Keep Them Playing

Video Game Community, Social Media, PR, Brand Marketing and Journalism Discussions

[kerbaldevteam]

We are thrilled to bring you the first edition of the Daily Kerbal. Although today is techincally Video Wednesday, we want to start off with this week’s devnotes.

Felipe (HarvesteR): Many Improvements done to Science Experiments and Transmission. Transmitting data does not allow you...

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Focus on Your Site, Not Your Competition

I’ve become a big fan of PocketGamer.biz in the last year. It is delivering news, editorial and features content about the absolutely chaotic mobile games market and really establishing itself as a place to go and get a handle on what’s going on in the greater industry.

Reading different viewpoints and seeing how reporters are getting more insight into the business is a good thing. Keith Andrew wrote an interesting op-ed about “games industry scandal,” asking us to take a moment before choosing a side on the next hub-bub that pops up on our Twitter feed.

His point is valid and it’s good to hear journalists are trying to get more clarity before making a call on something. But he also said something that stood out for me as much more important. He wrote:

“As an editor on a games website I know that, if we're even half an hour late on a story rival publications have already set live, we might as well not bother. People will have read the news elsewhere already, taken a view and moved on.”

This is a dangerous mentality for games media. Always being first is just not a very feasible business model. Scoops are going to come and go. Different reporters at different publications are going to have better relationships. So in today’s Search Era, where reading 10 stories about the same topic is as easy a Google News Search, it concerns me the gaming media is so concerned about running a news story after another site posted it. I am reminded of an old coaching cliché, “We’re going to focus on us and if we do what we need to do, we’ll win the game.”

Instead of worrying about always being first, make sure you’re always right. Then, focus on these three areas:

Build Your Own Brand: If an editor thinks it isn’t worth his or her time to post their own news story don’t believe in their site’s brand value. Just because somebody read a breaking story on one website doesn’t mean they won’t want to see what their preferred website has to say about it. Really big news, which is what so much of the games media leans on, motivates interest, and leads to people who will read anything and everything they can get their hands on. Let’s use the recent Breaking Bad finale as an example. I read multiple stories on several sites about the epic conclusion to one of my favorite shows. I already was reading recaps on Esquire and Hitfix but for the finale I read stories all over the place, including The New Yorker and EW. I really enjoyed the coverage on EW and I’ll likely be back for more. They’re a pop culture publication and it was clear they cared deeply for moments like this. I understood their brand quickly and will be back for more. Build your brand, make sure readers know what you stand for and why it should matter to them as part of your audience. For example, if a site has really strong readership with PS3, don’t be afraid to make it a bigger focal point of your coverage than Xbox 360 (or vice versa).

Value Your Writers: If there is one thing I learned from working in newspapers, it’s that people appreciate a certain sense of reliability from their news publications. They want to read the local columnist three times a week. I’m a big sports fan and have developed loyalty to certain writers. Stewart Mandel at Sports Illustrated does a terrific job on college football coverage and I read all of his work. I grew up reading Tom Shatel for the Omaha World-Herald and I often will wait up late to read his post-game columns. This is happening in video game media as well. Two great examples are Leigh Alexander and Patrick Klepek, who have both built their own cache in different ways. Leigh nurtured her own audience and carries it with her to multiple publications as a freelancer. Patrick worked at several sites and built trust as a solid news and features writer. When he landed at Giant Bomb, it was a great fit and I’ll further explain in my next point. Sites who can establish a relationship between their audience and editorial staff will benefit from it.

Community Is Brand, Sometimes: Branding isn’t just a matter of saying what you are and doing your best to live up to it, although that’s really where it begins. For games media, it’s also about enabling your community to help you deliver on your brand values. Destructoid and Giant Bomb are two of the best at this and really built their businesses by establishing an amazing dialogue between editorial and their audience. I got a chance to meet the community managers for Destructoid at PAX and even got one of my co-workers, Kerbal Space Program lead developer Felipe Falanghe, to don the Destructoid helmet.

They do a great job of harnessing the passion for games as part of their brand and creating this amazing feedback loop that keeps their community coming back for more. Gamers want to be part of the discussion, which is why sites like Kotaku are so impactful in the industry. Give them the chance to help boost your brand so the next time you miss a scoop, you know it won’t matter. Those guys are going to want to comment on it on your site with your community.

Hopefully editors will realize losing scoops isn’t the end of the world but another chance for them to prove why their site is the best place to read about the news of the day.

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Facebook Games Are Not Dying: 4 Ways Facebook Has Improved Its Gaming Platform

The pending sunset for SimCity Social, as part of EA’s decision to dump its entire Playfish Facebook portfolio, and Zynga’s very visible attempt to pivot to mobile has many asking if Facebook games are dead? Of course, that’s a classic overreaction to big news, which has more to do with publishers trying to figure out what works best in this disruptive moment in gaming history. 

Mike Rose at Gamesutra talked to a number of developers who are still developing games for the social network and seemed to think the platform is doing just fine. It’s a nice counter to the conversation but the commenters really pointed out it misplaced its efforts not examining what exactly Facebook has changed to make it a better gaming platform for all involved.

Now keep in mind, Facebook tends to change its mind – a lot – so one thing mentioned here today might be something they disregard in the near future (or are already). Nonetheless, it’s a great example of how and why game developers shouldn’t just view Facebook as a tool used to promote your mobile games and is still a viable way to generate new users and revenue (minus Facebook’s 30 percent, of course).

1. AppCenter gives Facebook a discovery channel on its own network. AppCenter isn’t huge and will never be an equivalent to Apple’s App Store but it is a great place for users to learn about new games and determine what might work for them. One way for Facebook to improve their channel is to create more engaging content.A partnership with a journalist site that already features a strong Facebook presence would be one direction. Apple has hired multiple gaming journalists for its editorial team, so it would also be a great move for Facebook to hire a small editorial staff to manage it App Center as well. Done well, this will pay off in dividends and prove to developers how serious you are about making sure great games on the platform are recognized as such.

2. Open Graph and EdgeRank are forcing developers to tell great stories, not just spam their users. Open Graph isn’t easy to just pick up and master. It takes a lot of effort and a team approach. Make sure a smart, sensible developer is handy because he or she will prove invaluable. But Facebook is making every effort it can to promote strong storytelling through the viral channels. That might not sound great for developers who want a K-factor circa 2008 but what it will do is promote engagement because people are interested and retention because people aren’t annoyed with your spam. I’d expect Facebook to continue finding ways to improve this process, which gives developers a great way to help players discover their game.

      3. Variety is the spice of life (and gaming). Facebook is built on the two pillars of engagement and retention. Give them something interesting and they’ll stick around. And when you’ve got more than a billion users, you’re going to need a lot of options. That’s why Facebook’s partnership with Unity is a wise one. Developers love using Unity and players love the fidelity the game engine provides. Unfortunately, Unity’s install base hasn’t hit critical mass, like Flash. That’s why Facebook is trying to help expand Unity’s install base, which would give themselves more inroads to deeper, synchronous player-versus-player games such as popular and successful online titles World of Tanks and League of Legends. If Facebook can succeed in growing this category, don’t be surprised if you start seeing stories about how Facebook gaming is back and better than ever before.

4. Mobile Facebook is just as good a platform as its web canvas. This might be the most important and most overlooked in the stories stemming from the news about EA shuttering its canvas games (it doesn't really mesh well with the idea that Facebook gaming is dying when mobile is making it more popular than ever before). PopCap isn’t leaving Facebook and recently launched Solitaire Blitz for iOS (I highly recommend if you like quick, twitchy card games.) and has several games coming down the pipeline. Facebook is striving to be device agnostic (well, save for Facebook Home, which I’m sure they’d like to see sell some Android devices that feature it) so it can advertise and engage to its customers wherever they want.

Facebook gaming isn’t dead, it’s iterating, which is the natural state of affairs on that platform. Hopefully, the next iteration will be friendlier to game developers and gamers alike. 

[vgjunk]

Here is an OutRun gif that came out a bit fuzzy but hey, we all know how much I love OutRun so it gets posted anyway.

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Man I played way too much OutRun as a kid. First in the arcade, then on my trusty Commodore 64. OK, My C64 was a lot of things, but trusty was not one of them. 

[thegameisalife]

Cute Fortress 2.

[theverge]

‘Fish Out Of Water’ is an insanely addictive game from the team behind ‘Jetpack Joyride’

Skipping rocks doesn’t seem particularly fun or exciting — it’s an activity better suited for sad-movie montages than a game you can’t put down. But as the Halfbrick developers behind Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja searched for a worthy follow-up to two of the most popular mobile games ever, skipping rocks proved much more addictive than anyone thought.

Fish Out of Water, available today for iOS, began as a dead-simple game in which you flicked your finger left-to-right to skip a rock across the water. “I ended up playing that version for, like, 20 hours,” Halfbrick CMO Phil Larsen said, “and all you’d do is skip that one stone and then you’d get your score out of 10.” Eventually satisfied that the core mechanic was as addicting as Fruit Ninja’s slice or Jetpack Joyride’s fly-and-shoot, Halfbrick’s developers and designers set about creating a world around it that’s much more complex than skipping rocks. 

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I had the opportunity of listening to Phil Larsen talk at Casual Connect last summer and if there's one thing they really have nailed, it's how to make a seemingly-casual game mechanic one that retains users over and over again. I haven't played Fish Out of Water but I've played a lot of Jetpack Joyride, which still to this day sits in my iPhone's favorite games folder. 

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Was SimCity Social a Game or Marketing Stunt?

If it looks like a marketing stunt, plays like a marketing stunt and includes cross-promotional marketing stunts within the marketing stunt, is it a game? And if it is a game, how will gamers react when the stunt is over?

These are the questions everybody should be asking after Electronic Arts announced its decision to close SimCity Social, a social game that still has an active monthly audience of 1.6 million users. The game was announced at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and won’t make it a full year before it is shut down. EA made the decision to close SimCity Social, as well as other Playfish games, including The Sims Social and Pet Society. Each of these three titles have a seven-figure monthly active user base so it’s not like EA is supporting ghost towns on Facebook, even if each title is well past its peak metrics.

For users of The Sims Social and Pet Society, this is clearly a disappointment, akin to a viewer’s favorite TV show being cancelled.

But for players who have been playing SimCity Social since it launched last summer, it might be better to look at what they’ve been playing and wonder if they’ve been actually gaming or participating in a marketing experiment.

EA worked with brand marketers to promote different brands, including Mercedes Benz, Century 21 and Dunkin Donuts, in SimCity Social with branded content keeping players busy building their city and participating in these marketing campaigns. Kotaku Editor-in-Chief Stephen Totilo applauded Dunkin Donuts for creating an effective in-game advertisement by making the in-game Dunkin Donuts shop more effective than the generic version in the game.

SimCity Social isn’t the only title taking advantage of these clever in-game cross-promotions. Ben Kuchera of Penny Arcade Report wrote about the most recent content addition to SimCity, which requires players to acquire a code from select Oral-B products, and called it a “cynically brilliant advertising platform.” This campaign is also available in SimCity Social and The Sims Social, even though both games will be shuttered in June.

Players, of course, are voicing displeasure with the decision and for those upset with EA, GamesIndustry.biz made an excellent point that once these three games are closed, the controversial publisher will have nothing to show for its $350 million purchase of Playfish.

So if SimCity Social was just a marketing stunt, how did it do? For brand marketers, it did very well as major brands were able to access a targeted audience. It also served as a valuable marketing tool to heighten the profile of the SimCity brand, reaching more than 15 million monthly active users at its peak, although it’s uncertain how many of those players bought the premium title (which had sold an announced 1.1 million copies during its first two weeks).

What’s concerning is that while EA is pivoting to a “games as a service” business, it doesn’t seem particularly interested in how tricks like this affect long-term relationships with its millions of patrons. Gamers, like sports fans, have long memories and are loathe to forgive wrong doings. For those still playing these social games, EA is killing their fun. That’s not going to help EA escape the wrath of their customers, who should always be in on the stunt, not its mark.

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When Games Marketing and PR Works: BioShock Infinite

(I’ll try my best not to spoil but as this is an article about the game, I will be discussing it.)

Games marketing and public relations too often gets a bad rap – especially when it appears like it overpromised and the game underdelivered.

That’s not a problem for BioShock Infinite, which is a critical and box office success. An intense, gruesome affair, BioShock Infinite often overwhelmed the stunning set design and captivating narrative, both of which earned this game high critical praise as well as a great Metacritic score (for those who need a data-driven example of a successful game marketing and PR campaign).

Ken Levine and the development team at Irrational Games clearly deserve the lion share of credit but I saw three key marketing and PR areas that helped BioShock Infinite blossom from a well-made first-person shooter into what GamesBeat called a “cultural phenomenon.”

1. Making BioShock a brand, not just a story.

You can read several different interviews with Levine, such as here with The New York Times, and he effectively promoted BioShock as a special experience for a gamer to enjoy.

This was an effective way to cover up the fact that Levine wasn’t going to be taking fans of the original game back to Rapture, the beautiful and haunting Art Deco Atlantis (Levine and Irrational didn’t make BioShock 2, which wasn’t as beloved as the original).

2. Promote the flying city of Columbia, a truly spectacular mix of Main Street and the Civil War.

For those of us who don’t race out the door to play a first-person shooter (FPS), BioShock Infinite snared us with this incredible floating city that was also directly tied into America’s heart of darkness (Harold Goldberg wrote Levine was influenced by Joseph Conrad’s deeply psychological story). It was a key selling point for the game, regardless if you were a fan of the original BioShock, or not.

3. Always Be Closing! BioShock Infinite promotions didn't end with launch.

If you haven’t seen Glengarry Glen Ross, watch it immediately or in the meantime, enjoy this great SNL skit based on a famous scene in the movie that is NSFW.

There’s been post-launch reveals of different Easter Eggs, TV marketing campaigns and plenty of earned PR coverage that is now reinforcing your message. Kotaku even posted about how one of the key game features was more than just “marketing bullshit.”

BioShock Infinite is a high-quality experience but ran the risk of being too different for core shooter fans and too violent for non-FPS fans to be a commercial success. The marketing and PR teams deserve credit for making sure both audiences were engaged and bought copies of the game.

[chartier]

My friend Nik Fletcher doing the good work. If you’re anywhere near the process of writing copy for an app, you are on the front lines of communicating to users, and communication is absolutely key:

This approachable name [of “apps”], and the incredible ease of access to apps, means that more people than ever are using our products. As a result, the expectation of knowledge is something we have to consider when we’re writing copy to go into our apps.

Terminology, abstract concepts, implementation details and bad translations are all things that need careful consideration. Understanding your audience is key - for example, an app built for developers might reveal more implementation details as they’re more technically literate. But would you intentionally use the term API in a consumer app?

This is a snippet of a talk he gave in March at NSConference 2013, videos of which are now available.

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Writing your App description is an important first conversation with your customer. There is also a great example about making sure your push notifications feel authentic and personal.

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Adam Orth Should Know Always On Means, Always On

Don’t get personal.

Want to train a spokesperson? Start here.

Don’t get personal.

In some industries, that’s easy. Nobody (besides the pipe maker, maybe) takes offense when someone prefers copper pipes over iron. Knock somebody’s favorite form of entertainment? Get your gloves on. Movies, rock bands, sports teams and especially these days, video games, can turn any dinner party into a debate at best, a backyard brawl at worst.

And when gaming professionals speak publicly about games and the industry, it’s too easy to cross the line, tearing apart a passionate, professional case to sound like your favorite shock jockey.

Unfortunately, that’s what drowned Adam Orth, the creative director at Microsoft Studios, in hot water and forced him to resign.

For those who haven’t seen this story take over their Twitter feed, Orth rattled off a series of tweets defending the idea of a gaming console that requires a constant connection to the Internet to play games. You can read the series of tweets here.

The fallout from these tweets forced him to resign from Microsoft, as Game Informer, Polygon and others reported. His last tweet was where his passionate argument in favor (supposedly) of Microsoft launching a new Xbox with “always on” requirements turned into something offensive.

Several reporters (and gaming industry folks) voiced their displeasure with Orth’s resignation (and even I think an apology to good people of Janesville, Wis. and Blacksburg, Va. should have been enough to end this squabble) but the decision for Orth and Microsoft to part ways after his outburst makes more sense when you acknowledge the legitimate concerns companies have when employees use transparent social networking services to discuss their job.

In college sports, coaches ban players from Twitter during the season, calling it a distraction or an easy way to get into trouble. And companies will limit their public spokespeople to key stakeholders, who know a company’s story best or have the bandwidth to really know a game before speaking about it in public.

Even the most guarded public relations executives want their leaders engaged in public conversations to share their story and show support for their community. It’s also why PR teams need to spend more time than ever with developers, producers and executives, teaching them how to prepare, partake and process the very public dialogues that must happen in today’s ever-present digital world. Professionalism in these exchanges is paramount, especially when consumers are taking part on sites like Reddit and Twitter.

Orth argued in support of a product that would be “always on,” but in doing so failed to recognize that in today’s digital landscape, people, as well as products are always on too.