Yesterday, GameCyte attended a particularly eye-opening presentation at the 2008 MI6 conference. You may never have heard of a company called Electronic Entertainment Design And Research (EEDAR), but they’re certainly interested in you. Or more accurately, they’re interested in what you buy, how you play, and how videogame marketers can best serve your needs to the the enrichment of all involved.
Founded in 2005 by Sony Online Entertainment veterans Geoffrey Zatkin and Greg Short, the research firm has spent the last two years accumulating a tremendous wealth of hand-picked game data and sales figures on which to perform statistical analysis. Today, Zatkin and Short introduced their audience of marketers and game industry professionals to a pair of burgeoning online trends (accomplishments and downloadable content) that said analysis had pointed to as not only directly correlated with increased sales, but also markedly underutilized.
Here there were no grand success stories or anecdotal failures, not much in the way of optimistic glances into the future — instead, EEDAR presented cold, hard facts designed to get marketers thinking about easy ways to directly influence their sales. As one might expect, takeaways were plentiful.
Accomplishments
“Until now, there really hasn’t been any information released publicly that shows how specifically and significantly accomplishments impact sales. So why don’t we do that?” asked Short, EEDAR’s chairman. The question, of course, was rhetorical. Tracking nearly 7,500 different Xbox 360 achievements in 213 different retail games, EEDAR identified 16 unique types, ranging from simple advancement (progressing through the game) to exploration, where the player is “pushed through the environment to look at things they normally may not have.” This brought up an interesting point; according to Zatkin, accomplishments “are used to dictate the behavior of players,” a notion he would reference later to great effect.
EEDAR found that though 16 different types of achievements exist, diversity had a strong correlation with game revenue. They admit that correlation doesn’t imply causality — that is to say, well-thought out games tend to have a wider variety of accomplishments to begin with — but believe it important nonetheless, and find the trend only growing as the years fall by. While in 2005 “consumers were uneducated in their expectations for an accomplishment system,” they quickly learned what it was they wanted, and by 2007 EEDAR finds “a firmly established trend” in that those games with 7-9 different types of accomplishments sold more than all those with six or less combined.
In particular, EEDAR advocated viral accomplishments — those falling under the categories of user-generated content, customization and community — which serve to draw in additional players. Zatkin claims “On average, games with viral characteristics sold 28% better than those who have none,” but not even a “sizable minority” — 8% of games — take advantage of this additional revenue opportunity. If accomplishments can be used to dictate players’ behavior toward the same marketing goal, Zatkin admonished the audience, “you should be rewarding your players for what you want them to do.” Short added that a simple way to do this is to allocate more points to those viral accomplishments which actually help sell their host games, rewarding the evangelists for their dedication. A helpful PowerPoint slide noted that a mere 0.78% of all Gamerscore points are currently attributable to viral achievements.
Downloadable Content
“Traditionally, you put a product in a box, ship it and you’re done. That is changing,” said Short. EEDAR’s second main finding was that the increasing popularity of downloadable content and online storefronts means that marketers have to focus more on the service, and less on the notion of a unified product. They noted that patch-and-update-king Microsoft is well in tune with the idea, but vaguely criticized Sony and especially Nintendo for a focus on individual downloadable titles instead of content. With the additional revenue from downloadable extras, EEDAR found that the top five Xbox 360 titles (consisting of Rock Band and a variety of 2K Sports franchises) could easily make two to three times their $60 sticker price; and that strategically releasing downloadable content at opportune moments could actually keep older games’ interest from decaying.
Downloadable Advertisments
By far the most surprising of the EEDAR’s findings, however, was the curious set of results they found when measuring titles that chose to release promotional trailers, demos, both, or neither in the course of their marketing campaigns. They found that cross-platform, the games that tended to sell best — by far — were those that only released a trailer, followed much farther down by those that had both trailer and demo. And given that on PlayStation 3, those that had only a demo did far worse than those with no promotional downloads at all, it seems that there may be an inherent risk in releasing early demos. At the same time, to maintain a long tail effect, EEDAR suggested that a demo might do well, as with DLC, to keep interest from decaying later in the game’s lifecycle.
If marketers pay any attention to the EEDAR’s groundbreaking suggestions, expect far more achievements, in-game viral recruiting and a dearth of demos in the years to come.
Check out our full, exclusive interview with founders Geoffrey Zatkin and Gregory Short.
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