Wednesday morning, GameCyte attended a panel on mainstream gaming at the 2008 MI6 conference in San Francisco. Read on to see how the the Rock Band marketers of the future will be competing for your attentions.
Moderated by John Davison, co-founder of WhatTheyPlay, and former editorial director of the 1UP network (not to mention one-time Gordon Freeman look-alike), the sparsely attended panel was tasked with differentiating mainstream gaming from the traditional, hardcore retail model, and discussed the necessity of new methods to reach the broader audience mainstream gaming entails.
What makes mainstream?
The panel generally agreed that the concept of mainstream, rather than constituting a separate, different market from core gamers, has more to do with the expansion of the gaming audience. Craig Relyea, senior vice president of marketing at Disney Interactive, went so far as to say that the entire concept of mainstream will be irrelevant in just a few years: "I don't think necessarily this is a topic that will have a panel discussion 3 to 5 years from now. It'll just be 'the audience' that we're talking to. The interactive entertainment audience."
2K Games senior vice president Sarah Anderson pointed to recent mainstream successes (including Rock Band, Brain Age and the Nintendo Wii) as evidence that games are changing as that audience expands. "Gaming is sort of cool again," she says, "and that's changing the way designers have to look at the way they are developing, because they still want to make great core experiences for the core gamer, something that has depth, but they have to be brilliant in their simplicity so that they appeal to the wider audience as well." Later, Anderson noted that even among core gamers on graphical powerhouses like Xbox 360 and PS3, expectations were changing -- gamers were saying they want games to be fun, rather than realistic or graphically appealing.
Meanwhile, MTV Networks' vice president of gaming and interactive products, Bob Picunko, felt that even though the audience is expanding, that doesn't mean games will necessarily be built with the entire audience in mind. He maintained that another option is to build "pods of games" for niche audiences. Good news for fans of realistic, violent first-person shooters, no? Relyea agrees -- according to him, the industry has grown by selling more products to the same core gamers and will continue to do so -- there's just a need now to sell to more people.
Current mainstream successes
The panel's speakers were obviously chosen with their recent mainstream success stories in mind, and so the panel quickly segued to a video presentation of the marketing methods attributing to that success. Picunko showed off four minutes (out of a staggering four hours) worth of back-to-back TV spots featuring product placement and celebrity interaction customized for each individual MTV channel, all designed to sell Rock Band to a mainstream audience. It was a tribute to the tremendous synergy between MTV's television and videogame divisions, and, judging by the reactions of the other panelists, quite the tough act to follow.
Relyea argued that given a limited budget, marketers have to target their audience more closely -- and in some cases, it's just not worthwhile to go for the mass market to begin with. "You need to determine what the potential of the title is," says Relyea. "In the case of something like High School Musical or Hannah Montana, the likelihood of us really connecting with the core audience on those titles is probably pretty slim."
And when going for an audience that's not already used to playing games, Relyea warns, you need to "sell the entire experience," marketing the platform as well as the game itself. He attributed part of the success of the DS title Spectrobes, a Japanese action-RPG with no traditional Disney tie-ins, to a series of commercials which prioritized images of young, "cool" kids interacting with their DS over video of the game in motion.
Anderson agreed that with the limited budget, marketers have to be more careful, and suggested that titles be evaluated one-by-one to determine whether to market to a core audience or the game's likely fanbase instead -- and believes marketers will "need to talk to the audience through different venues" altogether in the years to come, hinting at Davison's own WhatTheyPlay as a way to reach parents in particular.
As far as the tremendous success of 2K's Carnival Games, Anderson passed it off as something of a surprising fluke, attributed to being the "right product" at the "right time in the Wii cycle" and at the right price.
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June 30th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
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