EA’s Wilson: Transforming Origin To Provide Choice

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Electronic Arts has put executive vice president of EA Sports Andrew Wilson in charge of Origin, the company’s digital distribution service that looks to compete with Valve’s popular Steam platform. It’s a measure of both the confidence placed in Wilson and the size of the task ahead. EA’s Origin system has grown to over 40 million users on the strength of such titles as Battlefield 3, but Wilson sees plenty of work ahead.

Wilson is attempting to transform the focus of Origin back to the original vision of a service for gamers that would enhance EA’s games for consumers. Read about what Wilson says about Origin’s roots and his goal of making Origin into a ‘gracious host’ on GamesIndustry.biz here.

The [a]list daily sat down with Wilson at the E3 show to talk about Origin and the challenges ahead for Wilson. He not only has to change the nature of the service, he has to change the perception of the service that already exists in the minds of gamers.

Currently when you go onto the Origin web site, it’s a store front. Wilson has to change that image and the onboarding experience, then you those changes have to be communicated to the audience. The plan is re-focus Origin on the customer experience. “There’s going to be three manifestations of Origin based on who you are,” Wilson explained. “One manifestation of Origin is for the person that just wants to download a game and play it. Origin will act as that consistent downloader and installer, so that if you ever buy another game you don’t have to do it again, which is of value. Then it can be completely silent and you never have to deal with it again.”

Wilson continued, “Then there will be the stage where people have more than one game and they have a fairly extensive friends list, and that concept of a game library with friends’ presence and understanding where their friends are will become valuable to them. So now, rather than just clicking on the game icon on their desktop with Origin completely silent after the download and install, they might use the application then to managing their game library and managing the interaction they have with their friends, to make sure they don’t have to click and log into and open three games to find the friend they want to play with.”

“The third is the consumer that wants a downloader and installer, wants to use the library, and wants to know about the greatest deals or promotions that are available at any given time, and they will have that storefront available to them as part of that application. There’s going to be any combination of those three factors that are important to a given consumer. What we’re committed to is figuring out a way to architect to facilitate that. Complete silence past the initial download/install; enhancement of friends, library, presence and the services that go with that; and then they opportunity to participate in great promos by virtue of the application and storefront being there for you. We’re trying to give you choice.”

Wilson sees providing options for consumers as a key to appealing to the audience. “The important thing for us is choice,” Wilson said. “I think one of the things that people perceived about Origins was that we were trying to choose for you. The big shift that we have is we want to give you choice. It’s going to take some re-architecture, it’s going to take a little bit of time. That is certainly our intent.”

When GamesIndustry International interviewed David DeMartini (then head of Origin) last year at E3, he was asked about how Steam attracted sales with very deep discounts on games ““ for example, ‘this weekend 75 percent off on XYZ.’ DeMartini’s response was that EA felt it was damaging to the IP to discount games, and that EA would look for other ways to provide value to people rather than cutting prices. Has that perception changed On the Origin web site there’s a survey asking what game you’d like to see priced at $5. Has EA’s position on pricing and discounting changed with respect to Origin

With digital downloads, it would seem that pricing is less important than the overall revenue generated since cost of goods is no longer a factor. The remainder is just transaction costs which are a small fraction of that of the normal retail price. Wouldn’t EA rather sell 100,000 of something and make $10 on each one than sell 1,000 of something it makes $40 on

“The first thing I would say is I would counter the perception that the provision of a digital service is free or even necessarily cheaper than cost of goods over time,” Wilson parried. “I think when you get to scale there are certainly potential economies that you gain there, but it’s not free.”

That makes sense with sports titles, for instance, where you have licensing costs that are certainly far from free. But the margins on digital products tends to be about twice the margin on physical products, from earnings reports that EA has provided.

Wilson fired back, “Depending on the product. But I don’t think that changes your question, which is ‘Do you have a strategy around discounting or not ‘ as enunciated by David DeMartini a year ago. Here is what I would say: Right now what I’m trying to do with a vision of Origin is abstract it from the transaction, or the business model that drives that transaction. I believe that element will be consumer-driven also; it’s a supply and demand piece.”

There’s a larger picture to examine, Wilson explained. “We have seen the business model on the iPhone change dramatically in the last twelve to eighteen months,” Wilson said. “We have seen the business model on PC games vary dramatically in the West now, not just in the East. The vision that I have for the future of Origin is somewhat abstracted from the pricing or the transaction component, because that is something that is going to be very fluid based on consumer demand. What will be consistent, however, is the provision of service. What will be consistent is the need for us to continue to ensure the quality of that provision of service.”

Wilson continued, “With all honesty, our focus right now is on the underlying service provision. The nature of the transaction, the nature of the business model that drives that transaction, will likely change a hundred times in the next three years. But the desire of gamers to get access to their games easily, simply, seamlessly, consistently, will not change. The desire for gamers to connect with their friends and know where there friends are playing at any given time will not change. The desire for gamers to have their experience enhanced by virtue of services that automatically update their games, that allow them chat, VOIP, Skype, whatever it might be that’s part of that, that won’t change. All of the other ancillary stuff about transaction and business models likely will. Our focus has to be on building a service that doesn’t change based on what those ancillary things that change around them.”

The pricing is just part of why people choose a particular vendor, Wilson believes. “People buy for three reasons. One, price is a factor, absolutely; two, the credibility of the merchant is a factor (and the quality of the product they’re buying), and three, the value of the service they’re buying as part of that exchange or that transaction,” Wilson enumerated. “Price is absolutely a factor, but so is the content we provide and the credibility of us as a merchant and the credibility of Origin as the facilitation of that transaction, and the service that Origin provides could also be a factor in the future. We would be naïve to ignore any one of those three things.”

Read more about Wilson’s plans for transforming Origin here.

Nintendo’s Best Buy Marketing Ploy Worked

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Nintendo, facing an E3 where attention would be focused on new consoles from Sony and Microsoft, turned to a new marketing tact of taking games to the public. More than 100 Best Buy locations across North America had a Nintendo presence, where people could come and see some of the new Wii U titles that Nintendo was displaying that same week at E3. Nintendo claimed the event was a great success.

“We’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” said J.C. Rodrigo, senior product marketing specialist in Nintendo of America’s product development department, speaking to Polygon. “We really wanted to make sure we [brought] our experiences [to] the hands of people who want to try our stuff, as much as we could.”

Fans could play Nintendo Wii U game demos in four-hour periods at select Best Buy stores on two days during the week of E3.

“You had the sales and marketing briefing for the people that needed to hear that information; you had the Nintendo Direct for people that really needed to know, generally, what was happening and what we’re coming out with; and then you [had] the sampling at the Best Buy [stores] that got that information out as well,” said Rodrigo. “So if you look at it from the content perspective and who needed to know, everyone got what they needed to know — just in different ways.”

Nintendo feels that strong first-party titles will drive third-party publishers to support the Wii U, and so the company is reaching out directly to its core Nintendo fan base to try and make that happen. Still, getting third-party support will require some very strong sales from the Wii U. It’s also going to be difficult because the Wii U architecture is so different from that of the Xbox One and the PS4, thus driving up development cost and time for publishers.

Source: Polygon

Facebook In-Feed Advertising Has Become An Effective Tool

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According to a new study from AdRoll in which it looked at one billion impressions, ads featured in the Facebook news feed have 21 times the click-through rate of other re-targeting ads and 49 times the click-through rate of Facebooks right-hand side ads. What sets these ads apart is the fact they sit firmly in Facebook user’s news feeds, among their friends posts and posts from pages they like. This placement increases the ability of the ad to not only be seen and clicked on, but also shared to their friends. This shareability and placement puts these ads in a prime position to not only be seen, but also clicked through to.

In addition to the click-through numbers, this also translated into a cost per click that costs substantially less. According to the study, Facebook news feed ads cost 79 percent less per click than other web retargeted ads, and 54 percent less than sidebar facebook ads. The downside to all of this is that the reach of the ads is limited only to Facebook users instead of the entire web. Google’s AdWords program has more reach than Facebook’s feed advertising, but even still the cost per click is substantially lower and the click-through rate is substantially higher for Facebook.

Facebook uses a policy of retargeting, where specific in-feed ads will be shown to users who have already visited a site for a product, with the goal of bringing them back again. In addition to this, Facebook only sells one of these ads per user per day, meaning that the feed won’t get filled with advertising. This one-a-day policy means the number of ads is low, so it won’t appear incredibly often, but this is important. If users only see a few of these ads instead of being constantly flooded, they are more likely to click through on the ads they do see.

One year ago, advertising on Facebook was a less than perfect solution. It is quickly becoming one of the more effective advertising tools on the Internet today, especially with the use of in-feed advertising.

Source: VentureBeat

Grow Mobile Launches Mobile Marketing Dashboard

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Discovery and user acquisition are the key challenges in the mobile gaming market, and as a result mobile ad networks have grown in response. There are now well over a hundred different mobile ad networks, and game marketers are facing increasing difficulty in tracking and optimizing campaigns across so many networks. Enter Grow Mobile with its solution: A mobile app marketing platform that enables marketers to buy across more than 75 mobile advertising networks.

The Grow Mobile Platform is the first self-serve dashboard allowing marketers “to transparently buy, track, optimize and scale their advertising campaigns across the highly complex and fragmented mobile advertising marketplace,” as the company’s press release puts it. “By utilizing Grow Mobile’s Platform, marketers can now make more informed advertising decisions and increase their overall return on investment with one solution.”

Creating the app was a response to the situation that COO A.J. Yeakal and CEO Brendan Lyall, co-founders along with chief architect Minglei Xu, saw in the marketplace. The [a]list daily spoke exclusively with Grow Mobile about the app.

“There are so many different players in the market that we wanted to build a solution that would help with buying,” said CEO Brendan Lyall. More than that, they wanted an app “that would help with analyzing and tracking your data, creating a better situation to optimize the advertising spend.”

“There are well over 150 ad networks today,” Lyall noted. “It’s become increasingly fragmented, and it’s difficult for a user acquisition manager or a game studio to create enough coverage to test out all these different ad channels. It’s not as easy to decipher which one is the right network. Everyone wants to test, but it’s just very difficult to do technical integration and billing with all 60 of them or however many providers or ad networks you might work with.”

What’s the response been from ad networks?

“They’ve been very positive, actually,” said Lyall. “The core of our service is to not only scale our customers, but when you map the right campaigns to the right networks it nets out to better results on the ad network side. They’re very supportive of what we’re doing.”

Grow Mobile is focusing on larger developers as its target market.

“We focused on building a platform that appeals to tier 1 mobile app developers, which means that our average customer is spending a minimum of $20,000 a month,” said Lyall. “We find that’s an amount that gives an advertiser enough budget to really test out enough traffic sources to validate what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, and figure out which sources are going to scale best for their app.”

Grow Mobile’s proprietary Intelligence Directory and automated Media Planner give marketers the information they need to select the most effective traffic sources from more than 75 integrated ad networks, ad exchanges and direct publishers. The platform’s self-serve media-buying wizard makes it easy for users to syndicate campaigns live in minutes, without human interaction or signing multiple insertion orders. Grow Mobile’s lightweight SDK and API integration are available for Android and iOS and are available now at the company’s web site.

The Last Of Us Zombie Fungus Is A Real Thing

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Naughty Dog’s zombie survival game The Last of Us has taken gamers by storm, offering tight gameplay, believable and brilliantly written characters and a realistic world where gamers have taken to the plight of Joel and Ellie. One interesting aspect of this game that makes the world that much more believable is the reason the zombies exist: the Cordyceps fungus.

The fungus that has reduced world’s population by 60 percent in The Last of Us actually exists, and it is terrifying. Unlike the game, it hasn’t made the jump to humans yet, but infects ants and spiders. This means a situation like a fungal zombie apocalypse is unlikely. Probability aside, though, using a real-world fungus for the reason the zombies exist instead of a simple virus grounds the game in reality, and makes the world that much easier for gamers to identify with.

By using the Cordyceps fungus as one of the game’s primary antagonists, there’s a ready-made hook to use in generating game PR and potentially creative marketing efforts. The fact that this game is appearing in a Scientific American article shows the utility of the game’s background as a PR tool. Doing solid research for a game before writing and creating it makes for a more compelling world, and for more compelling real-world marketing. Showing off the power of the real world fungus and connecting it to the world in game is a great way of bringing gamers into the world of the game, and convincing them that it is, indeed, a world worth exploring.

Source: Scientific American

 

South Park Game Is Faithful To Show

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South Park and the Stick of Truth is South Park in video game form, plain and simple. The game features writing and voice acting by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and the show’s trademark animation, only in video game form. The trailer shows off some of the show’s trademark humor featuring a small sketch with Stan’s dad Randy Marsh. Formerly a production of THQ, the production of the game has fallen to Ubisoft now. The game will be available this holiday season, or as Cartman puts it in the trailer: “Some holiday season, hopefully kinda soon. You know how video games are.”

Super Mario 3D World For Wii U

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The new Super Mario 3D World for the Wii U shows classic Mario gameplay transformed into HD, with the added benefit of up to 4-person multiplayer. The engaging twists on the standard running and jumping shows why Nintendo believes this is the type of title that could revive Wii U sales. See for yourself why they might be right!

Pepsi Publicity Stunt Captures Attention

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In a publicity stunt for their product PepsiMax, Pepsi Co. utilized street magician Dynamo to float while holding onto the side of a double-decker bus driving through London. Afterwards, he took a refreshing sip of PepsiMax, of course. In true magician form, Dynamo isn’t revealing his secrets, but it’s a fun trick that delighted onlookers all over London.

This trick has generated a good amount of buzz for Pepsi’s product (and over 3 million views on YouTube), but publicity stunts such as these aren’t nearly as common in the video game industry. With proper resources, well seen publicity stunts can easily go viral and bring attention to games that normally wouldn’t see attention outside of gamer circles. EA and BioWare have been at the center of a couple of memorable stunts.  Last year, they launched copies of Mass Effect 3 into space, and lucky finders got to keep their copies of the game. In 2011, they teamed up with Lucasarts to stage a light saber-wielding flash mob in Times Square before the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

If more companies created marketing events like EA and Pepsi, there could truly be some interesting real world campaigns out there that would garner a lot of buzz for their games. Such events not only create massive crowds, but they engage people through social media and YouTube.  Looking at one game on the horizon, perhaps Square Enix can promote Final Fantasy by hiring a group of Society for Creative Anachronism fighters to recreate a battle from the game, complete with some finely staged magical effects.

Source: Mashable

 

Smart Car, Smart Ad

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Showing what a product isn’t, and then showing what it is can make a much stronger impact. This Smart Fortwo ad sets up its punchline beautifully, underscoring the key benefit of the vehicle. It goes to show that sometimes you might want to sneak up on your key benefit, especially when you have a smart audience.