Google Goes Gaming

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Gaming is an ever expanding field, with online and social network options granting more possibilities for developers than ever before. Google realizes this, and has hired Mark DeLoura to be “Developer Advocate” for gaming, perhaps in an effort to compete with the App Store on Android.

“The key to success will become encouraging developers to innovate on their platforms,” says Aaron Goldman, managing partner at Connectual. “Apple has more than 150,000 apps that developers have built on its platform. Android has something like 20,000. I’m not sure hiring one ‘advocate’ can close the gap but it certainly signals Google’s commitment to the developer community.”

Some folks think, however, that they’ve been missing out on opportunities with ad and microtransaction based games. “I’m surprised they’ve waited this long to throw their hat in the game biz,” said SEO-Shop.com’s Steve Gerencser. “Games have always been sort of niche marketing and revenue, but with free and micro payments in games on sites like Facebook, suddenly huge opportunities for in-game advertising are opening up.”

Source: MediaPost {link no longer active}

Nielsen Reporting On Out-Of-Home Advertising

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Nielsen today announced that they will be launching their “Fourth Screen Network Audience Report.” This new report will allow agencies and advertisers to compare advertising in out-of-home markets like movie theaters, health clubs and restaurants to television and online video down the road.

“The basics of the calculations we are using are certainly consistent with the normal use for ratings,” says Paul Lindstrom, a senior vice president at Nielsen.

Nielsen will look at the different ways each network is distributed and will track things using a “census of transaction data” like theater box office receipts and gas pump receipts. Over the next several months, Nielsen will add dozens of other place-based networks to the report, including some retail-based platforms.

“What we are attempting to do is create a sizing or a context to compare these networks,” added Lindstrom.

Source: MediaPost {link no longer active}

Facebook Fans: What’s Their Worth?

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Certain companies have worked hard at developing fanbases on social networking sites like Facebook, but it’s been hard to put a dollar value on their marketing worth. Well, social media specialist Virtue has put a quantitative rating on it: one million fans translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year.  By studying clients with 41 million combined fans, Virtue found that most fans yielded extra impressions, so that a marketer posting twice a day can expect about 60 million impressions per month through the news feed.

“It’s important to understand that once you build that fan base, you want to make sure you’re leveraging it,” said Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue.

However, the study found that those brands that are more engaged or appealing to their fans could have up to 3.6 impressions per posts, while other brands had as low as .44 impressions per fan. Considering the fierce loyalty that games and gaming companies provoke, they should definitely look into investing in such sites if they haven’t already.

“It helps [marketers] justify the spend they’re making, especially in acquiring a fan base and engaging that fan base,” Strutton said. “When you start to [add] engagement value, it goes higher. We were trying to get an easy-to-understand valuation terminology.”

Source: Adweek  {link no longer active}

Twitter Tweets Ads

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While Twitter has managed to be popular with wide swaths of people, it hasn’t been very good at generating money. The owners of the micro-blogging site today unveiled “promoted tweets,” which will appear as paid ads in search results that the user can “re-tweet” to others. The first advertisers will be Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America, which are already using the medium extensively for communications.

“We wanted to do something that just enhances the conversation that companies are already having with their customers on Twitter,” said Twitter Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo. “We are not in a rush to make a certain amount of money this year. We want to get this right. We don’t want to force a model on people that is based on incorrect hypotheses.”

Considering the number of game companies that already use Twitter for promoting their games, having paid advertising on Twitter might make a lot of sense.

“Of all the places Twitter could include ads, this is the least obtrusive and the most relevant. People will not desert Twitter for this. It’s inevitable — technology services need revenue,” writes {link no longer active} Josh Bernoff. “Not only that, I expect it to be successful. Searches on trending topics are an inevitable place for mass market ads. But searches on other hashtags are also likely to generate interest from advertisers, and relevant ad tweets make sense here.”

Source: Ad Age {link no longer active}

Dead Space Gets Booked

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Tor Books and Visceral Games today announced that the Dead Space franchise is expanding into books with Dead Space: Martyr. This seems to gel with the marketing strategy established by Electronic Arts (which owns developer Visceral Games) where they’ve pushed other game properties like Dante’s Inferno, Mass Effect and Dragon Age onto multiple mediums.

“One of the most compelling storytelling aspects of Dead Space has been the Church of Unitology: its origins, power, and role in Dead Space,” says Tor editor, Eric Raab. “Writer B.K. Evenson gets into the terrifying aspects of mob mentality like no other writer today. This isn t only a great story within the Dead Space universe; it s a great novel on its own.”

Dead Space: Martyr will deal with the backstory behind the games, where geophysicist Michael Altman finds an alien artifact that causes strange visions deep within the Chicxulub crater. B. K. Evenson, the award-winning author of Last Day, will write the book, which will release in July 2010.

3DS Hyped Up By Nintendo Of America President

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The 3DS might be Nintendo’s most significant release over the next 12 months, being the next big launch in the company’s comfort zone of portable gaming. It’s evident too in the way Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime is hyping up the 3DS as the biggest portable launch for the company since the DS in 2004, likening it to the upgrade the DS was over the Game Boy Advance.

“We have ideas of what we want to bring to the consumer that we can’t do with the current [DS hardware]” said Fils-Aime to BusinessWeek. “The Nintendo 3DS for us is our next handheld platform.”

Nintendo wisely reached out to mainstream publications to market the heck out of the Wii and it worked wonderfully. It seems like it may be continuing this pattern with the 3DS.

Source: IndustryGamers  {link no longer active}

Hype Builds For Prince Of Persia Movie

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While Ubisoft continues to build buzz for Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (which ships on May 18), Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney are also ramping up promotional efforts for The Sands of Time movie based on the game franchise. The movie debuts just 10 days after the game. Disney has released three new videos, diving into behind-the-scenes content, like adapting the game’s story for film and so on. The videos (see below, courtesy of GameVideos) definitely should get movie goers and gamers excited about the film.

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Modern Warfare 2 Gets Family Guy Treatment

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Activision Blizzard’s Modern Warfare 2 has already exceeded $1 billion in sales and is one of the biggest brands in gaming, so it’s not like it needs any more exposure, but a recent episode of Family Guy gave it just that – and it was a good promotional spot for the Xbox too. The episode clip below shows Peter Griffin playing horribly as a total “noob” while other players badmouth his lack of skill. Microsoft and Activision must love this attention. It reminds us of how World of Warcraft was parodied on South Park and The Colbert Report; you know your brand has become absolutely huge when pop culture entertainment latches on. It makes a brand marketer’s job far easier.

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THQ Steps Into The Octagon

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THQ’s UFC Undisputed 2009 was one of the publisher’s top performing titles last year (3.5 million shipped), in no small part thanks to the great campaign the company put together (as noted by IndustryGamers) {link no longer active}. Now UFC Undisputed 2010 is a little more than a month away (May 25) and THQ is ramping up its promotional efforts. This new trailer featuring undefeated fighter Cain Velasquez does a great job of showing off the high-octane action of the mixed martial arts sport and blending it with real in-game footage.

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Fired Infinity Ward Heads Launch New Studio, Sign With EA

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Ex Infinity Ward studio heads Jason West and Vince Zampella are still in active litigation with Activision Blizzard, but they’ve already formed a new development studio called Respawn Entertainment, IndustryGamers {link no longer active} has reported. And in what could be a big blow to Activision potentially, Respawn has an exclusive publishing agreement with rival Electronic Arts.

In a separate interview {link no longer active} with IndustryGamers, Jason West commented, “What it came down to was we wanted someone who would respect our independence and our culture, let us own the IP and put us in a position to maximize our success, so we can have a great team and control the brands and franchises that we want to make.”

West and Zampella built up the Call of Duty brand, and now they have the opportunity to start from scratch with the help of EA. West and Zampella certainly have the talent to craft an incredible gaming experience and EA has fantastic marketing resources, so this should be worth keeping an eye on.