An example of the direct effect of social…

November 11, 2010 By 1 Comment

As a specialist in social media (as part of digital and mobile marketing), I’m not immune to the influence of my own social networks. And that was driven home to me earlier this week, with a direct result in financial terms.

I’ve been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a lot over the past year, and during that time, a group of mainly UK, 30-something gamers has gathered within one or two degrees of my social circle. It’s quite a small group in terms of the more organised ‘Clans’, but there’s enough of us, and enough dedication/obsession to mean that some of the group are online pretty much any evening that you care to look. (And many of them are 30+ professionals, backing up the theory online gaming is the new golf for business networking!)

Last Monday at midnight saw the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops – the new game in the CoD series. Given that MW2 is the biggest-selling game of all time in the UK (20 million sold), and a cursory look at my own friends list reveals a range in ranks going down to the 13 million+ mark, it’s fair to say that Black Ops was a pretty big event. Although even I was a little surprised to see exactly how many people turned out locally for the launch – hundreds were queuing when I happened to finish an evening of work and make the snap decision to try and pick up a copy in the middle of the night.

That’s right – I went out at about 00:30 on Tuesday morning to pick up a videogame, thinking there might be a few other obsessives, and I turned the corner of the shopping centre to find a few hundred people.

And I was purely driven by social motives:

I already have more games than I can feasibly finish, including the previous games in the series. And although the fun of a new game is attractive, Black Ops isn’t something which attracted me for that reason (as compared to Kinect, Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport etc).

There were two reasons for paying a premium in terms of financial cost (Wait a while and copies will be cheaper), and time (Sacrificing sleep to make a purchase, and the time since that I’ve already put into the game).

  • The loss of my social circle: All of my MW2 friends had stated they’d buy Black Ops within the first 1-2 days. That almost immediate loss of a social group was a prime driver in sending me out to the shops.
  • A chance to gain social status: I’m not the best at Call of Duty, although I blame a lot of it on slow internet speeds. During MW2 I suffered a couple of console hardware failures and as a result, missed large amounts of game time. This meant that I was only able to reach the medium level of in-game ranks – lower than quite a number of friends. By purchasing at launch, I had the chance to possibly get a little headstart on some of the group, and potentially I might end up as one of the top players in the group (Sadly that plan hasn’t quite worked, as I’m still not playing the new game particularly well!).

The end result?

  • £42 for the game purchase with added special offer of Xbox gamer points.
  • 1.5 hour of time spent purchasing the game and immediately coming home to try it instead of sleeping.
  • 10+ hours of time spent playing the game since I first brought it home.

And in case you’re tempted to think about this as the example of a particularly unusual and obsessive gamer, Black Ops has largely been sold on the online multi-player aspect of the game. And the first day figures have just been released:

  • UK and US sales in first day: 5.6 million copies, beating 4.7 million for MW2.
  • Revenue to publishers Activision in the first two days is estimated at $360 million.
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Filed Under: Digital Culture, Social Gaming, social networks, Videogames Tagged With: , , , , ,

A lot to (Halo) Reach for….

August 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One of my favourite marketing campaigns was for the Xbox game Halo 2, featuring the ilovebees website (which is thankfully still online – it’s so rare people keep sites like this online after the campaign has ended).

It was a massively intriguing and popular alternate reality game which saw a big number of people I know collaborating to try and get to all the details of the game etc.

So the marketing for the latest in the series, Halo Reach, has a lot to live up to – the ability to control a giant robot arm is kinda cool, but I’m not sure I’ll remember it as well after six years!

Incidentally, Halo 2 was one of the only times I’ve actually gone to a game store at midnight to grab one of the first copies of the game – I doubt I’ll manage it this time due to the fact I’ve had two original Xboxes RROD (hardware failure) on me so far this year… (Then again, there’s a special Halo: Reach Xbox available!).

Either way, it’s better than being the second game to try to latch onto controversy by allowing you to play as a terrorist.

Filed Under: marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The best social games on any platform…

February 22, 2010 By 3 Comments

Social Gaming is one of the trends of the moment, and the best examples of the genre are Farmville, which has reached 80 million users via Facebook, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox, which has topped $1 billion in sales since November 2009.

Despite the fact they are both very different games on different platforms, they both share many similar attributes which have seen two radically different audiences become engrossed, enthralled, and in some cases obsessed and possibly addicted.

1. Shareability: Using Facebook as a platform means Farmville is easily able to spread across 300 million users. Although Call of Duty is in a walled garden by only working with people on the same system (whether Xbox, Playstation or PC), all three options now allow for friends lists and invites into games, allowing me to be invited into a social group as soon as I turn on the games console. When Call of Duty launched I could see 20+ of my friends were playing, meaning the pull to join them was incredibly strong.

2. Grindability: Something that’s been noted in social gaming is the ability to ‘level up’ and progress simply by investing plenty of time (or by paying to skip the time requirement). Both Farmville and Call of Duty reward you simply for spending time with them, even if you don’t do particularly well. Even if you constantly kill your crops, Farmville gives you ways to keep going, and Call of Duty gives you bonuses for finishing a multiplayer match or benefitting from the skill of your teammates.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Image by Flyinace2000 on Flickr, used under CC Licence.

3. Accessibility: Both games allow you to jump in and start playing quickly without barriers. Although you can earn better rewards in both games, in Farmville they are really just enhancing the same game mechanic you already have – and in Call of Duty the weapons you unlock aren’t that much better than the ones you start with. Instead of leaving the all powerful weapons for players who have spent months with the game, this means that as a beginner, you can still do OK in a game to give you a reason to carry on.

Farmville

Farmville image by RustyBoxcars on Flickr, used under CC Licence.

4. Social standing: Whether in Farmville or Call of Duty, you’re rewarded with marks of your progress which give you an element of social standing with your friends – in Farmville it’s buildings, pets and better crops. In Call of Duty, once you’ve finally got through 70 multiplayer ranks, you’re then given the option to reset every reward, but now you get a badge to show you’re ‘prestiged’. And you can do it again, and again, up to 10 times apparently.

I’ve dabbled with Farmville, but the small social group whose respect is probably more relevant to me are on Call of Duty, which is why I’ve spent a seemingly ridiculous amount of time on the game in the last few months.

5. Ways to rank: With Farmville you can rank for experience, levels, and by helping your friends and neighbours – if I help a friend they get a message telling them how lovely I am. By the same token, Call of Duty not only gives you an overall level, but scores you on score, wins, kills and accuracy, meaning that there’s always someone you know that’s just ahead in one of the leaderboards, and you’ll always have one score that’s respectable.

A world of gamers:

I’ve written before about why the time is now right for pervasive social gaming. It’s now backed up by Windows Mobile 7 including Xbox Live. Gamers are not a niche group of teenagers – they’re the 55% of female Farmville players who are 43 years old on average, or the middle-aged guys who have gone from an early 90s console to the latest Xbox or Playstation after work or their kids are in bed.

This doesn’t mean that the current media (TV, radio, print etc), can’t still command huge audiences, but they’re converging more and more (Pop Idol etc using text voting, user-controlled radio (disclosure, I work on dabbl), the use of QR codes and augmented reality to brief new technological life into print, etc. Games have pervaded everything as much as story-telling, even if the critical debate about them is still in the early stages of evolution.

Filed Under: Social Gaming, Videogames, xbox 360 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,