The End of an Era?

Is the game finally over for consoles?

Many professionals have been asking themselves this exact question for the past few years. With the release of the iPhone, and all sorts of other mobile devices such as the iPod Touch, video game consoles are starting to lack purpose. Due to the open sourced nature of games on these mobile platforms, these games are usually free to play, made with very short periods of time. Often, these games are games that do not require a large time commitment, and are simple to pick up.

Sales of consoles in the U.S. dropped 21% in 2012 to just over $4 billion. Microsoft announced that Xbox revenues dropped 29%, while Sony announced a drop in PSP and PS3 sales of around 15%. Nintendo‘s new Wii U console also failed to generate much interest in the market. (Source: Time Business and Money, “Game Over?” Martha C. White, 2/11/2013) As these giants in the industry fall to their knees, does that mean the future of gaming is over?

Not quite. The video game industry, although seemly is suffering through a tough period, is actually the largest it has ever been. Outside of these large console makers are the smaller independent game development firms, and these firms are raising large amount of capital. Game developer Double Fine, at the end of 2011, realized that the future of gaming is changing. Tim Schafer (the founder of Double Fine, worked on titles such as Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango), decided to make a traditional point-and-click adventure game to bring back the past excellence of the video game industry. He turned towards Kickstarter for his funding efforts of the $400,000 he needed for the project. Within a few months, he raised $3.34 Million. This is currently still the world record on crowd funding amount raised. Kickstarter uses a mechnic where the public is able to “donate” money towards a cause. In this case, the public voted with their money that they want Tim Schafer and Double Fine to make this adventure game. (Source: Time Business and Money, “Why the Next Hit Video Game May Be Crowdfunded,” Victor Luckerson, 1/29/2013).

More and more games are now moving towards crowdfunding and open source play. With new releases such as the Steambox (console made by the video game digital distributor Steam), and Ouya (another very large crowdfunding open source game console effort), it is apparent that the game industry isn’t dying, it’s just changing. Game making is become more and more accessible with new accesible game engines such as the Unity3D or Unreal Development Kit, and programming is slowly becoming a staple of today’s education.

Instead of looking at this as an end of an era, this should be thought of as the beginning of one. Interactive media is changing, and the only way for it to go is up.

The Cool-ness of Innuendo

During the infancy stage of video gamming industry, Nintendo had ensconced themselves as the primary choice of its targeted demographic group—the youth i.e., teenagers. Thanks to Mario Brothers franchise and The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo had a monopoly that seemed would never be overtaken by competitors. In 1989, however, Master System (Sega Master System) launched SEGA Genesis to rival and hopefully replace Nintendo as the top video gaming console. During its inaugural release, Sega’s primary competition, other than Nintendo, was TurboGrafx-16. TurboGrafx-16 was released in August 29^th 1989. Two months later Master System released Sega Genesis into the video game market.

Sega only managed to ship 400,000 units in the first year. In order to increase sales, Sega diversified their gaming portfolio by expanding beyond gaming to include various platforms such as online banking system and an answering machine called the Sega Mega Answerer. Despite this, Sega remained as a distant competitor to Nintendo.

To narrow the competitive gap Nintendo had created. Sega would launch sexually suggestive advertising campaigns. These campaigns were aimed to suggest that the Sega Genesis consol was the “cooler” console.

These campaigns were ran in UK’s Viz. Viz is a comic book for “Adults” (college students) that was full of frat-boy, locker room humor. The tone of the campaign was ensconsed in sexual innuendo.

The advertising copy for on Sega’s campaigns would include suggestive words and phrasing as: “Pulling and squeezing your knob” and “Now you’re shooting all over the place.”

The copy for the above campaign was:

You sit there, eyes glued to the writhing, arcade-quality graphics, pulling and squeezing your knob. Now you’re breathing heavily over the digital stereo sound. Now you’re shooting all over the place, but it’s no use … “GAME OVER.”

In another print ad, SEGA Genesis would depict a man peeing in snow to spell out “SEGA”

The copy for the man peeing in the snow was:

“On a cold winters night no activity combines such precise co-ordination of eye and hand as the Sega challenge. Offering instant relief to both right and left handed players, the contest guarantees to seperate the men from the boys (NB.Female players may find difficult with the higher skill levels). So, as the the iceberg said to the polar bear-” go with the flow, but don’t eat that yellow snow’.”

In a third print ad, SEGA wold juxtapose their flagship, Sonic, with a pair of testicles. The tagline for ad was:

“Which pair will be biggest on the beach this summer”

These campaign’s were the beginning of the end for Sega.

From a marketing standpoint Master system failed to recognize that even though the campaigns were a hit with their targeted demographic group i.e., young adults and those who wished to be young adults, the people buying their games were the parents of the targeted demographic group.

Parents don’t want to expose their children to sexually suggestive, crude, inappropriate imagery via a gaming counsel. Subsequently, the potential customers for Sega were snagged by Nintendo. Nintendo appealed to parents because of its family orientated sensibility.

Nintendo’s success is due, in part, to their understanding of who their demographic group is and what their capabilities are. As a whole, the mean age of those who play video games is fairly young. Knowing that the young are reliant on their parents for a myriad of things especially economic.; Nintendo packaged their product to first appeal to parents because they were the ones acting as gatekeepers.

Edifying the public: Wieden and Kennedy’s Community Involvement

With clients such as Coco Cola, Facebook, EA (Electronic Arts) and Nike Wieden and Kennedy has established itself as a plangent force in the Advertising world. Year in and year out Wieden and Kennedy is responsible for producing work that leaves an indelible image/thought in the mind of consumers. In order to be one of the top leaders in their field Wieden and Kennedy has to have a commitment to their clients that is unparalleled by their competitors. By way of their commitment, Wieden and Kennedy is consistently producing work that is effectively communicating with the targeted consumer group of a particular client.

Most recently, Wieden and Kennedy launched the “Find Your Greatness” campaign. The campaign seeks to ask the audience to have an introspective look at the definition of greatness.  Included in this campaign is a spot entitled “Jogger.” The spot features Nathan, a 12-year-old from London, Ohio. The spot begins by showing a young, overweight boy—Nathan—struggling to run, through determination he is committed to the task at hand—to get fit. The spot not only created attention for Nike, but also perfectly exemplifies their commitment to edifying the public.

Wieden and Kennedy’s effort to edify can be documented by Designed to Move via Access to sport. Access to sport is the nonprofit arm of Nike. Through Access to Sport, Wieden and Kennedy presented Extra Time—a film dedicated to the global mission to get children to be active.

At the conclusion of the spot, the audience is told: For the first time in history, this generation of children is expected to die five years younger than their parents. According to the Designed to Move website: In less than two generations, physical activity has dropped by 20% in the U.K. and 32% in the U.S. In China, the drop is 45% in less than one generation. Vehicles, machines and technology now do our moving for us. The Designed To Move website continues to say, “By the end of this decade, most Americans will exert only slightly more energy per week than if they slept 24 hours a day.”

By pure candor and through their insight into the public, Wieden and Kennedy crated a spot that effectively communicates the health epidemic that is starting to plague the youth. This was accomplished because the spot featured the honest and youthful thoughts and wishes of how some kids would like to spend their time if they had an extra five years to live.

Electronic Arts and the Storm that Ravaged SimCity

EA (Electronic Arts) has been a major name in the video game industry for decades. Unlike most game developers now which originated from other entertainment or computer software companies, EA was founded in 1986 as a video game development company, one of the first of its kind. Over the next decades, EA would continue to evolve and grow to become now one of the world’s largest 3rd-party game publishers, with a total net worth of around 5.3 billion dollars. In 2011, their revenue for the fiscal year totaled to around 3.8 billion dollars.

However, EA has always been considered one of the worst places to work for, and one of the most unsatisfied customer base. The new SimCity, released March 5th 2013, is a perfect explanation of why.

SimCity is a revival of an old 24 year franchise by the same name, a game where the player plays as an omnipotent figure who controls the construction and operations of a simulated city. The game consists of strategy, management and growth all in a real time setting. The original game also inspired a plethora of other simulation games at the time, kick-starting the simulation game genre as a whole. The game-play obviously holds up to the test of time, so what could possibly go wrong?

To begin, upon release, players were unable to log into the game to play due to a server issue on EA’s side. The EA forums were filled with people complaining about how they couldn’t log in after dishing out $60 for an unusable product. What really frustrated the players was that SimCity is supposed to be a single player game, and it had been. For decades, gamers enjoyed SimCity without having the need to connect to the internet, so access to EA servers shouldn’t even be necessary for the game.

Similar issues plagued the launch of Blizzard‘s recent title, Diablo III. The previous games, Diablo I and II both had single and multiplayer options, but in Diablo III, internet connectivity is required for both single and multiplayer. The unfortunate thing was that during the launch, Blizzard’s servers suffered a similar fate.

Sony had a recent crisis where hackers accessed the Sony database and stole the credit card information of PS3 players. Sony had to take down their service for around a month, and in return, they gave out free games to customers who were affected by the issue. Since the unfortunate server incident, EA worked very hard to bring back the customer’s trust. Following Sony’s example, EA also took initiative to give out free game products to players affected by the server issue. EA also launched 40 new servers by the 2nd week of game release to relieve server stress. However, the effectiveness of EA’s efforts are daunting due to the PR they made previously for themselves. As time goes on, only time will tell how companies grow to evolve and solve digital content marketing issues as large as these.