The New Wave of Marketing March 18, 2011

So you’re a development house with a pedigree of games, and you decide you want to make your next game an entirely new IP that no one up to this point has heard of before.  You’re releasing in a time where the market on all the current-generation consoles are flooded, with tons of games already out, many of them contenders for best game of the platform, and plenty more to come that year.  You need to sell your game, and sell them as close to release day as possible.  Because brick and mortar retailers don’t like keeping inventory on shelves that isn’t selling and after a few months they will start to mark down the price of something they want to get rid of, regardless of what price point you’re telling them to sell at.

You could market the game through the usual channels, like through television ads, billboards, and magazines.  However, marketing on TV and in print costs a lot of money, and your core demographic doesn’t really pay any attention to advertising that way anymore.  They’ll usually just ignore them, change the channel or have them deleted from their recordings.

You could offer your customers something to get them to preorder, like a physical promotional item or day one DLC.  By telling your customers to preorder at a certain chain store, you can offer them exclusive downloadable or unlockable content as an incentive.  Retailers like this because it can get them guaranteed customers when the game finally releases, and money paid for games that aren’t even out yet.  It also gives them a good barometer of just how many copies of each game to stock on the day of release.  The problem is that this will make a lot of customers who didn’t preorder feel penalized, and make them think twice about paying full retail price for a copy of the game that doesn’t have the DLC offered with it.  Also it can really anger customers if you offer different promotional items spanning over many different retail chains, making many completionists wary of the value of their own Day 1 DLC when there are other items for a game out there they can never have.

You could release a Collector’s Edition (CE) of your game and charge a premium price for it.  You can fill it with little in-game trinkets or include things of actual substance like a documentary disc and art book.  The low quantity of those at release could bring out a lot of preorders and day one purchases getting you full price sale on each game, on top of the extra money from charging a premium price.  However a CE costs more money to make and your publisher might not be interested in offering one if they don’t see a demand for one.

So what do you do?  You have to be creative.  Coming soon I’ll be talking about the most creative marketing campaigns for new IPs I’ve seen over the past few years.  If anyone has any ideas they’d like to pass along to me, post a comment!