What is Professional? March 21, 2011

Funny Story.  I fix computers on the side since I’m really good at it and twice a week I go to classes for training in computer certification.   I was told in class last week that the guidebook clearly states you’re expected to look professional when you go out to a computer repair job and I just laughed hysterically.

I’ve been fixing computers most of my life, but mostly just for my own personal amusement.  I hadn’t discovered until recently (my family was always against me making profit from my computer skills, they rather I stay in college until I died) that fixing computers could be a lucrative business if you had a customer demand for it in your area.  With only my experience and no formal training to inhibit my expectations, I would go to these computer repair jobs dressed how I normally dressed, with a video game t-shirt and zip up hoodie (weather appropriate).

In fact I told my A+ Certification class about a time when a private school called me in to look at some laptops.  I went to diagnose and fix them wearing a Doom 3 shirt.  None of the staff batted an eye at my appearance, I was treated with the utmost of respect, and a lot of the students (who averaged around age of 6) were extremely curious to what was my experience and how they could get a job fixing computers as well.

I was told by the instructor that was just AWESOME.

I think that the times have changed, in that people expect real technical experts to dress like how I normally do, instead of dressing how Best Buy does commercials about how their technicians look.  The times of the MIT graduate IBM engineer wearing a button down white shirt and black tie, armed with horned rim black glasses and a pocket protector have passed and people have come to expect a computer expert to come wearing a video game or rock band t-shirt. Dressing like a stereotypical geek is not professional anymore.  Ironically, dressing in a Halo shirt actually makes you look more like you know what you’re doing.

Obviously it’s a bad idea to wear long dangling chains, especially if you’re working inside a pc, so things like dog tags cannot be worn, but even something as professional as a tie can also easily get in the way of your hands when you’re building a new PC.

From what I’ve been told by my peers, the corporate level still expects their employees to cater to their stereotypical dress codes, leaving personal individuality to when they leave their homes.  Other than basics of cleanliness, there is really not a good reason for these policies to be in effect, espessially when a guy like me looks like more of an expert to a typical person than someone depicted in a Best Buy commercial.  More progressive software companies like Google, eBay, and Apple have bucked this trend without incident, to say nothing of the dozens of game development studios in the US alone.

Something that I’ve noticed, especially in the computer games industry is that you can’t judge anything about a person just by appearances anymore.  I think for the most part people still will judge others by appearances in every other field (business especially) but in all my experience, for technology they expect the out there to be the norms.  This might have something to do with the exposure a lot of people have had to technology enthusiasts as depicted to them in movies and on television, or it could be expectations formed from people they have in their own families who have technical backgrounds.

I think that’s one thing that A+and compTIA is behind on, maybe someone should inform them to update their manual.  Has the games industry influenced this trend, or has the media been more responsible?  I’ll leave you to decide that, and also what you should look for when you need help the next time your computer breaks. 

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!