To Sell Or Not To Sell, That Is…The Only Two Choices
I apologize in advance…this is going to be a bit longer than my usual post.
There are, by the latest official count, eleventy-bajillion MMORPG games in some stage of development, with the growth showing an exponential curve that indicates there will be three MMO’s in development for every man, woman and child on the planet by late next week. (And yes, that includes the people in grass huts that think electricity means “something crawled up the gods’ arses again”)
In “The Olde Days“, selling an MMO concept to the public was a bit simpler; once you explained what the heck you were actually talking about, they got to choose between you and the two or three others out there. In today’s market, you’ve got to stand out like a book on celibacy at Paris Hilton’s place to stand a chance. Therefore, we have to add yet one more hat that a publisher has to wear properly to have a hope of surviving:
Re-read that last part…”trigger an emotional response”. That is, not to understate things, a huge phrase for MMORPG companies.
Or it should be.
Think about it…when gamers get “into” an MMO, what happens when something is changed/nerfed/”monkeyed with” in their game?
And why does that kind of response happen? Because gamers become emotionally attached to the game they’re playing. Developers design toward emotional involvement as one of their end goals, publishing companies count on it, and gamers want it.
So why in the Twelve Unimaginably Pissy Names of The Great Game God Lagulon don’t they try to invoke that same emotional response in advertising their game? How many ads say “Live the Adventure”, “Hottest PvP Action”, or “Realm vs. Realm” in their ads (or similar cliches)? Either that, or a nice big picture of yet another orc brandishing yet another sharp weapon? The answer is…most of them.
The question is, of course…how do you actually provoke an emotional response with your advertising for a game?
Okay…that’s one way.
MMORPG publishers sell their games like they’re selling soft drinks…they should be selling them like you would sell real estate…because you’re not asking someone to pay money to play with your features; you’re asking someone to pay money to move into your world.
“Want a house? We have houses. Big, SHINY houses. With lots of grass and stuff. And you get your own driveway and everything! You know that driveway your neighbor has? That thing is nothing like the driveways we have, because ours have parking spaces painted on them, so you don’t have to waste time trying to figure out where to park! Live the adventure of a house today!“
Would you move into THAT neighborhood? Of course not…at least, not based on that ad. And yet, that’s exactly the message of most MMORPG advertisements.
Attention, publishers: YOU ARE NOT SELLING A PRODUCT, YOU ARE SELLING A COMMUNITY.
Ryzom is going to pass through a few uncertain days/weeks, a second time. Our efforts to move Ryzom forward didn’t get the expected repercussions and today as I speak, while the game continues to run and to be supported, the company behind its development – Gameforge France SARL, located in Paris – is lacking the funds to keep going.
It started me thinking about the failure of what is a fairly well-developed, complex game. Ryzom is remarked to have one of the best, most devoted communities in the MMORPG realm. So devoted, in fact, that there’s a decent chance that a group of community members will put together an offer to buy the game, just as they did the first time this happened back in December.
This is a game that has had its fair share of problems, both from a development standpoint and a subscriber standpoint. And the people that play are willing to buy the damn company to keep it going. That…is an emotional reaction.
Now, admittedly, your game has to allow players to become emotionally involved in the world, or all the good advertising in the world won’t help. However, Ryzom is that kind of game, as evidenced by the community it has.
When I first mentioned it, how many people said “Ryzom? Seems like I heard something about that game at some point,” or (even worse), “Ryzom? What the heck is that?”. Did poor advertising kill Ryzom (twice now, and counting)? Probably not, and we’ll probably never know. But selling the experience instead of the game couldn’t have hurt things.
Design your advertising with the same goals you use to design your game, and you see a difference in response to your offering.
Scream “Combat combat COMBAT!” and you see a response as well.
If the perfect game is built in a forest of MMO’s, and no one’s there to feel it, does it make a sound as it closes?
October 4th, 2007 at 1:23 am
I’m inclined to think of the product as “what you are selling”, so would rephrase your assertion as “The product you are selling is a community”.
Now, having rephrased it, I’ll disagree a little.
First, your product is a context for a community.
If you sell that to enough people, they’ll move-in and build a community.
They just as easily formed a community in a chat room or on a forum, or in a better game. It’s the context that your MMO offers which makes it distinct, and the reason they chose it over everything else.
The desire for Ryzom’s community to buy the game is an excellent example: they aren’t really asking to buy themselves, but rather the context around which they developed into a community.
Though I suppose if you’ve launched a game and have subscribers playing it and then put it on the market, then it’s the game’s community that really establishes the value of what you’re selling.
e.g. Google buying youtube despite already owning Google video… Or Yahoo! buying Flickr even though they already had Yahoo! Photos… they were buying the communities.
October 4th, 2007 at 2:11 am
“The product you are selling is a community”.
A very good point.
However (and feel free to disagree again…a little or a lot), I don’t see anyone trying to sell the “context for a community” aspect. I think the real estate analogy still holds water…as much as analogies can, at any rate.
When you’re selling a house, you’re appealing to what the potential buyer desires in a community. Like to solo? Fine, I have a lovely two-room cabin up on that mountain over there for you. Have a wife and 2.3 kids? You are going to adore this three-bedroom…it’s right down the road from one of the best schools in the state, and the neighbors have kids the same ages as yours…let’s go take a look!
Like to PvP? We have quite a few development properties in downtown Detroit.
But you’re exactly right…and managed to phrase what I was trying to say much more succinctly than I did.
Damn you, Jeff.
November 13th, 2007 at 4:51 am
It’s been a month, so I finally have a reply…
However (and feel free to disagree again…a little or a lot), I don’t see anyone trying to sell the “context for a community” aspect. I think the real estate analogy still holds water…as much as analogies can, at any rate.
Marketing pros don’t play MMO’s. They haven’t a clue what they are selling. So you see MMOs being sold in a certain way – but that’s due to a lack of understanding on the part of the marketeers, and not really the developers.
They don’t know how to sell an MMO, but they do know how to sell explosions and tits, which most demos are better able to demonstrate than “community”, anyway.
…Or…
Marketing pros aren’t trying to sell to the MMO fanboys-n-girls, because they know those folk’s ears are to an entirely different ground, anyway… So what you see people trying to sell in the traditional marketing channels will sound as though it is a foreign tongue, because really it is.
The marketing pro’s are genius enough to know that the people who hear about MMOs via those channels will not understand what the product is, why they should think that they ought to buy it, or even that it is indeed for them, if they were to peddle the merchandise for what it is.
None of the (few, I admit) marketing people that I have ever met seemed ignorant of the product, but almost none of the marketing that I have seen seemed the least bit intelligent… so I don’t know what the deal is there.
That said, most of the marketing for a game comes pre-launch. There really is no community at that point. Just the vacant lots that will soon be populated – or not – and which will soon provide the context for a community to develop – or not.
Ok, there’s the beta community pre-launch, but they are building little mud huts at launch day’s genesis device ground zero. They’re certainly not being sold, though they often feel sold-out.
That’s where the real estate analogy breaks downs: there may be a school down the street, but no one is enrolled yet. The neighbors might have children the same age as yours, but at best that’s the real estate agent making a promise to do his best to sell the neighboring homes to families like yours… ’cause at the moment they are unoccupied.
Well, the Oklahoma Land Rush was a real estate acquisition something like it, I guess… but they weren’t advertising the community aspects of it, such as great neighbors and nice schools and dead indians, etc., but really just FREE LAND GOING FAST.
And these days they even turn a blind-eye to the Sooners, sneaking on the night-before, and staking the best spots with some extra pre-order goodies thrown-in to boot.
But it is the potential for a nice community to develop there that captures the imagination of experienced gamers.
They know that no matter what else, if the community sucks then the game will have been a bust for them, and their hope for it is what has them buying the box and risking it’ll be a waste of their time.
But I don’t think the marketing you see is directed at those experienced gamers. It’s a message for gamers that aren’t shopping for a community, but more for… eh, I dunno… whatever non-MMO fans get lured into MMOs with.
Even for them, community is actually what will be the make-or-break factor; but since they don’t know that, it wouldn’t do any good to convince them how great the community there is, and experienced gamers will know that the community of which you speak doesn’t even exist yet.
Or maybe not.
I guess housing editions advertise what great neighborhoods they “are” all the time. From the moment construction is complete and not a single person lives there yet: Blammo! Commercials full of smiling kids playing in the park on the corner and friendly old men keeping their yards in perfect order.
And we fall for that.
Still, I don’t think the masses in the market have the experience to make advertising MMO’s as communities the best choice just yet.
For the overwhelming majority of your potential customers, that the product they purchase provides them with a community membership will be a surprise. That they find it to be far more enjoyable than what they thought they were buying will be another one, an order of magnitude larger.
‘Cause they just wouldn’t have bought “membership in a community”, these people. ‘Had no desire for such a thing. Whatever they were looking for in a game that had them settling on a given MMO, it surely wasn’t that.
Could be the marketing pros actually know what they are doing, cause to sell a community you first have to convince the buyer that he needs to buy into a community, before you even get to selling him on your specific one.
But people already know they like tits and explosions.
November 13th, 2007 at 5:15 am
NECRO! NECRO!
Sorry…I had to.
Could be the marketing pros actually know what they are doing, cause to sell a community you first have to convince the buyer that he needs to buy into a community, before you even get to selling him on your specific one.
You’re exactly right, and that’s an angle I didn’t think through enough. Which is somewhat embarassing, since I’ve been involved with radio advertising for over 20 years now. Sigh.
However, as people float from one MMO to another, wouldn’t this work as part of a decent post-launch advertising strategy? Admittedly, from what I’ve seen, there aren’t a lot of ad dollars thrown around post-launch (especially compared to pre-launch, and for the first month or two after going gold). After all, there are millions of WoW players that are eventually going to look for another game. I’m not saying it should be the thrust of all advertising, but it just interests me that no one has tried this angle to catch some of the players that are moving from game to game.
Also admittedly, for a large part of the group, community falls second to “C’n I blow up crap? Huh? HUH!?!”, but the “CommunityHeads” are a part of the potential customer base, and usually they form the part of the playerbase that is most likely to stick around for a while.
But people already know they like tits and explosions.
Sorry…not going to take your word for this one…I need links.