Trauma Team is the fifth entry in the Trauma Center franchise and presented unique challenges for Atlus from a marketing perspective.  On one hand, it is an established franchise with a built-in fan base, but on the other hand, more emphasis is put on multiple characters and realistic medicine.  We talked to Robyn Mukai, Manager of Marketing at Atlus, and Aram Jabbari, Manager of PR and Sales for Atlus, about making Trauma Team a success.

[a]list: Talk to me generally about the marketing benefits and disadvantages stemming from the unique nature of the Trauma Center franchise.

Robyn Mukai:  The unique nature of Trauma Center always results in a conundrum for marketing. On the surface, the concept is relatively simple to communicate to consumers; it’s as simple as saying, “Play doctor!” However, as you try to lead the consumer further in, it gets to be more difficult to make that message comprehensible without getting overly technical. Playing doctor isn’t something most people are familiar with in a video game context, and thus, it bears a great deal of explanation as to how you do it. Moreover, we’ve found a noticeable divide between the hardcore gamer types that make up the core of our “Atlus Faithful” and the more casual gamer types that better enjoy the idea of medical drama as a game. It’s always harder to reach casual gamers because they’re not generally tuned into gaming news in the way the hardcore are. Often, you need to reach out to them in a less gaming-centric environment, which changes the content and delivery method of your message.

[a]list: How did the inclusion of the widest variety of medical professions in the game challenge the marketing team to convey that Trauma Team wasn’t “merely” a surgery game?

RM: We identified two different communication paths for Trauma Team: 1) for the existing fanbase, a message about what new features and benefits Trauma Team brings to the series; and 2) for the uninitiated, a more basic “What’s Trauma Team ” message where we sought to walk them through the concept and show them why it’s fun. In both cases, the foundation of the message was “Six doctors, six specialties,” which summed up simply and clearly the variety that they could expect to receive in Trauma Team.

[a]list: Tell me about the ways you promoted the different medical disciplines in Trauma Team.

RM: We took a video-heavy approach and gave each medical discipline its own “walkthrough” video. In the video, we covered what the given specialty was (including its real-world utility), an overview of the Wii control scheme, and the basic plot and character in the portion of the game involving this mode. We also put a great deal of emphasis on the official website as the destination to gain access to the full information and assets, including a series of developer featurettes that presented consumers with a behind-the-scenes look at how those specialties came to be from the standpoint of game design, visual design, story, and more. Across the various outlets, we rolled out the specialties starting with the familiar – surgery – and then moved on to the new, making sure there was time for both consumers and press to get familiar with one before we moved on to another.

[a]list: While there was multiplayer in New Blood, I’m not sure how many people were aware of this feature. How was it expanded upon and emphasized more in Trauma Team?

RM: The greater attention we brought to the multiplayer modes wasn’t solely a matter of expanding and emphasizing our marketing from the previous Trauma Center games as it was clearly communicating Trauma Team’s full slate of features and benefits. Obviously, the expansion from one medical discipline to six, each with its own unique gameplay, meant that multiplayer had to be designed to suit each type of gameplay. In delivering the message of Trauma Team’s great variety, the various executions of multiplayer naturally became a part of that message, and we went further to explain it, sending out information and video to press and fans, creating a dedicated space on the official website, etc.

[a]list: Tell me about the video features that delved into the game’s voice acting and localization.

Aram Jabbari: One of the things that we’ve always been aware of, something that has been consistently brought to our attention by our fans and our friends in the gaming press, is that the Trauma Center games have to be played to be understood.  In other words, it is difficult to get a true sense for how the games feel and exactly what it is that makes them so exciting and hard to put down by watching videos or looking at screenshots.

This was very salient in our minds as we started to plan the promotion and marketing for Trauma Team.  As the biggest and best game in the series, we needed to find new creative, efficient ways of building interest in the game; we didn’t just want to put out gameplay video.  Context, framing what the viewer is seeing, is more important for some games, and we’re really satisfied with how the multimedia content we released leading up to the game’s launch served that purpose.

With a far greater emphasis on story and characters than any of the previous games, Trauma Team had, as one would imagine, more voice acting and dialogue text to localize.  Our fans (and fans of gaming in general, we’ve found) are always interested in the localization process, so it seemed like the perfect subject matter to delve into for the game.

Trauma Team’s development process easily dwarfed that of its predecessors, which also seemed like a great topic to explore.  The development team was incredibly generous with their thoughts and revelations over the course of creating the game, and we turned those tidbits of fascinating trivia and behind-the-scenes info into featurettes that spanned months, nearly from the time we announced the game until it was out on shelves.

With reactions from critics and gamers alike suggesting that the developers hit one out of the park with Trauma Team, both in terms of pure medical action fun and also in terms of significantly upping the production value and presentation quality of the series, we’re confident our marketing and PR efforts focused on the right key points and helped to establish the right expectations.

[a]list: How did you try to emphasize that Trauma Team isn’t just about medical procedures, but also has drama and “visual novel” elements as well?

AJ: It’s easiest to understand something when you can see it, so we put a great deal of effort into actually showing people the game’s distinct visual style and emphasizing the new animated comic-style cutscenes.  In fact, we were pushing the new animation style from the very moment we announced the title at E3 2009, because we knew it added immeasurable immersion and involvement to the game’s narrative.

Throughout all of our efforts, we always worked to balance the gameplay modes with which each of the characters is associated and the fact that each of the doctors has their own unique story, their own origin tale that significantly affects the decisions they make throughout the course of the game.  The protagonists in Trauma Team have more personality, grit, and realism than the characters from the previous games, and the fact that they face more grounded, realistic medical crises throughout the overall story arc further connects the player to their highs and lows.

Recognizing this, we went out of our way to play up the fact that the game offers six different specialists for the player to choose from, and that each of these MDs’ modes plays like its own game.  Since this message was consistent and uniform throughout our PR and marketing materials, we think it was really cemented into the fans’ minds.

[a]list: Trauma Team seems to be developed with a greater emphasis on realism than past Trauma Center games. Do you think this opens up the potential audiences it appeals to in the U.S.?

AJ:  The sci-fi elements introduced towards the latter portions of the previous games typically seemed to polarize the games’ fan bases.  On the one hand, many gamers seemed to enjoy the departure into fantasy, perhaps because the notion of serious medicine was something they didn’t want to explore in escapist entertainment.  On the other hand (and it did seem as though this group was the majority), many gamers seemed a bit alienated by the sudden appearance of… well… aliens.

So, the fact that Trauma Team would remain much more grounded in realism from beginning to end (while retaining a healthy amount of fun and playfulness along the way) was a very important point for us to emphasize.  From the moment we announced until the game ultimately released, we made it as clear as possible that Trauma Team was a far more realistic medical drama than its predecessors.  We did so because yes, we did believe that staying away from a sub-genre like sci-fi could potentially expand the game’s audience, but also because we felt as though that is what the game’s hardcore fans wanted to see as well.

The game’s reception suggests that fans appreciate the game’s more grounded nature, and when considered along with the game’s more accessible starting difficulty setting, it’s easy to see why fans and critics would go so far as to call Trauma Team the most accessible Trauma Center game yet.

[a]list: Thanks Robyn and Aram.