Controversy Marketing
- Thread starter JP Sherman
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It's too bad that good craftmanship on games can be substituted with good craftmanship on publicity stunts. It's even worse that those attemtpts succeed more often than they deserve to. I can live with moustache-twirling being all the rage in oil industry or banking, but when it enters some artistic sphere and makes creativity take a backseat, then i start to get aggravated. Well, that's the inevitable consequence of going big-budget, i guess.
And no, there was never a controversy in gaming industry that made me pay attention. It's probably because i don't really pay attention to anything, though.
And no, there was never a controversy in gaming industry that made me pay attention. It's probably because i don't really pay attention to anything, though.
Great article JP. You have shown multiple positions of marketing from a PR standpoint of "what do we do now to turn this to our benefit" to "lets do something we KNOW will piss people off". I do love a good campaign that gets people all crazy for a little bit.
However, in some cases it shows just how smart a person is and how "Duh" a group of people are. Loved it, keep it up.
However, in some cases it shows just how smart a person is and how "Duh" a group of people are. Loved it, keep it up.
I would never ever in a million years let controversy over a game influence my decision to buy it or not, and shame on the people that do. (which there are clearly plenty of) To think that some developers actually MODIFY a game after recieving feedback in order to gain controversy is disgusting.
Well said- worthy developers have a vision for their game and try to fulfill that vision without sacrifice or compromise.Kollega said:
I agree, personally I like they way a centrist Californian politician used the noise about freedom of speech generated by attacking video games to sure up his position amongst values voters. A pure master stroke, or do you thing that other side cant play the same game too?Spinwhiz said:
Thank you so SO much for this closing statement. Seriously...this is precisely the issue I see with controvesies. Not that they don't provide short-term benefits and profits, because they obviously do and if people feel like playing along, there is no reason why it should stop. But they can hurt the long-term effects of the studio, company or the entire industry when it comes both to money as well as to other more nebulous, but vitally important, things like a sense of belonging of the consumer.
I sometimes wish more business executives would realize this point. I may not be a believer in capitalism as being something that will be endlessly sustainable really...but even so, it wouldn't hurt to have more business types that can think in this sort of long-term fashion - to me that would be more than enough really.
Keep these articles up. They're truly invaluable! Often enough you read articles from pretty smart people, who make pretty solid deductions. But none of that can match someone that writes about something intelligently along with a hefty amount of experience behind him.
I still remember the controversy that Mass Effect made and the huge media blow out that came from it.
Just made it even the more popular.
Then there was MW2 recently with "No Russian" which, against jsut helped push it to the mainstream.
Controversay is often good, as long as its only media hype, and, even if its more than that - It pushes boundaries, and people like that
Just made it even the more popular.
Then there was MW2 recently with "No Russian" which, against jsut helped push it to the mainstream.
Controversay is often good, as long as its only media hype, and, even if its more than that - It pushes boundaries, and people like that
Another great article, well done! I have rarely seen articles actually get down and address the nitty-gritty of ethically gray tactics. Your piece is a very clear look at them with little bias. Thanks for another look at the inner workings of the industry.
This entire schtick rides of the notion that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" -- that is, one must attract attention to their game even if that attention is negative, since more people will learn about the game.
It makes sense from a marketing standpoint -- you have to spread the word about your game somehow. However, faking controversy is a very stupid idea, since it makes people feel manipulated and jerked around instead of convinced.
That's all marketing is: convincing large numbers of people to agree with you.
It makes sense from a marketing standpoint -- you have to spread the word about your game somehow. However, faking controversy is a very stupid idea, since it makes people feel manipulated and jerked around instead of convinced.
That's all marketing is: convincing large numbers of people to agree with you.
This is why we say not to feed the trolls. And the main difference between trolls on forums and in the board room is that one group has more qualified people managing the trolling. They are probably on the forums as well.
Good points made.
Sometimes accidental findings out of the controversy can lead to a boost, like it'll get covered on a news show, and people will flock to buy it just to see if the game was worth the news coverage.
Sometimes accidental findings out of the controversy can lead to a boost, like it'll get covered on a news show, and people will flock to buy it just to see if the game was worth the news coverage.
There are quite a few things that can manage success (and sometimes even quality) on the very basis of eliciting controversy. South Park, The Simpsons (to a lesser extent), Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Stephen Colbert are some examples. If you have such popular people/ franchises operating for so long, that seems to suggest that it is a sustainable phenomenon.
But for games, it is also an exploitation of the image of gaming - it's not developed enough such that most people think games are capable of or aspire to much more than juvenile spurts of blood or scantily clad females. Even perhaps the most optimistic estimate of the first digital game (SpaceWar! in 1962) is almost a century later than the first modern film (1877, 1888, or perhaps the 1860's depending on how you classify "film".) That's 150 years ago as opposed to 50 years ago for the second-youngest form of media. In other words, mainstream media has been around since before anyone alive today was born, but games haven't. This means that what we do today might cause that same stagnancy in games that plagues comic books - the grizzled space marine who repeatedly engages in mass slaughter of evil dudes may become the pervasive equivalent of the spandex-clothed superhero who saves the world once a month. That might be a risk.
I don't think that it is a large one, though. Different genres exist within a given medium for a reason, and within those genres there are still divisions between what people look for in a book/movie/game. I'll invoke Sturgeon's Law here: when asked "Isn't 90% of science fiction crap?" he responded "90% of EVERYTHING is crap." It's true: For every Lord of the Rings, every The Dark Knight, every Bioshock, there's a load of other crude attempts that mimic a lot of what they achieve, but just fall flat because they're not crafted as well. Like most forms of creative intellectual property, 10% of all the games, books or movies get 90% of the sales.
In other words, most games are derivative crap that sorely needs something more to aspire to than the last hit of the week - but that's true of all other forms of media as well. It's just that the older forms have a long list of classics that reimagined the whole medium that came before, and the much, much longer list of derivative slop of that same period was forgotten. We just need to wait for those classics to be developed (or make them ourselves, if a few of us feel like making the plunge.) Negative stereotypes will definitely stick around for a while for marketers to exploit, however - the average game does earn them (and so do quite a few popular ones.)
...well, this turned out to be longer and more rambling than I expected. I just mainly wanted to ask what people thought about games like Postal 2 that didn't manage to exploit the controversy that the developers were desperately aiming for. It seems to make controversy exploitation into less of an automatically successful "get-rich-quick" scheme than it's usually perceived as.
Marketing is getting a product you want to sell into the hands of people who want to own it.Rawle Lucas said:
If you treat controversy as a marketing tactic ? and you SHOULD ? it should follow from the experience of the product, the game. And if it's outside that, then yeah. It's a stupid idea.
But no controversy is fake. If people argue about it, it's a controversy, whether the first person to start talking about it was an honest citizen with an axe to grind or a fully-owned subsidiary of Blizzard games. Just because somebody made it up doesn't mean it isn't true.
Think about ilovebees. Might you feel a little jerked around by that, too? But it still worked, and it still worked very, very well. Because it fit within the game.
And blah blah blah. Just trying to defend my trade.
There are plenty of fantastic games that didn't see a lick of marketting, and I'd say most games aren't changed during their fundamental stage in order to gather more attention from the press and community- especially not in ways that are controversial. You have a very pessimistic view of game developers no? Most of them try to make games that appeal to large amounts of people, but that doesn't mean that they're making any sacrifices to their original concept or the game's quality, and it certainly doesn't compare to hiring fake protestors and aiming at sour topics intentionally during the conceptual stages of development. And if I had to name developers who I consider sincere in their art, the first to come to mind would be Valve, Nintendo, and Warren Spector.JuryNelson said:
Well said. Sometimes I wonder if battles won by a company through controversy will ultimately lead to their defeat in the war. On one hand, you draw more attention to one of your games, but on the other hand your general reputation among the masses becomes tainted.
You have a pessimistic view of marketers, no?Electrogecko said:
Valve compromises the shit out of their visions. They have ideas going in that don't work at all, and they throw them away. They are very, very open about this. Left 4 Dead began life as a game about fairies. COMPROMISED.
Behind Microsoft, Nintendo is probably the most audience-focused company in the world. It's not about giving the people something great, or delivering on a vision, it's about staying true to what people expect from them.
Full disclosure, I have never played a game that Warren Spector had anything to do with.
I hope that what this column can continue to do for people is to get them to stop confusing "marketing" with "bad marketing."
When marketing works, you don't even think it's marketing. You think it's news. But when it fails, it looks like a cooked up controversy or a compromised artistic vision.
I guess I should have amended my challenge to be "Name one [developer that didn't compromise their original vision AND didn't "bow to the pressures of marketing" AND succeeded anyway.]" And don't say Valve. Because The Orange Box was nothing if not a vote of no confidence for Portal.
1. L4D came from people playing Counter Strike with lots of bots set to 1 health and knives only. That's in their commentaries on the roof in the first level.JuryNelson said:
2. Valve never knew Portal was going to be so popular. The Orange Box was designed to sell all the Half-Life 2 games with this little puzzly-game and this updated version of Team Fortress thrown in for good measure.
3. Valve is one of the few companies that fully support their fan base, with SDKs, mods, free updates, and so on. They have a record stretching back to Half-Life (1997 I think) for doing this.
4. Don't get Valve and Steam confused. Steam is almost a completely separate entity in it's own right.
Are you saying that if you change the game at any point during the development process then you are compromising it's integrity? Game development is not a static thing, it's organic. New ideas appear almost everyday, some good, some bad. The best of the best go in to the game, and if that means it changes direction, is that necessarily a bad thing? Or is that a compromise?