stunt generated. "The ability for consumers to pay what they wanted to for the title also generated an enormous amount of publicity, further benefiting sales," they reported. Publicity might be harder to measure, but I did touch on the fact that it could boost future game sales and new launches.

For anyone interested in the sheer numbers, however:

The average price paid for the game was $2.03, while almost 17,000 people chose to pay a single cent and another 21,000 plus paid between 2 cents and $1.99. The next largest category was the $5.00 to $5.99 range, with over 7,300 customers. At the other end of the spectrum, 4 people chose to pay $50.00 for the game.

Not necessarily within the scope of this blog, but I thought that it was a nice follow-up.

Kill All Sons'a Bitches: L4D2 M-Rated Cinematic Trailer "Leaked"

And my God, it is positively delicious looking.

I've mentioned Left4Dead and Left4Dead2 in a few blog posts, and the leak of this trailer is another opportunity to look at some nifty advertising, specifically the pre-launch type.



Like in the film industry, many videogames -- especially those created by successful publishing companies -- release cinematic "trailers" before the actual launch of the title. Trailers for videogames, like those for movies, obviously have the job of trying to sell you on purchasing a product (whether that is a game disc, a movie ticket, or a DVD).

What's trickier about videogame trailers, however, is that generally the content cannot just be ripped from already-shot scenes of the film. This is especially so in the case of "cinematic" trailers, which people believe represent the highest animation quality of which the graphics engine running the game is capable). That, and not only do you have to tell a story -- you have to show off what the gameplay will be like, which is easier said than done. Representing the way it feels to actually play the game through a passive medium, like watching a Youtube movie, is definitely more art than science.

As a devoted fan of the first game, I can only hope that the quality of this trailer indicates the "feel" of the upcoming game. Even if I had no experience, no familiarity at all, with the original game, this trailer would certainly be enough to make me go find out more about the upcoming release.

PS. In case the Youtube clip is taken down, you can also watch the trailer here.

Facebook: Soon to be more Civilized.

Yesterday Games.com reported that Civilization, one of the pillars of the real-time strategy videogame genre, will be launching a version of its long-running franchise on Facebook in the upcoming year.

As I mentioned to fellow classmate katdiogo in a comment on a recent post about Farmville on Facebook, there are very few games available on Facebook that appeal to me. Though I clearly enjoy playing videogames, as someone with regular access to other gaming platforms, Facebook does not tend to draw me in.

However, the news of Civilization coming to everyone's favorite social-networking site, for me, could be a (no pun intended, honest) game-changer. When I grew up, the bread and butter of my videogame experience was half Doom, half Warcraft and Command and Conquer style RTS (real-time strategy) games -- until I was about 8 years-old and started playing online games.

Civilization is a game which defines the RTS genre for many people. Much like something in Farmville, the game is based on progression (rather than say, Pacman or Tetris -- you are generally building off of where you left from. The idea is to take a group of people (normally sorted by nationality) from their start as simple gatherer-hunters, up to their pinnacle as world-dominating superpowers.

I initially heard about this game via Twitter, when all the gaming sites I follow suddenly went crazy as they broadcasted the news. Then, I had gaming friends who similarly tweeted and retweeted the information. I know I just made the point about buzz driving games on social-networking sites, but this is a prime example of what I meant. Already, without having to do anything other than pump their story into the right channels, many people in the target audience (people who have enjoyed past Civ games and would be likely to try out the Facebook version) have this news on their radar.

It remains to be seen if the game would have any more power to retain a player-base than the usual Facebook game-application fare, but given Civilization's (well-earned, in my opinion) good reputation amongst avid gamers and even an older audience (the first Civilization game was published in 1991), I have high hopes already.

Cover Art: the Last Chance to Grab Players

A couple days ago Gamespot ran an article referencing NPD research that "40% of gamers impulse buy."

As for what factors played into an impulse purchase, 40 percent said the game's packaging was a "very important" or "extremely important" factor in their decision.

This was higher than the 33% that mentioned the importance of a referral from a friend, the 25% that said the in-store demon was a critical factor, the  21% that liked the recommendations from other shoppers, or 19% that felt like the sales clerk played a big role in what title they picked up. This should be moderately good news for videogame advertisers: it's a lot easier to control the packaging of your product than the buzz which surrounds it, let alone the aptitude of the salesperson behind the counter.

The reason that the cover art is so vital, in my opinion, is that for most games it is a clear indication of "what type" of game it is, and what type of player will enjoy it. Now, judging a game by its cover is bound to result in some more expensive mistakes than judging a book by its cover, but overall there are some pretty integral semiotic codes that go into the construction of cover art.

Though Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare earned great ratings from game reviewers across the board (and the History Channel games, generally, have not), it's clear to see that in both cases art work is likely to catch the eye of gamers who like war games. If you have already played and enjoyed game like Call of Duty 4, you're probably going to be more inclined to buy The History Channel: Battle for the Pacific just from glancing at the cover art. If the game is being sold at a reduced price (which it probably is: Battle for the Pacific is likely available used, and even new, it's old enough that it's not going to have a whopping $59.99 price sticker), you'll be even more persuaded.

The beauty of semiotic coding as advertising in cover art is that the same codes tend to be transferable not just from game to game, but also from movies, novels, comics, etc. To give an example...

A movie poster for a well-known, much-loved franchise: Star Wars. For many fans, this movie is the epitome of the space-faring epic, not only a classic but an definitive work in the genre of science fiction. It is a -- to put it likely -- wildly successful application of the "good versus evil" theme to the world of aliens, spaceships, and intergalactic battles.

Here's the cover of Mass Effect, an incredibly successful science fiction RPG:

I'll let you guess what the game is about.

Gamers on Social Networks... a Whole Goddamn Lot, Too

I recently touched on the idea of the "give it away free" business model when it comes to video games in a post about World of Goo's temporary offer of "pay what you can." While it's quite rare for traditional videogames (PC or console alike) to adopt this strategy, there is actually quite a large precedent for "play for free" videogames, especially online games.

And I'm not just talking about Text Twist or some dodgy online pool game. I'm talking about games that people play, often without even associating them with videogames. Even the most stereotypically anti-geek, mainstream, Gossip-Girl loving individual might spend hours a day fiddling around with these games.

But enough with the cheesy suspense: I'm talking about Facebook. On Thursday USA Today reported that Farmville, a game which will celebrate it's four month anniversary this October, has 56 million unique players monthly, and something like 20 million unique players daily.

Atul Bagga, a gaming analyst at market researcher Think Equity, expects the $500 million to $600 million social-gaming slice of the online market to at least double, to $1 billion, in 2010.

And where, oh where, does that money come from? After all, downloading the application and running it -- playing the game itself -- is free. The answer comes from two main streams of revenue. The first is micro-transactions. While you aren't paying a monthly subscription fee (like you would pay to play World of Warcraft, or what you pay to access Xbox Live's full services), you might, from time to time, spend a dollar here or there (on particular farming tools in Farmville, for example). The games don't necessarily nickle-and-dime you to death, because most of the experience is free. However, all that pocket change certainly adds up.

The other revenue stream comes from advertisers.

Meanwhile, advertisers are gravitating to the popular social-gaming sections of social networks to reach tens of millions of consumers.

"It's attractive real estate," says Hi5's Trigg. Hewlett-Packard, Verizon and Netflix are among major brand names running banner ads on MySpace's gaming areas.

It's unclear what, if any, portion of this goes directly to the publishers of the specified applications like Farmville (rather than just Facebook itself). However, it is more than clear that this industry is experiencing incredible growth with profit margins that could make anyone salivate.

The cleverest part of the advertising, when it comes to games like Farmville, is that it is so damn cheap. After all, the cost it takes to implement an obnoxious "Invite your Friends!!!" template is obscenely inexpensive in comparison to running something like a TV ad. You don't need a well organized campaign that sprawls across every available window. All you need is to prompt your players to invite a handful of other people, who go on to invite a handful more.

The best trick, of course, is to reward the players for doing your advertising for them. Instead of paying an agency hundreds of thousands of bucks, you pay one dedicated player 100 apples or oranges, or whatever the hell the currency is in Farmville, to get one other player on board. Maybe if they invite two friends they get a cow. Ten friends? A barn.

I'm probably showing that I definitely don't play this game to anyone who does, but the point holds true: you are paying people in fake currency to do what you would otherwise have to pay people in cold hard cash to do.

The downside to social gaming, however, is that they are like viruses. They blossom exponentially for a little while, infecting many of the people they come into contact with, dominating a population. But then people get over them (or, I don't know, die -- time to abandon the metaphor). In the terms of social gaming, they get bored. Then they move on. The same system that makes it so easy to join games like Farmville is what makes them easy to leave: they get swallowed up by the 'next big thing.'

To put it in more proper vocabularly: these games thrive on buzz, which is also the core component to their advertisment.

Pop Idol Likes Videogames, Would Be Interested in Production

I touched a little bit yesterday on my disdain for videogame advertising only seeming to target women when it wants to sell distinctly "feminized" games (fashion, cooking, baby-pet-rearing) rather than even bothering to view them as part of the market for major industry blockbusters. However, as I tried to make clear with that post, the prospect of having more girls and women playing more games, in general, excites me and makes me all warm and fuzzy.

Last Friday, Gamespot noted that pop music idol Beyonce Knowles has expressed an interested in working on a dance-based fitness game for women. Of course the news is entirely speculative, but it is interesting to note. After all, Knowles would already have the powerhouse of her personal brand to drive an advertising campaign should a game with her name on it ever come to fruition. She's an iconic figure of the "strong" yet desirable female role model, for both young girls and older women alike.

"I'd like to get involved in videogames since I really love Wii Fit," the singer was quoted as saying. "I think it would be a great idea to incorporate choreography because for me my workout is way more fun when it involves dancing as opposed to running on a boring treadmill. So I would love to do some kind of fitness game but incorporate dance and performance into it. I think a lot of women would enjoy that."

As the article points out, celebrity-backed games aren't a new concept. That said (and this is open to some, though I doubt much, debate) none of the celebrities mentioned are half so influential as Knowles amongst the possible target audience (women and young girls who enjoy dancing and pop music).

World of Goo: Pay What You Can

"Pay What You Can," while not exactly a widespread phenomenon (to put it lightly) isn't a completely new concept. Obviously not-for-profit groups have been executing this sort of donation-based system for quite some time: churches are probably the longest running business in the world, and they've been passing around the collection plate for thousands of years.

More recently "Pay What You Can" has come to private, for-profit enterprises. The ease and relatively minimal cost of transferring certain types of goods over the Internet had allowed certain companies and artists to dabble in giving their content away for whatever the customer feels is an appropriate price. Radiohead is probably one of the most well-known examples of this, and the concept seems to apply very readily to music in particular (likely because it's only very slightly less convenient to obtain albums illegally via torrenting clients).

It's a different story to see pay-what-you-will exchanges for videogames. Unlike some free to download or even free to play games, World of Goo isn't based on micro-transactions after you've started playing like most games which follow such a business model.

How exactly does a year-old game releasing its content for as low as $.01 pertain to pre-game advertising? The question becomes: what is 2D Boy (the publisher of World of Goo) playing at here? It could be -- and is likely -- that they've sold all the copies they believe they're going to sell for the going rate of $5-20, and are just trying to eek out the last bit of potential profit by reaching people who might pay $1, but not $5.

While this certainly has to have some benefit, another possibility -- and one that may be more likely, given how notoriously low the averages raked in using "Pay What You Can" systems tend to be -- 2D Boy is now more concerned with building an audience. World of Goo has been a very successful small game for the PC (as well as the Wii, though that version is not part of this promo), and at this point, it may be more important for 2D Boy to increase their brand recognition as a smaller company that releases really solid games, rather than attempting to sell however many more copies at a fixed rate.

If 2D Boy is confident enough that their gameplay will encourage fans to purchase the games they make in the future, the strategy of giving World of Goo away for a penny becomes its own word of mouth advertisement -- without having to spend anything on a hefty campaign, new insights, or even distribution aside from bandwidth costs.

"Girl" Games: Love 'Em, Hate 'Em

The Wall Street Journal ran an article today titled "Videogame Firms Make a Play for Women." While initially I had my hopes up, the secondary text immediately reminded me why, as a female who loves videogames in general, I can be so jaded about a thing that I enjoy. "Publishers Roll Out Fashion-Theme Games for Girls, Workout and Dance Titles for Older Females," the descriptive second-title reads. Cue the disgruntled harrumph and the cynical eye-roll, please.

"Videogames have long been considered the domain of teenage boys and young men. Though a few publishers have developed computer games for women, the genre wasn't considered significant until the past several years. Nintendo helped fuel the change with its touch-screen DS portable device five years ago and Wii console three years ago, providing easy-to-play games that appealed to a broader audience—including women—and helped spur its sales."

As someone who has been playing videogames since she was old enough to grapple a joystick or smash buttons on the keyboard, I have truly come to despise the way that the female gaming audience has been addressed in the recent years. Before I go further: of course it is better that the gaming industry is address their female market at all, which has by and large been the standard practice for the lifetime of gaming. That aside, it doesn't stop me from wishing they'd do, well, better.

I do appreciate that Nintendo releases a variety of games that introduce many different types of people to videogames as a whole. One of my all time favorite games, and probably the most memorable game of my childhood, was a Nintendo game (Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to be exact). Nintendo deserves its well-earned success in the market of making extremely user-friendly games that really get at the heart of the light, carefree, and playful videogame experience.

That said, it doesn't just confuse me, it irritates me when the industry seems surprised that girls and women aren't more interested in their products. While there is something to be said for the fact that women and girls are less socialized to enjoy violent pursuits (little boys are targeted for dinosaur ads, while little girls get Barbie), there is a problem with how the videogame industry treats women in its content, and more relevantly to this blog, its advertising.

For example: it doesn't matter if you're making what is considered one of the best franchises (Soul Caliber) in its genre (fighting) -- if you treat women like objects and have players who go on and on about the physics behind how the stupidly-oversized boobs move, guess what, chicks are probably not gonna touch that with a 40-foot pole (unless they have already been introduced into the market by a different game).

The objectification of women -- or their sheer absence from many mass-marketed titles -- should make for a goddamn no-brainer in my opinion. It might be a myth that you draw more flies with honey than vinegar, but what the videogame industry is doing is the equivalent of soaking their product line-up in Raid.

How this relates back to Nintendo and the WSJ story: why do videogame marketers assume that the only way to get women to play games is to give them things that are "easy-to-play," let alone that have to be about fashion and weight-loss?

Since then, publishers have made a serious effort to develop mass-market games beyond the usual shooter, racing and sports titles. According to financial firm Wedbush Morgan, female game players now account for about 40% of the overall market, compared with the IDC research firm's estimate of less than 12% in 2001. Wedbush calculates that a 5% increase in female players could translate into as much as $1 billion in new revenue every year.

Five percent more chicks, a billion more dollars, and no one has had the bright idea to just try to INCLUDE female gamers into the games that are already being made successfully? I posted recently about the controversy behind Left 4 Dead 2, but regardless of how anyone feels towards the release of the sequel, Left 4 Dead is an amazing example of a game which has appeal among female players.

Among the characters one can choose from is a young woman (named Zoey) who is fully clothed, operates with exactly the same stats as the male characters, and rather than being a strained, sex-kitten personality in the post-apocalypse, she is actually more of a stereotypical "geek" than the rest of the characters. L4D, particularly the PC version, is often considered (within the gamer community) as the best chance one has of playing with female gamers in a FPS.

Now that I've been over the "hate" I have for the idea that the only games girls and women want are cutesy fluffy things, I will reiterate that, despite this, I love that girls and women are actually getting some attention from the industry at all. My mother bought a Wii and a WiiFit within the last couple of years and, though I know I'll never get her to play L4D with me (I've tried), it's nice to see someone enjoying the fun that comes with playing a videogame, regardless of how or why it got into their hands.

And who knows... I can snarl and spit about sugar-coated games being force-fed to the young female gaming audience all I want, but maybe Littlest Pet Shop is actually prepping the next 7-year-old girl for her introduction to dominating the leaderboards of future Call of Duty games.

Spore Hero Ad Scripted by a 12-Year-Old

Originally reported on Brand Republic last Friday, videogame publishing giant EA Games invited 12-year-old Blake Simon to help them create an upcoming TV ad for the Wii's Spore Hero.

While it would be unfair to critique the work very harshly, the wording doesn't sound very far from a generic game ad. What good is it to bring on a member of your target audience to help out with an ad script, when the creative team is likely just going to force them to follow a formula anyway? To me this seems like a missed opportunity for EA, though I'm sure Blake Simon had a great time being a part of the creation process -- most gamers, old and young alike, are usually only ever stuck on the consumer side.

Of course all this begs the question: what would ads created by target members look like with other games? As clear as it is that Simon was told what points he had to emphasize, videogame advertisers (and ad-designers in general) stand to learn a lot about their products if they ask their player-base how they would advertise the game.

Can DLC Effectively Advertise a Controversial Sequel?

The popular, many-time award winning game Left 4 Dead launched for Xbox 360 and PC on November 18th, 2008. Since then it has amassed an extensive and devoted fan base across both platforms. Players team up as survivors who must work together if they way to make it through the through zombie-ridden territory to safety -- or, alternatively, group up as "special infected" and do their best to separate and incapacitate the survivors.

Controversy arose amongst the PC gaming community (in particular the Steam Community, as Steam distributes the PC version of L4D) when a sequel was announced at the 2009 E3 Convention. Understanding the controversy -- and why it was so specific to the Steam community rather than the Xbox community -- requires a bit of knowledge about how PC gamers think.

Unlike console gamers who are accustomed to purchasing new games on a fairly regular basis, where DLC (Downloadable Content) is not as integral to the experience, popular computer games are released less frequently. They are often supported by a wide net of casual but talented programmers who add their own modifications to give the game more diversity, and more relevantly, publishers of PC games are much more likely to distribute DLC that further extends a game's shelf-life.

The announcement of a sequel was welcomed by the Xbox community, who was eager for new content. The Steam community, on the other hand, saw it as a distasteful act of greed. Over 25,000 players signed a petition against the release of Left 4 Dead 2.

Valve, L4D's publishing company, responded by attempting to pacify the petitioners with promises of new DLC for the original game, as well as the release of more tools to further strengthen the Mod-making community. True to their word, "Crash Course," a new, two-level campaign for L4D was announced this summer and went live a couple weeks ago for both platforms.

Interestingly enough, the new content was free for all players running Steam -- but cost $7 for Xbox 360 users (who already pay at least $10 more for the original game copy than the less expensive PC version).

The question now becomes: will "Crash Course" pull its weight? It seems like a smart move. Ideally it will 1) alleviate some of the concerns of the Steam community by following a business model with which they are more familiar, 2) generate excitement for the upcoming sequel, and 3) build Valve's brand reputation as a fair and customer-focused game publisher. In the gaming industry the very best advertising is structured around creating a loyal fanbase.

Successful franchises are those that deliver quality in each of their sequels: big hit series like Grand Theft Auto, Legend of Zelda, Halo, Call of Duty, and so on are all clear examples of this phenomenon. Quality DLC such as "Crash Course" for L4D may well kick up the buzz for the sequel.