Nexon’s ‘Ghost In The Shell Online’ Targets Western Markets

BY

Nexon’s been making big moves in the U.S. market recently, with investments in Cliff Bleszinski’s studio Boss Key Productions, Big Huge Games, and more. Nexon’s also showing the new team-based FPS Dirty Bomb, which began a closed beta last week on Steam. The biggest news this week is the advent of Neople’s Ghost in the Shell Online, which will ship first in Western markets with beta sign-ups beginning in Q2 2015. The [a]listdaily spoke with Nexon regarding these developments.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IzALTAUSFMY

Ghost in the Shell Online releasing first in the Western market rather than other regions. Nexon America is expanding its presence in the West, both by publishing new Western-developed titles and bringing appropriate titles from other regions to North America, LatAm, Europe and Australia/New Zealand. Since Ghost in the Shell is a popular IP and the first-person shooter genre is also hugely popular, we felt it was a great fit for the Nexon America portfolio.

Nexon’s calling this part of its “free-to-win” games strategy. How are these games different from free-to-play games?

We realize the need to evolve to suit the market. As part of our ongoing strategy to expand in the West, we’re working with developers to ensure that the monetization models in our upcoming games are fair to the players and in-line with expectations of the Western audience. Monetization will vary from game to game, but the intention with our new titles is to offer cosmetic and convenience items only, rather than things that offer a competitive advantage.

Will Project Bluestreak and Dirty Bomb also be arriving this year?

Dirty Bomb is currently in closed beta exclusively on Steam, and we are accepting sign-ups at www.dirtybomb.com. Open Beta will launch later this year. We have not yet announced dates or details for Project BlueStreak.

What sort of marketing plans does Nexon have for Ghost in the Shell Online?

We are currently working on announcement timings & marketing plans for Ghost in the Shell Online. It will definitely kick off this year, but still a bit early to know exactly when.

Will YouTube and Twitch be a major part of the marketing strategy? Will players be allowed to stream the beta action from these games?

Moving forward, YouTube and Twitch streaming and player-created content will be part of our strategy for all games. Both platforms have a huge influence on the industry and offer the ability to talk directly with our fans and potential players.

Website: www.nexon.net
Twitter: @Nexon_America

eSports In Cinema Series Will Take Pro Gaming To The Big Screen

BY

Hollywood has officially taken notice of the rise of eSports. In addition to a new big screen documentary, All Work All Play, from the filmmakers behind the critically acclaimed Wordplay, ESL has partnered with BY Experience to bring eSports events to the big screen worldwide this July. That’s right, eSports will be taking on Hollywood blockbusters like Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Pixels. But the movie premiere will have some extras that Hollywood may not be able to compete with when it comes to the Millennial eSports demographic.

Immediately following the world premiere there will be a live eSports show that includes top players, famous eSports personalities and exclusive content targeting pro gaming fans. The event — “All Work All Play: The Pursuit of eSports Glory Live” — will be premiered from the ESL Burbank studio in California on July 23 for North American and Latin American cinema audiences, and from the ESL Cologne studio on July 28 for European and Asian cinema audiences.

“BY Experience is working with theaters on a global basis to distribute this live event to the broadest range possible,” said Amy Kuessner, head of content acquisition at BY Experience. “While distribution is not 100 percent solidified in the U.S., we anticipate every major movie theater chain from Regal, AMC, Carmike, Cinemark, Marcus, National Amusements, Kerasotes, Landmark, etc. participating in this monumental event.”

All Work All Play, which brings the stories behind the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) global tournament to life, will screen as a work-in-progress at the Tribeca Film Festival this month. Patrick Creadon, director of the film at O’Malley Creadon Productions, said he’s had amazing experiences at Tribeca in the past, and he’s looking forward to getting valuable feedback from a festival crowd. The film will be completed by mid-June, and will hit theaters a month later during the busy Hollywood tentpole season.

“It’s an interesting time in film distribution, and there are exciting new models on how to bring your stories to a large audience,” said Creadon.  “We’re thrilled to be working with BY Experience, the world leader in alternative theatrical content, to distribute not just our film but also a live eSports experience which will take place immediately following our world premiere. The plan is for All Work All Play to be distributed on over 2,000 screens worldwide in late July, which is an especially exciting proposition for those of us in the documentary community.”

Since eSports is a truly global event, and the IEM stops in different countries during its tour, there’s a great opportunity for fans to come out and show their support of this documentary. Michal Blicharz, managing director of pro gaming at ESL, said the ninth IEM season, which is the focus of this documentary, was a breakthrough season for ESL. It served as a transition season between the eSports world of the past and the eSports world of the future. That provided a great backdrop for all the human stories in the film.

“We’ve always been drawn to stories that are comprised of people with a unique passion, especially if their passions include some sort of creative problem solving — Wordplay and crosswords; I.O.U.S.A. and tackling the challenges of the national debt; and If You Build It and design-thinking to help transform a struggling rural community,” said Creadon. “In that sense, All Work All Play was a great fit for us.”

IEM is the longest-running global pro gaming tour in the world today. Season 9 had stops in Shenzhen, San Jose, Taipei, Toronto, Cologne, and Katowice. Creadon said Intel was looking to have someone capture the personalities and dynamics that exist behind the scenes of this community and they enlisted his team to film.

“Like all of our previous work, we’ve enjoyed coming into a new world and figuring out what makes these people tick,” said Creadon. “And as a non-gamer, I think our approach is framed up a little less around the specifics of gaming and eSports and a little more around broader questions that interest us on perhaps a more universal level:  What is it about games and competition that draws you to this community What are your concerns about building a career in this new industry What are the sacrifices you’ve made to pursue this passion ”

Julie Borchard-Young, co-president of BY Experience, said this documentary is the first in a series of cinema broadcasts that will afford eSports fans an opportunity to get together in their communities to enjoy several high-profile events throughout the year, as part of a global shared experience.  

“Cinemas provide the optimal setting for spectators to watch their favorite players and teams compete across an array of gaming titles, broadcast live on a 70 foot cinema screen in surround sound,” said Borchard-Young.

With over 89 million people watching eSports last year, according to Newzoo research, this big screen boost could not only attract Millennials to theaters, but also introduce new people to this huge phenomenon.

“After our film Wordplay was released in theaters in 2006, attendance at the annual crossword tournament featured in the film doubled,” said Creadon. “In addition, the film helped bring more crossword constructors and solvers into the puzzle world. I think there’s a good chance our film will expand the audience for eSports in a dramatic way and will further the understanding of eSports to gamers and non-gamers alike.”

Blicharz said if this film is a success, it could have a broad range of influence on eSports, from bringing new players in, or people that are interested in working in the industry, to convincing more company executives to invest in it.

“We are quickly reaching the point where eSports and its value does not need to be explained to the world’s major corporations,” said Blicharz. “It is imminent with or without the film, but hopefully All Work All Play opens more eyes to eSports and speeds up the process.”

That’s good news for Blizzard Entertainment, Riot Games, Activision, Valve and other developers at the forefront of eSports.

 

 

Bing Gordon On Marketing Games

BY

Bing Gordon’s perspective on the game industry and game marketing comes from his 26 years at Electronic Arts, and then subsequent time at pre-eminent venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where Gordon is a general partner. Gordon has headed up investments in numerous firms, and serves on the board of companies like Amazon, Zynga, and N3twork. He spoke with Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat about a number of topics recently, and his comments on game marketing were insightful.

Gordon noted that he’ll be speaking at the Game Marketing Summit later this month, where he’s been asked to talk about “hacking monetization.” Gordon notes that it’s really a tackeoff on a popular Silicon Valley term “growth hacking,” but he sees the changes in monetization as equally important. “For monetization, I use the word “hacking” just because other people use it. It’s a new economy of games. I started talking about it in 2004,” Gordon said.

What’s new with marketing in 2015 that’s changed from 2012? “Instagram. It’s basically channels. 2010, Facebook was the channel. 2012, I’m not sure there was a channel,” said Gordon. “We were transitioning from web to mobile. In 2015 Instagram is a channel. Email is always a channel. How do you build awareness in the first place, and then how do you connect people socially without the Facebook notification channel ”

He sees games that connect people regularly as still an uncommon thing, though games like Game of War and Words With Friends accomplish it, and Clash of Clans does it somewhat. “It’s hard to find other people in a mobile game,” Gordon noted. The clan structure is an interesting retention mechanism for mobile games, which Gordon likened to a “light version of MMO guilds, which are an online version of fraternities and sororities.”

When it comes to game marketing, Gordon said that while games in the 90’s were showing well on TV and thus TV ads were common, now games are being designed for mobile social sharing, and nobody’s quite figured that out yet. He’s not convinced that Twitch or YouTube are the only answer. “Those do not work for all games. Those work for games that are already hits,” he said.

The tricks that worked for console game marketing in the last decade are not working so well in the new era of mobile game marketing. “What they have in common is, they all think the console game marketers are going to lose their jobs,” Gordon said. “In the 2000s, console games were marketed a lot like movies — paid television, a little bit of PR, a lot of retail marketing, and street marketing, trying to get word of mouth among opinion leaders. None of that has worked well for mobile games.”

Gordon went on to note that TV ads are still mostly focused on showing great graphics, and that mobile games just don’t generally have graphics that look great on TV. That’s why we see Liam Neeson or Kate Upton instead of images taken from the mobile game. One of the key things about mobile games is the social connectivity, and Gordon has yet to see any TV ads created around that. Of course, as Gordon notes, “It’s hard to get inventive about social endorsements, showing on video what social is.”

There’s still plenty of potential for marketing creativity when it comes to games, especially mobile games. “I do think there’s stuff going on in short-form online video that’s pretty interesting,” Gordon pointed out. “There’s stuff going on with YouTube and the various creators there. How they build an audience is interesting. But there doesn’t seem to be very many people who are thinking across games and new video simultaneously.

Gordon went on to talk about many other things, including the investment environment, wearables, and new platforms. Read the complete interview on VentureBeat here.

Playable Ads Improve Activation, Retention

BY

mNectar

Branch Metrics

Mobile game makers constantly strive to improve the results from their ads, and even small improvements to the percentages can mean big benefits to the bottom line. mNectar and Branch Metrics have partnered to provide deep-linked, playable mobile ads that can take you right back to where you were when you clicked on the ad, after you’ve tried out the game.

“Developers across our network see nearly 100 percent lift on both the conversion to register and the one month retention for users who originate from a contextual deep link,” explained Branch Metrics’ Cofounder Mada Seghete. “It’s the best way to welcome and delight users: by showing them what they expect to see.” Currently, mNectar’s advertisers are seeing user retention rates that are four times as effective as other forms of mobile advertising, such as interstitials, and twice as high as video ads.

The [a]listdaily spoke with mNectar CRO Daniel Cheng (pictured, left) and CEO Wally Nguyen (pictured, right) to find out more about this improvement to Playable ads.

What led you to create this new feature for Playable ads — was it feedback from advertisers, customers, or your own idea?

The idea came from a combination of advertiser feedback, emerging use cases for deep linking, and a well-timed introduction between mNectar CEO Wally Nguyen and Branch Metrics CEO Alex Austin. A partnership between Branch Metrics and mNectar was a no-brainer because deep linking adoption for mobile games has been relatively low compared to the rest of the mobile app ecosystem. Advertisers love the idea of improving the Playable ad experience by letting new users pick up where they left off after installing.

Are you seeing any differences in Playable ads between different types of games? In other words, do they work better for some types of games than others?

The great thing about Playable ads is that it’s an actual sample of what the user will experience after they download the game. Playable ads lead to higher retention and LTV rates, and are adaptable depending on the genre of game. Some games are easier to grasp than others, such as a casual versus a hardcore game. mNectar supports both by providing varying Playable session times. For example, a casual Playable can be understood with 30 seconds of play and a hardcore game may need 5-10 minutes. mNectar supports any length of time needed. In addition, we can drop users into a specific point of the game, so it’s easy to highlight different features and levels.

When will this improvement be available to advertisers Is it hard to implement for the advertisers?

Using deep links within our Playable ads is available now! It requires sharing an app build with mNectar for the Playable and integrating a Branch Metrics SDK for the Deep Link.

Do you expect these enhanced Playable ads to perform significantly better for advertisers, and if so, by how much?

Using deep links within Playable ads will not only lead to better performance, but an all around better user experience. Retention rates and LTV will increase since a user doesn’t have to re-do the advertised portion of the game they’ve already experienced. Since a user can now continue from where they left off during their Playable experience, they are far more likely to play deeper, be retained longer, and spend more. All of that benefits the advertiser.

Are you seeing any significant differences in the response to Playable ads between tablets and smartphones, or between different regions?

Mobile ads, including our Playable ads do perform slightly better on tablets, we believe given the time spent on each device. Users on their tablets are in their living room gaming, whereas smartphone users are more likely to be passing the time commuting or running errands.

‘DomiNations’ Brings Classic Strategy To Mobile

BY

The mobile game market is seeing an amazing amount of new games coming out every week, and it’s getting more difficult than ever to get noticed in this avalanche of games. One thing that helps is a pre-existing audience, either for the style of game, the game’s creators, or the content of the game. Big Huge Games today introduced DomiNations, which the company is hoping will resonate on all three points.

DomiNations is certainly reminiscent of Rise of Nations, the hit real-time strategy game created by the original Big Huge Games and published by Microsoft back in 2003. DomiNations; like its spiritual predecessor, lets you create and grow civilizations through history, and of course battle other players for resources and territories. This is an extremely popular genre of games on the PC, and certainly mobile games like Clash of Clans and Game of War owe a lot to this genre.

The creators of DomiNations are led by Brian Reynolds and Tim Train, veterans who’ve worked on games like Civilization, Alpha Centauri, and of course Rise of Nations. Their games have a devoted following which is certainly going to want to look at DomiNations. The historic content of the game ia something nearly everyone is familiar with, seeing popular historical figures and civilizations portrayed in the game will certainly grab interest from players. DomiNations is now available as a free download on iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Android mobile devices.

 

“We’ve built DomiNations from the ground up to combine the in-depth strategy gameplay we’ve been creating for over 20 years with a fast, fun, and tactical experience customized for mobile devices,” said Brian Reynolds, Creative Director for DomiNations.

DomiNations is a base-building strategy game where players will choose to lead one of the world’s greatest nations including the British, Romans, Chinese, Germans, French, Japanese, and Greeks. The timeline of DomiNations unfolds across the expanse of human history, where players must research landmark technological developments, leverage unique strategic civilization abilities, and build Wonders of the World in order to pave their way to victory. With famous generals like Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, and Napoleon at the helm, players can relive history’s most famous conflicts at the tips of their fingers.

“Big Huge Games is ushering in the next generation of mobile strategy games with DomiNations, offering players an unrivaled amount of strategic choices and gameplay depth,” said John Robinson, general manager of Nexon M, Nexon’s arm devoted to mobile games.

Tim Train

The [a]listdaily spoke with Big Huge Games co-founder Tim Train about DomiNations, which he call a “Combat City Builder” or CCB. Some people, he said, call it “reverse tower defense” but that’s not as catchy.

Mobile is different from PC, both in the technical aspects of the platform but also in how players tend to play games. You’ve had to take that into account with your design, haven’t you?

Yep. One of the keys to mobile game design is making your game work for short gameplay sessions or long gameplay sessions. You want to have a lot more flexibility in how the player is able to play the game, so you need to have really short play session times that are possible. You can just log on and harvest your caravans and your farm and hunt the animals that are wandering around your map and see what rare resources you get from them. That might take a minute or two minutes, but when the player has a half hour of time that’s when you want to battle.

So when you have a long period of time you want to make more careful strategic decisions.

Absolutely. The attacks themselves, we wanted to add a lot more depth than the state of the art in strategy games these days.

How does monetizing the game work? Can I spend money to speed up construction?

Yes, you can spend your money on speedups and resources, those are the two main areas you’d spend premium currency on.

Does the game work equally well on tablets and smartphones?

We think it translates pretty well. That’s for people who own small-screen devices to decide. The trickiest bit is the interface, as in making sure your interface is readable, your icons are big enough to tap on but not too big that they obscure too much of the screen. So far we haven’t had any real issues with it.

What’s the marketing strategy for DomiNations? How will you help your audience find the game?

For us, as a game developer, our plan is just to make a good game. That may be a little naive to say in this day and age, but for us that;’s where it starts. If you make a great game that people want to come to play, they’re going to tell their friends. And then their friends are going to tell their other friends. To us that’s really the heart of it — you make a great game and people will come.

Now, there’s the whole user acquisition component to it in the mobile space, with optimization of channels. That’s not really our thing, that’s something for publishers. That’s where Nexon comes in.

How is developing this mobile game different from what you’ve experienced before creating PC games?

The thing that I’m excited about is the ability to actually understand more about what players actually like, and then responding to that. In the old days you’d basically box something up and throw it over the wall and that was it. You might have community forums or something, but you never really knew exactly how many people finished your game, or how many people bought it and never opened it. But in this world, you can say ‘OK, let’s actually look at what people are doing.’ Do they seem to like generals Are they building a lot of generals OK, maybe we’ll put some more generals in the game. That’s the thing to me about the ongoing development process, to be able to understand what your players like and do more of it.

Download DomiNations for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch on the App Store and for Android devices on Google Play {links no longer active}.

April Fools! Which Brands Did It Best?

BY

We’ve all been especially leery-eyed at our screens today as the Internet alighted in pranks here and there. Some more believable than others, some funnier and some flat-out bad.

Here’s our round-up of nine the best ones we’ve seen, but we need your help to determine who the real winner of the day was. Let us know which prank was your favorite or if we missed out on any especially good ones below.

Audi’s Autonomous Office Chair

First up is Audi’s ‘Autonomous Office Chair,’ an obviously fake product that we really, really want anyway. The humor is absolutely on point and shows that the luxury car brand is far from stuffy.

 

Tinder… For Uber

Tinder’s own competitor to Lyft appears to have been launched today. Match yourself to an Uber driver and split rides! If that isn’t romantic, we don’t know what is.

PlayStation Flow

VR is so hot right now. It’s also absolutely ripe to poke fun at. Oculus Rift, watch out: a truly immersive experience is here.

 

Tanks On The Moon

Even if it was just a trailer, this would be good. The best thing about this April Fools gag is it is actually playable for a limited time.

 

Airbnb Time Travels

Planning out your next vacation in ancient Greece Airbnb makes it simpler for you, whether you’re thinking of renting out a private villa or a totally normal-looking wooden horse.

The Steam-Powered Console

We use Steam. We own consoles. Now the two are combined in the most literal way.

Steam Powered Console

Zombie Army THRILLogy

If you like dancing games and also zombie games, you’ll be delighted that the makers of Zombie Army are bringing together the best of both worlds (and zombie Hitler).

 

Jetsetter’s First Virtual Reality Hotel

We laugh now, but this prank might be the kernel of a very, very good idea.

Razer Project McFly

We know Razer as the maker of high quality peripherals, but they’ve really outdone themselves this time.

 

 

Raptr’s Dennis Fong On Marketing Gaming’s Special Moments

BY

Raptr, the PC online gaming platform, just announced it’s brought in an additional $14 million in funding, most of which will be used to finance its new service, Plays.tv. It’s a new social media site designed for the PC gaming community. There’s an app you download (for Windows) which automatically records your game screen while you play any game that can be shared through its social network, as well as the usual array of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Plays.tv is designed to highlight special moments of a game. Will gamers be interested in sharing those moments It’s seems like an excellent bet for Raptr, which already has an audience of millions of PC gamers.

Game marketers can look at this as yet another social medium. When special moments occur in games, players will now be able to share them far more easily, which is good news for helping games gain visibility.

[a]listdaily caught up with Raptr CEO Dennis Fong to find out the thinking behind Plays.tv and what it might mean to marketers.

Congrats on your new round of financing. It seems like you are already having revenue come in from advertising, why do you need the additional financing?

Well, Plays.tv is just in its infancy and we plan to add a lot of cool features to it to make it the best community for capturing and sharing your gaming highlights. We want Plays.tv to be a place where gamers can memorialize and relive their best moments, which means potentially a whole lot of bandwidth and storage costs as serving video can be rather expensive.

The Wall Street Journal described Plays.tv as “Instagram for Gamers.” Is that a correct description? How does it fit into the Raptr eco-system?

“An Instagram-like service for gamers” is about the closest analogy we’ve found so far, and it’s a pretty apt comparison, especially when taken in the context of existing gameplay video experiences like Twitch, which are really entirely focused on live, asynchronous, one-to-many video streams that require those creating the content – the streamers – to essentially be performing on-camera for extended periods of time. Plays.tv is about asynchronous, recorded, short-form videos showcasing the memorable moments that all gamers have when they play. Plays.tv is effectively completely separate from the Raptr eco-system, with the exception of the fact that the Raptr client contains the same recording functionality found in the new Plays.tv client, so we expect quite a few gameplay highlights to come from the existing Raptr user base, which now numbers more than 46 million core PC gamers.

You’re mainly focused on PC gaming, yet Instagram is a mobile service. How do you see trends pointing to more and more mobile and tablet gaming as well as those saying that mobile advertising will double that of desktop by 2017?

Yes, Raptr as a company, and the software and services we offer, are very much focused on PC gaming. The Instagram analogy doesn’t extend to platforms, but it certainly works well in terms of the types of experiences that both creators and consumers of gameplay highlights can enjoy: just as it’s fun to consume Instagram content (pics and vids) from friends and strangers alike, it turns out that sharing your epic gaming moments with friends and a community of like-minded gamers is pretty fulfilling – like discussing that great 360 move, or your friend’s epic fail, or any other key moment in a game. We may eventually add support for mobile and/or console games – in fact, some enterprising early users have already found workarounds in order to post console gameplay clips to Plays.tv – but for the foreseeable future, we’re really focused on PC gaming, which is a $30 billion a year industry sector in its own right, with more than 1.2 billion PC gamers worldwide!

E-Sports and streaming gameplay seems to finally have taken off this year. What are some interesting opportunities in this medium for marketers to be aware of?

Beyond the obvious — sponsorships and endorsements around professional players and teams — marketers should be looking at the broader picture: sharing gameplay content in a range of video forms is huge opportunity to reach large, passionate, dedicated audiences of gamers. Streaming video has gotten the lion’s share of the attention because of its close association with eSports — but recorded gameplay can command equally large, equally avid and equally affluent audiences; just ask PewDiePie, who made more than $4 million last year through ads and sponsorships of his recorded gameplay.

Finally, what’s your favorite game right now?

At the moment, I’m loving Ori And The Blind Forest, which is a gorgeous game that’s also extremely challenging. I like games that can keep me visually enthralled even as they’re torturing me in terms of difficulty level!

Elon Musk, Tesla and ‘Brand Rub’

BY

Just how valuable is the Elon Musk brand right now Well, judging by the news yesterday, the man can send out one tweet about a coming product announcement and almost immediately increase the value of publicly traded stock in Tesla with almost $1 billion.

Pando Daily noted that the electric car maker’s stock to jump nearly 4 percent in just 10 minutes — adding a staggering $900 million to the company’s market cap in just 115 characters after Elon Musk tweeted the news to his 1.87M followers. Now that’s a good earned media ROI!

The man is also a media darling. Just check out some of the recent headlines below.

Even Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak is a fan and loves Tesla and owns one himself. The “Woz” gave his thoughts on what Elon Musk’s April 30th announcement will be on my Facebook wall after I guessed that it’s a line of batteries, see below.

By acting the role of entrepreneur of our age, Musk is increasingly associating innovation with both his personal brand and the Tesla brand.

The following two graphs from bavconsulting.com shows how the Tesla brand is positioned as compared to other car companies as well as hip new media companies.

Tesla Power Grid

Their conclusion:

“All in all, it seems the ‘Elon Musk’ brand has some well-earned innovation credibility that it continues to leverage with new venture ideas such as the Hyperloop. These ventures have a ‘brand rub’ that positively affects Tesla and could help the company sell more cars in the process.”

So no matter what Tesla’s new product line is, it seems like Elon Musk’s midas touch or “brand rub” have a chance to make it a success and the markets blind faith in it is almost scary.

But my guess is that it’s a line of batteries. What’s yours?

MLG President Mike Sepso On Why ‘Call Of Duty’ Is Heading To Arenas

BY

While eSports like Riot Games’ League of Legends, Valve’s Dota 2 and Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft II steal most of the spotlight in professional gaming, Call of Duty continues to rise in the ranks as a global eSports powerhouse. The partnership between Major League Gaming (MLG), Activision and Microsoft known as the Call of Duty Championship has grown exponentially over the last five years.

After being open to the public as part of Activision’s Call of Duty XP event, the past three years have seen the Los Angeles-based $1 million tournament rely on MLG.tv, CallofDuty.com and Xbox Live livestreaming to reach millions of fans. This year, the event was open to the public at the LA Event Center across the street from the Staples Center, which hosted the League of Legends Championship a couple years ago. Having actual fans fill the stands instead of just friends and family members made a big difference in the atmosphere. It also helped that the 32-team tournament format saw most of the top teams, including last year’s finalists, eliminated early.

The exciting format opened the door for a brand new team, Team Revenge, to make it all the way to the Championship match; although they ultimately lost to Denial, which took home $400,000, top prize in the $1 million cash pool. Mike Sepso, president and co-founder of MLG, was on hand to make sure all of the drama was livestreamed to millions of gamers worldwide. He explains why Call of Duty’s growth will one day soon fill a sports arena in this exclusive interview.

How have you seen this Call of Duty Championship evolve over the last couple of years?

The growth over the years is off the charts. We’ve already had more viewers watch more hours in two days than we did all of last year. So viewership is going through the roof. It’s great this year because we were able to have a live audience. Those tickets sold out in a couple of hours, so it was pretty cool. And the energy is awesome this year and the competition is amazing. The teams from the rest of the world have definitely increased their skill level and they’re a lot better. We had so many upsets on Day 2 with top teams getting out of the tournament early. It’s been really interesting.

So we’re starting to see parity in Call of Duty, which the U.S. used to dominate.

We’re seeing there’s some talent in the rest of the world. Because there’s an MLG Pro League in the US, they don’t get as much kind of practice at the top level as the U.S. teams do, so that makes a huge difference. But they are playing more and through our partnerships with groups like Gfinity and CEVO. We’re building up that infrastructure in Europe, so those teams are definitely getting better.

How are the EXO suits in Call of Duty Advanced Warfare impacting the actual gameplay experience for pros and audiences?

It’s pretty cool. It adds a whole new dimension to the game. You’re not just running around on the ground. You’ve got three dimensions to work with. It adds an element of speed, it adds an element of surprise and it really extends the area of the gameplay. You have a whole new vertical dimension to play in.

We’ve seen eSports dominated by PC games like League of Legends, Dota 2 and StarCraft II. What potential do you see with Call of Duty and other games on the console side?

We’re starting to see Call of Duty on the Xbox catch up to the PC world. Certainly in the U.S. it already has, and I think in parts of Europe like the UK and France it’s huge, and in Australia it’s huge. We’re seeing it grow really quickly in Brazil. We’re going to see some parity there as well.

Do you see Call of Duty as a better mainstream entry point to eSports versus a more complex MOBA like League of Legends?

Call of Duty is the most successful video game franchise in the history of the industry. There are over 20 million people playing Call of Duty and it’s been around for so long. It’s such a recognized brand and it’s also more accessible. You play it on your Xbox in your living room. You don’t need a really super high-end computer to play it on, so especially for the North American market it’s a much easier entry point. It’s also easier to just be a spectator who’s not necessarily a player because you can tell what’s going on.

Call of Duty was part of MLG’s first X-Games event.  How have you seen ESPN help introduce more people to esports?

The integration with X-Games opened us up to a whole new market and added some credibility, since we’re able to make MLG’s Call of Duty competition a Gold Medal event at the X-Games right next to all the other action and racing sports. It’s been great. And interestingly, it’s huge at the X-Games. It’s one of the biggest competitions in terms of spectators and in terms of ticket sales, and these pro teams like Optic, Faze and Envyus are absolutely super popular with the X-Games audience.

When it comes to eSports these days, we’ve seen arenas like Stapes Center and soccer stadiums around the world sell out. Do you see Call of Duty being able to attract that kind of attendance?

Yeah, I definitely think so. At our major Call of Duty events you can tell people get pretty excited about the game and we’ve had up to 10,000 attendees. It’s about finding the right format too. We don’t necessarily want to rush right into arenas just because it’s great for watching. We also like the community aspect, and having a bigger open format for the game to get more amateur players in and people trying to qualify in to become pro. We have different models. We’ll be selling out arenas in the U.S. for Call of Duty very soon.

How many people actually watch this championship through MLG.tv livestreams?

Several million were watching this weekend. It’s pretty substantial. It’s a big audience. It’s comparative with other eSports, and with traditional sports as well at this point.

Where do you see Call of Duty five years from now as an eSport?

It’s going to continue to be one of the fastest-growing eSports titles because of the support that Activision puts into it and the level of communication and interaction we have with the studios. You can already see the advances that are happening every year in terms of integrations into the games specifically for the eSports community, whether it’s the gameplay, the weapon balance, the maps being created, the game modes; and on the broadcast side the spectator modes and all the tools that are being built into the game to help us make the broadcast better.

 

Fixing Free-To-Play’s Image Problem

BY

Free-to-play games are a burgeoning business model that has taken over mobile games, is defining the MMO game sector, and is now popping up on consoles. The seemingly unstoppable advance of this business model has many longtime, hardcore gamers on edge — a look at the comments sections on consumer websites will show that quickly whenever a free-to-play game is mentioned.

The problem of free-to-play’s image is even more important when you realize how widespread it’s becoming. Many pay-up-front console games now have microtransactions in them — this isn’t just buying a major piece of downloadable content (DLC) like a map pack, but items and improvements that may even be consumables. Those are mechanics directly imported from free-to-play games, grafted into premium games. Is it any wonder players get upset Look what happened with Diablo III, where originally the game included an Auction House where you could buy and sell items for real money (with Blizzard taking a cut).It turned out this meant that item drops in the game weren’t as much fun, and thus Blizzard eventually removed it, much to the delight of fans.

The problem hasn’t escaped the notice of industry leaders. Nintendo’s CEO Satoru Iwata took up the issue when discussing Nintendo’s move into mobile games. “I do not like to use the term ‘Free-to-play,'” Iwata said. “I have come to realize that there is a degree of insincerity to consumers with this terminology, since so-called ‘Free-to-play’ should be referred to more accurately as ‘Free-to-start.’

Peter Molyneux added some comments about free-to-play at a recent Game Connection. “We’re taking a huge hammer and smashing [our customers] with it. ‘You will pay, or you will not enjoy!’ We’re treating them like children. We’re beating up our consumers, and saying, ‘be patient, or pay more!,’ said Molyneux.

Laralyn McWilliams, former creative director on Sony Online Entertainment’s Free Realms, had this to say about free-to-play games: “Think about Candy Crush Saga, which I’ve played a lot and I really like, but it’s a great example of this. The moment that you monetise in Candy Crush you’re probably extremely frustrated. You want to get past this level you’ve failed to complete 40 or 50 times, and that’s the moment you spend. But mixed into that moment where you spend is that frustration. It’s building a bad connection. I’m not monetising at a positive moment. An example I’ve used before is the person leaving the Apple store with a new iPhone after having stood in line all day, and they’re like, “Yes!” Isn’t that how we want people to feel when they spend money They should feel awesome.”

How did this image problem arise, and how can it be fixed. First of all, it’s important to realize that not all free-to-play games suffer from a stigma. League of Legends is enormously successful, projected to bring in well over $1 billion this year — and it’s free-to-play. Clearly the game’s players don’t have a problem with how the game is monetized, and the free-to-play model has seemed to accelerate the growth of the game rather than hold it back in any way. World of Tanks is similarly successful, with over 100 million players worldwide. What do those games have in common. You are not limited in how much you can play, and you can earn anything important in the game completely through play without spending any money.

The games that people most often seem to complain about are ones that limit gameplay, usually by time-gating. A typical mechanic is that you only have so many lives, or so much energy, and when that’s used up you must wait until it returns (which often takes several hours). In many games, you may start construction something (an army, or a fortification, for instance) but it takes time to construct. So you can either wait until tomorrow when it’s completed, or spend money to build it faster.

A particularly annoying game mechanic for some people is the ability to buy power in a game. You feel your pistol isn’t killing zombies fast enough spend some money to get flame thrower or an automatic weapon. That may be okay in a single player game, but when you’re competing against other players it can be disheartening to realize you’re losing because they spent more money than you did. (However, this is perfectly acceptable in China, and in fact is how most of the games work there. It’s a cultural difference.)

So where does the answer lie Isn’t this purely a product development issue, something the game designers should fix. Actually, no, the game designers need to hear this from marketing… and marketers need to help craft a solution that’s in keeping with the nature of the game. The best games at monetizing have that business model designed in from the start. Wargaming’s CEO Victor Kislyi likes to call his games “free-to-win” rather than free-to-play, because you can win at the games without spending any money.

Waving the wand of PR over your free-to-play game isn’t going to fix this. The reality is that there are and will continue to be free-to-play games, especially on mobile platforms, that are annoying and gouging consumers. Just like the plague of quick copies of games with similar names that show up around any hit mobile games, this is an annoying part of mobile gaming that no amount of wishing will make disappear. We have to deal with it, and that’s by affirmatively making the free-to-play games we are directly involved with fun and not limited in annoying ways. If you’re going to use free-to-play as a business model in some way, you have the potential to reach a huge audience — but they should be able to get a complete and fun game experience without spending money.

The challenge for marketers is to work with game designers find positive ways to spend money in the game that make players happy, not just relieve the annoyance you’ve built into the game. Games are, at their core, about having fun — and spending money should get you more fun, not remove barriers to having fun at all.

Marketers then need to communicate to players (and potential players) that the game has a complete fun experience without spending. Don’t try to hide the fact that there are ways to spend money — you should be celebrating it. If you are embarrassed at that thought, that’s a signal there’s something wrong with how you’re monetizing your game.

Properly done free-to-play games, when given enough time, do an excellent job of marketing themselves through the community of players who are enjoying the heck out of the game. Those players become (unpaid) evangelists, and they are very effective at getting friends to sign up. Enlisting their help starts with a great game with the right monetization — and that’s something you get when marketers and game designers work together.

Fixing the image problem of free-to-play games requires more than just a coat of shiny marketing — the game has to be constructed properly from the ground up. It’s a team effort, and everyone needs to know that from the beginning. Marketers, it’s up to you to start by convincing game designers and programmers that you are an essential part of this, not someone they call in at the end of the project to make some money for them.