A Vision Of Marketing’s Future

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Hitfox Group founder Jan Beckers addressed Casual Connect on the future of marketing mobile and online games. Beckers has founded six companies that currently employ over 500 people, primarily involved in marketing and advertising mobile games. The HitFox Group currently works with over 180 game publishers and over 1000 media partners.

Beckers kicked off his talk by noting the evolution of games, from 2005 when browser games began to be popular,  to the growth of social games in 2007 through 2009, to then mobile games taking hold in a big way in 2010. Gamers were playing online and mobile games for the first time, and hadn’t really been exposed to many titles. “In early game marketing times untargeted banners, if you only bought your target cheap enough, worked rather well,” said Beckers. “That’s gone, of course.”

Today’s market is a very different story, Beckers said. “The good news is the market is still growing very fast and it will continue to grow,” said Beckers. “The problem today is the platforms are getting really crowded. There are so many developers out there competing for the same users. User acquisition became a bottleneck for everybody in the last few years. The advertising landscape became extremely complex.”

Beckers pointed out that there are many advertising models out there now, and that the market is beginning to enter a period of consolidation. “Game publishers will see more and more consolidation, with those getting out products to consumers with the smartest forms of advertising,” said Beckers. He outlined five of the key marketing trends that game publishers should keep an eye on in the coming years.

Strategic cross-promotion is important, and that means focusing on an audience and a genre of games rather than a platform to maximize the effectiveness of cross-promotion. “For the last few years, whenever there was a new platform coming out, such as social or mobile, it was rational to be a platform-focused player. That means a publisher considered themselves to be a mobile game publisher, a Facebook game publisher, or a browser game publisher.” When the platforms were all new, that made a lot of sense because the most critical knowledge was getting distribution and gameplay right on that platform. “Now the critical knowledge is of your audience and of a specific category of games, such as King with casual games,” said Beckers. “You must focus on a specific audience or genre in the future, and not so much on a specific platform. Every publisher will be a cross-platform publisher.” 

Big data is the new holy grail for marketers. “The sophisticated advertisers are tracking nearly everything, and then they re-target only toward profitable groups of users,” said Beckers. Beyond that, the market is moving toward higher quality traffic, transitioning from CPM (the cost per one thousand impressions) to CPC (cost per click) to CPI (cost per install) and now towards ROI-optimized CPI. “Developers will pay out for users who complete a certain level,” said Beckers. “Pay more for quality traffic to get payers instead of only the players.”

Smart content integration is on the rise in the last few years, said Beckers. “Avoiding banners that look like banners, but providing actual value by integrating games in lists and by doing so you can reach out to classic media and new game media.” This way you get your games distributed in many blogs as well as being reviewed and mentioned, Beckers noted.

Finally, Beckers noted the importance of product. “In the long run marketing is helpful, but it’s about product, product, and the product,” said Beckers. Users are becoming educated and they know good games from bad games. “The product will do more and more of the marketing,” Becker contends. In an uninformed market, marketing wins, which is what happened in the early days of online, social and mobile games. Now as the market is becoming well-informed, marketing will help and it has to be done right — but game quality is essential if you want to maximize sales. “It’s very much about developing the best products in the future,” said Beckers. “I would recommend following the good examples of publishers that became cross-platform publishers but then stayed to one very precise target group. If you do the best product within the niche, that’s likely to pay out.”

Nissan Revs Into ESports

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Editor’s note: Veteran entertainment journalist John Gaudiosi is now a regular contributor to [a]list daily.

This past weekend saw record livestreams on Twitch thanks to Valve Software’s The International 3 and its $2.8 million prize pool and Blizzard Entertainment’s World Championship Series (WCS) Season 2 Regional Finals. Twitch reported 4.5 million unique viewers in one day on August 11. Over 550 million minutes were watched this past weekend with an average viewing time of over two hours per viewer. These types of numbers are finally attracting mainstream brands. On the heels of American Express launching a Riot Games League of Legends debit card comes Nissan’s first foray into eSports.

Nissan has partnered with Team Curse League of Legends players for an online campaign to promote the Versa Note through the Your Door To More social video contest, encouraging gamers to create short videos for the chance to win a $1,000 Amazon gift card and have their video appear in a Nissan commercial. Team Curse pro gamers are using their own massive social media outreach to spread the word on this promotion virally.

According to Donovan Duncan, vice president of marketing at Curse, the Web giant is doing over a billion page views per month and has 40 million uniques worldwide on comScore.

“We are reaching on average 10 million viewers on streams each month,” said Duncan. “We also reach about 600,000 people through various social media channels. We’ll clear over $20 million in revenue this year.”

It’s these types of numbers that caught the attention of Nissan’s advertising agency, Chiat/Day. Baker Lambert, senior strategist at the agency, is a big fan of eSports, having watched many StarCraft II and League of Legends matches.

“We chose to connect with e-sports because the yourdoortomore.com campaign lives 100 percent online, and since eSports isn’t broadcast on TV or any other medium (yet), eSports fans are 100 percent online,” said Lambert. “The demographic fits very closely with the demographic we were trying to reach with this campaign, and partnering with eSports also provided us a lot of ‘bang for the buck’ in terms of cost per impression than most other mediums. So, when we stepped back and looked at it — it was finding the right audience in the right place at the right time — and it made perfect sense to be a part of that.”

Duncan believes this Nissan deal goes a long way in legitimizing the sport. Millions of people are watching these matches. The involvement of a company like Nissan means companies outside of the industry are starting to take notice.

“As more and more of these companies start to get involved, eSports will become as mainstream and sought-after as the NFL in terms of organizations that companies want to be associated with,” said Duncan. “Our players have a lot of fans, and unlike other professional sports teams our players have a lot of online interaction with their fans through livestreaming. Our audience is very engaged, so partnering with our team opens up the opportunity for advertisers to interact with the user on a very personal level through our athletes.”

According to Lambert, the campaign, which runs through August 19, has seen more engagement from the gaming community and eSports than from any other source.

“Nissan is an innovative brand, so it makes sense that they would be one of the first mainstream advertisers to try this up-and-coming format,” said Lambert. “This campaign and the success it has had so far has raised a lot of eyebrows in the industry, and has really demonstrated how much potential exists using this medium. We feel like there is nothing but growth potential for partnerships between mainstream brands and eSports.”

Lambert said the huge numbers League of Legends is amassing won over the agency. They chose Team Curse over other teams because of the professionalism of the pros.

“There are certainly other eSports teams out there grabbing a lot of views, but they aren’t necessarily portraying the kind of image you would want to align a brand with. After talking with team captain, Brandon ‘Saintvicious’ DiMarco, I was impressed with his professionalism, commitment, and business savvy and I knew that this was a team that had the organization, professionalism, and talent needed for a viable partnership.”

“By utilizing influential celebrities in the gaming world, Nissan is realizing the power that streaming and eSports can have on fan interactions with their brands,” said Nathan Lindberg vice president of sales at Curse. “We’re excited to be the first eSports organization to introduce this to an automobile company in North America.”

Duncan added that livestreaming has really taken the place of conventional TV and media for a lot of the people who watch it. Some of Curse’s streamers are reaching 50,000 people concurrently for hours at a time. It’s changing their lifestyle and the way they consume content. This also opens up a unique opportunity for advertisers, who get a direct feed into a highly engaged and attentive consumer audience.

“If someone wants to watch a game of League of Legends, their only option is to watch it online; that makes eSports an especially viable option for campaigns requiring online engagement,” said Lambert.

Steve Arhancet, director of eSports at Curse added, “Nissan is a blue chip company and their participation in the industry is yet another indication of the tremendous maturity of the league and its abilities to attract large brand sponsors.”

With livestreaming numbers continuing to grow with each big eSports event, and more events happening around the globe on a regular basis, these types of opportunities for mainstream brands will continue. Nissan has also been able to tap into Team Curse and the livestream of practice games, which is unique to eSports and allows fans to watch their favorite players practice every day. This literally opens up daily connections with a huge fan base.

Trion’s Rift With Traditional Marketing

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Trion Worlds has had an eventful year in 2013, with the introduction of the grand cross-media experiment Defiance, the Rift MMORPG going free-to-play, layoffs, closing the company’s San Diego studio to consolidate in Redwood City, and the return of former CCO Scott Hartsman to become CEO of Trion Worlds.

Trion Worlds SVP marketing Noah Maffitt

The [a]list daily sat down with Trion Worlds senior vice president of marketing Noah Maffitt to discuss the company’s approach to marketing. Maffitt comes from a diverse marketing background outside of the game industry, working as an e-commerce specialist at Office Depot and then managing Live Nation’s global digital business.

So why did Maffitt decide to dive into the game industry “If you look at the videogame industry and how dramatically it’s changing, there’s a lot of things that are being spun on their heads,” said Maffitt. “If you take the perspective that you follow your customers and find a way to deliver what they’re looking for, there’s still lots and lots of opportunity. Trion seemed uniquely positioned to me to take advantage of those trends. It’s small enough and nimble enough to quickly move around and follow the customers.”

Trion has undergone major changes this year, and one big one was the transition of the MMORPG Rift from subscription to free-to-play. “I’m actually very pleased with how the team has executed on it,” Maffitt said. “It was a planned transition that’s taken months and months to do. They’ve thought through all the little details very well. We actually saw our sales go up after we announced free-to-play, because we think we have a compelling package around that transition. Our player counts have gone way up, as well. All early signs are good.”

The shifts in business models don’t distress Maffitt. “The model has changed dramatically, but from my perspective this is nothing new,” Maffitt noted. “Musicians used to go on tour to promote a CD; now they give away CDs to promote the tour. There’s been ‘free-to-play’ in that industry for a long time. The same thing is happening with movies and TV ““ the models are all changing across all forms of entertainment. What’s happening here is shaking this industry quite a bit, but it’s actually a blueprint that exists out there. There are ways to follow a trail that’s already been worn in other parts of the entertainment industry.”

The changes in the industry have of necessity been reflected in marketing games. “Marketing is a lot more creative, and a lot more analytical. Being able to measure and understand impact, and change things up faster,” Maffitt pointed out. “The old model of making a really big bet, investing tens of millions of dollars in a big launch, that will still happen but I think it will be fewer and fewer titles that will really succeed in doing that. You’ll see a broader base of other titles that grow through a slow build and analytically rich marketing.”

“It’s part of the reason Trion was recruiting outside of the video game industry,” Maffitt continued. “It wasn’t a fluke I ended up in this role. It was Trion consciously saying ‘the old model isn’t as effective, it still can be effective but it’s a lot more risky.’ The thought was in recruiting from outside the industry let’s find some people who have high scale experience, who understand analytics, who understand customer experience and how to measure it, who understand driving profitability into each customer segment in terms of how we acquire and maintain those customers over time. It’s not just a one shot $59.995 retail opportunity any more. It’s an opportunity to engage over a much longer period of time.”

The Defiance transmedia game/TV show has been a years-long effort by Trion and Syfy to create synergies between the two media, and it is still evolving. “We’re figuring out what works and what doesn’t, we’re testing a lot of different things,” said Maffitt. “We’re testing different price points for the client, we’re testing different promotion around bit sales which is the in-game currency. You listen to the in-game chatter, but that can give you a lot of false signals. A few minority voices can lead the conversation in a way that isn’t really truthful or accurate. What we pay attention to is the real behavior, and we’re testing that all the time.”

The road ahead for Trion is going to be interesting, with the continued growth in mobile platforms and new consoles arriving. “We are absolutely interested in next-gen, and we’re fleshing out with partners what that would look like,” said Maffitt. “We’re one of the only companies that has a game experience tied in with a scripted video experience. As you think about exploiting capabilities of second screen, there’s lots of potential ways we could create a pretty interesting offering that ties all of those things together.”

Maffitt is still excited by what the game industry has to offer marketers. “This industry actually has what every other industry would kill for,” said Maffitt. “The biggest challenge is engagement. How do you get people to actually care about your product Because if they care about your product, they’re actually engaged with it, then you can activate on them. Social media without engagement is kind of stupid, but social media with engagement, you can do some really powerful things. How do you make peanut butter interesting on Facebook What’s incredible about this industry is the engagement is off the charts. That’s a massive, massive opportunity and I think it’s underexploited in this industry.”

“There’s a lot of distractions, there are a lot of great games out there,” said Maffitt. “The days of marketing getting everyone to the front door and saying your job is done are over. We need to get them through the front door, see what they do when they’re inside, and follow them through the experience to understand who’s dropping out and why. Traditional game marketing has been all about upfront awareness, and now it’s about lifetime customer value and understanding the full life cycle.”

“It’s a pretty saturated market out there, and the biggest challenge for the industry is how do you hold that engagement,” said Maffitt. “There’s a lot of talk about who will win on the next-gen platforms, and I’m less concerned about that. You need to be where the customers are, and they’re going to be on all platforms. It’s how do you develop a compelling experience that’s available where you want it and when you want it.”

The Key Challenge Facing Games

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The gaming industry has undergone massive changes in the last decade, but one of the key ones is the enormous increase in the number of games being produced. This is as important a platform shift as any disruptive technology — perhaps more so. As the industry enters a new era of consoles, it’s important to note that the technology base for consoles, computers, smartphones and tablets will continue to change — but for the next several years at least, not in ways that will fundamentally alter game designs.

The early days of the electronic game industry saw enormous effort being expended on technology. Just getting visuals on screens was a challenge, and one that absorbed a huge percentage of development resource. Rapid improvements in graphics technology, storage technology, and screen resolution followed, with grand leaps to such technologies as fully 3D settings and touchscreens. Certainly, there was attention paid to game design, to marketing, to sales and distribution. Many companies rose to prominence because of an aptitude in one of these areas. But technology was the focus of the industry.

The situation has changed. Platforms continue to improve, but the changes are incremental and not ones that will cause designers to completely rethink how games are made. The next-gen consoles coming this fall will have a substantial advance in graphics, but it’s not as difficult to handle as the jump from 2D gaming to 3D gaming. The last major technology disruption that caused massive shifts in game designs was the introduction of the smartphone (and tablets), with a touchscreen and an array of sensors built in.

Smartphones and tablets continue to post solid sales gains, and are expanding around the globe. The technology improvements ahead for the next several years won’t really cause a fundamental shift in game designs for mobile platforms, though. Faster CPUs and GPUs, better screens, longer battery life, improved cameras are all nice to have, but merely make things better, not different. The touchscreen will continue to be the main interface to smartphones and tablets, and the array of sensors won’t change.

The biggest change that affects game design now is the sheer volume of games available. “It used to be that gamers were starved for content and fascinating new releases,” said Scott Steinberg, CEO at TechSavvy Global and noted marketing guru. “Back in the early 90’s I’d be happy to get a high-profile new release every three or four months. Anything even remotely interesting had a chance of succeeding. Now, we’re at the other end of the spectrum — we’re drinking from the firehose. There are too many Kickstarter projects, too many interesting, quirky or fascinating games out there, too many apps, too many interactive entertainment experiences. Even if you’re a gamer, there’s only so many hours in the day.”

Now the issue is whether someone can find your game among the thousands of new games appearing every week. “Discoverability is the fundamental problem,” said Steinberg. “Games, like many other properties like books, movies, music, are increasingly commoditized in the eyes of the customer. When you have hundreds of thousands of games that are one tap away, many of which are free or incredibly affordable, increasingly brand awareness and the trust factor are becoming increasingly important.”

The basic skill needed, Steinberg explains, is the ability to attract and retain the customers. You have to get noticed, then you have to convince customers to stay with you, and then convince them to come back. Finally, you have to convince them to spend money. A good game in and of itself can rarely do that without good marketing.

“I’ve argued for a long time — fire your marketing team,” said Steinberg. “Everybody in the company should be in the ‘marketing department.’ Designers need to think like marketers, marketers need to think like designers, and really think about from day one what they’re going to do to drive that awareness, and have something to offer the customer and something unique to say. Think about your customer, think about their needs, and how you’re going to offer them something considerably different.”

Steinberg says that games have become ‘content’ in the eyes of quite a few people, and what that’s telling you is they’ve become a commodity. “The games that succeed are AAA blockbusters or quirky independent releases. Why is that ” Steinberg asks. “The answer is probably that they had something unique to offer, or they stand out at a glance, or they have a tremendous following, or any or all of the above.”

“We’re talking about multiple challenges here, game design simply being one of them,” Steinberg notes. “The business, the branding, the marketing piece is every bit as important a part of the equation. Everybody argues content is king, gameplay is king, but you have to have a sound business strategy and a great high-quality game experience. At the end of the day, if you can’t stand out from the noise you just fade into the echoes.”

Building and maintaining an audience is a task that’s as important as building and maintaining a game. Developers and publishers need to see these elements as equally important parts of having a successful game. Everyone involved with a game needs to keep both of these goals in mind. As the game industry continues to grow, the technology will be just one important issue alongside equally important issues of game design, game quality, community, brand-building, monetization, and business strategy. Successful games and successful game companies will find some way to do well at all of these elements.

Tilting Point Adds 2K Marketing Veteran

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Tom Bass

Tilting Point Media is a newly formed publishing venture aimed at the mobile and tablet markets. The company plans to invest $40 million over the next three years for the development and marketing of mobile and tablet games, and in its announcement promised “groundbreaking marketing campaigns” for its titles.

As part of this plan, Titlting Point has added industry veteran Tom Bass as vice president of marketing. Bass recently stepped into this role after eight years at at publisher 2K Games, where he held the positions of director of marketing and senior director of social media and consumer relations. Bass led the worldwide marketing efforts on titles like BioShock and Sid Meier’s Civilization IV and V. Most recently, he pioneered efforts within 2K to improve social media outreach, community building, and consumer support that proved pivotal to the success of Borderlands 2 and XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

“Our current and prospective developer partners know that skillful planning and execution on marketing is pivotal to the success of their games,” said Tom Frisina, executive chairman of Tilting Point. “They need an insightful and analytical leader they can trust to deliver innovative and high-impact marketing worthy of their creations. Tom Bass fills that role perfectly, enabling our partners to focus on what they do best — making awesome games.”

Creating groundbreaking marketing campaigns is an ambitious agenda, and the [a]list daily spoke exclusively with Tom Bass about the marketing challenge that lies ahead.

[a]list daily: We all know discoverability is the core problem facing mobile game companies. Paying for installations is getting more and more expensive, and may not always get you customers that stick around. Starting without a huge audience, how do you build one?

Tom Bass: Discoverability is a huge hurdle for independent developers on tablets and mobile devices. While increasing competition forms the core of it, part of this issue is that many developers and publishers fall into established game plans that rely exclusively on paid user acquisition. What worked six months ago for a different game won’t necessarily work today.

Paid user acquisition is an important part in nearly all mobile game launches. It’s something that we take very seriously as well, and we’re building a dedicated team to manage user acquisition. The issue is that paid UA shouldn’t be the only marketing that supports the game. The old saying of “I know 50 percent of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half,” no longer is applicable in the data driven world of paid UA networks, so it’s very tempting to rely solely on them to drive installs.

The problem that many developers realize when they exclusively use that strategy is that they’re not building brands or advocates, and it’s becoming a very expensive strategy as UA costs continue to rise. Users acquired with paid UA tend to retain, engage, and spend less on average than users acquired organically. Paid user acquisition needs to be complemented by great PR outreach and big ideas and efforts in marketing. The entire campaign must be driven by outstanding visual assets that have solid media support behind them, coupled with development of content for the community, and attention to the customer. There’s clearly a need for further branding than games can achieve on small install banner ads alone. User acquisition and a CPI focused approach is an essential part of what needs to be a larger marketing mix that captures mindshare and builds the brand. Hoping what worked last time will work this time and relying on cookie cutter plans are disaster strategies.

[a]list daily: Community building has become a very important part of many console, PC and online games, especially multiplayer online games. Mobile games have not had that so much, perhaps because that industry has mostly been focused on casual games. As we see more, deeper game genres appear on mobile, will community become more important? How will it differ?

Tom Bass: The communities for mobile and tablet games don’t necessarily mirror the growth and development of those from console and PC games. For example, Supercell has forums with tens of thousands of threads and over a million posts on Clash of Clans and Hay Day, but the games’ Facebook page likes don’t reflect the popularity of the titles, with Clash not even breaking 500K. The opposite holds true for Plants vs Zombies, with over 10 million likes on Facebook, while PopCap’s official forums are nearly dead. There are definitely opportunities for growth on both sides as well as challenges. Communities must be supported and nurtured; you can’t force a community to exist or attempt to move them to a medium that’s more convenient. Communities thrive on content and access, so community managers at the developer level are always going to be essential. Tilting Point helps out developers with conceptualizing and developing new content, to keep the community engagement and interest high.

[a]list daily: Video has become a powerful tool for marketing console and PC games, yet we’re only starting to see some videos for mobile games. How important do you think this is as a marketing tool?

Tom Bass: Video is going to become more and more important as a marketing tool for mobile/tablet games, but there are very few developers and publishers doing it right in this space. In console and PC, trailers are major productions, and I’m not just speaking of CG — every gameplay video is meticulously storyboarded, shot and re-shot, and edited by dedicated teams or agencies. As video install ads become more prevalent, even the 15 and 30 second videos that are produced need to be at a triple-A level to stand out from the sea of competitors. A lot of developers don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to create two dozen videos of various lengths for their campaigns, and that’s an area where Tilting Point comes in and excels. Some of our development partners are happy to hand over video production reins, while others such as Uber consistently put out excellent content, as evidenced by the Toy Rush announce trailer they recently produced.

[a]list daily: Looking ahead at the mobile market for the next year or two, what’s the biggest opportunity for you as a publisher of diverse titles? What’s the biggest challenge?

Tom Bass: For developers, one of the biggest challenges in the coming year is getting to the top 10 by themselves. The prospect of a very small team having a breakout hit is going to be less and less likely if they’re operating strictly on their own. But there haven’t been many options for developers other than antiquated publisher models, paying your way to installs, or relationships that really only provide access to a network. The market has outgrown the traditional publishing model. That isn’t what an independent developer needs, which is why Tilting Point came to be. Developers need a different kind of partner.

[a]list daily: Is Tilting Point looking for certain types or genres of games, or will it consider a wide variety? Why or why not?

Tom Bass: The games we’re working on with our partners represent a wide variety of genres and target audiences. There’s a consistent theme though — and that’s high quality, original IP games developed by the leading independent developers in the industry, all of whom we have tremendous respect for. They’re the ones that Tilting Point was built from the ground up to support.

[a]list daily: How will Tilting Point stand out among so many other mobile game publishers How much effort will go into marketing the Tilting Point brand as opposed to the individual games?

Tom Bass: Tilting Point stands out among the game publishers because we’re not a publisher. We’re a partner to independent developers, offering funding, marketing, data, and optimization services that everyone needs to succeed, but that only a handful of developers currently utilize or can perform in house. We don’t put our name as the publisher on the App Store — that slot is rightfully reserved for the teams that create the game. And since we don’t develop games ourselves, developers appreciate that they’re getting the full attention of our best team and not being pawned off to a secondary internal division. The marketing is focused on promoting the games and the developers, not Tilting Point. It sounds basic and how it should be, but it’s the antithesis of many publisher approaches.

Xbox One’s Silver Lining

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Microsoft has been touting “cloud power” as one of the main features for its Xbox One game console — but what exactly does it mean? Today, the company released a new infographic, detailed in the link below, that explains what it’s all about.

By uploading data through the “cloud” servers, players are able to keep track of progress in certain games. Forza Motorsport 5, for instance, will allow you to challenge a network of opponents, including your friends— even if they aren’t online at the time.

The infographic also explains that 300,000 servers — the latest and most reliable cloud infrastructure to date — will be ready when the Xbox One launches this fall. Background downloading will also be available, so you can get right into playing your games, rather than waiting for them to finish loading up.

The Xbox One releases later this year.

Source: IGN

For Wooga, Cross Promotion Makes A King

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Wooga is the number three publisher of social games, after King and Zynga, according to AppData. The company is rapidly transitioning from social to mobile, and now reports that nearly half of its revenue is derived from mobile versions of its games. Wooga has a monthly audience of 50 million users, and like many social and mobile publishers, it is looking for the best way to leverage that audience. The answer that Wooga and others have arrived at is publishing.

The [a]list daily spoke to Wooga’s COO, Jan Miczaika, recently about Wooga’s foray into publishing with Tactile Entertainment’s game Airheads Jump. “Wooga is first and foremost a game developer, but what we’ve seen having developed a lot of games is that we’ve built internal resources,” said Miczaika. “We treat Tactile Entertainment like any other game team. They get our full marketing support as well as a ton of feedback. For instance,  Jelly Splash will be out in 22 languages, and this is something a smaller developer cannot do.”

This seems to be an inevitable evolution for developers as they gather a large audience, and as the vast majority of mobile developers continue to struggle to find an audience. Why not pick some titles you think would be winners for your installed base, and cross-promote these games into profitability?

Games are becoming more important than the platforms, especially for casual games. People separate phones from tablets and laptops, but people just want to play the game,” Miczaika said. “Consumers don’t care what platform it is. I once told my mother we make iOS games, and she said ‘Oh, I can’t play them, I have an iPhone.'”

The key for free-to-play games, which now define the vast majority of mobile titles, is the large audience allows for cross-promotion. “Once a device hits a billion users, that’s when it becomes a mass-market device,” Miczaika noted. PCs have already hit that, smartphones have hit that point this year, and tablets are projected to hit that point in two years.” By way of contrast, Miczaika points out that consoles sold about 34 million last year. That’s not anywhere near the scale of the other platforms.

Publishers have experimented with different cross-platform strategies, but the most successful one seems to be fully synchronizing games across all devices. King has shown that with Candy Crush, and Wooga has had great success with Diamond Dash synchronizing across all platforms. Players enjoy being able to play a game on any platform that’s handy, and not losing any progress.

The publishing strategy won’t be a major initiative for Wooga. “We’re thinking a couple of published games per year,” said Miczaika. The games Wooga looks for will be similar in general to their current casual, broad-appeal titles. “We won’t go into tanks or dragons. It will be close to our existing style,” Miczaika said.

It’s getting harder to make competitive games, with development time and budget increasing. “Definitely,” affirmed Miczaika. “We see production quality going up all across the board. With the App Store market being so competitive, it’s something you have to do.”

Miczaika sounds a cautionary note for mobile developers and publishers. “Our existing audience is definitely an asset, but if it’s not a good game you can’t buy your way to the top. You can burst your way to the top, but in the end what you need to have is retention. What we’re focused on most is building games that retain people. If it’s a game that people play once or twice and then stop, it’s never going to monetize.”

Accessorizing More Than Games

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Astro Gaming is an unusual accessories company. It’s placed product quality and design high, which is why so many professional gamers use Astro Gaming headsets — even many who aren’t under contract with Astro Gaming. But Astro Gaming is also focusing on the brand experience, seeking to be a recognized consumer brand. As part of that goal, Astro Gaming is opening up a retail store in San Francisco in the booming South of Market area, close to AT&T Park.

The [a]list daily spoke with Astro Gaming’s director of marketing, Aron Drayer, who has a long history in the game business as a producer at companies like Activision, Vivendi, Atari. Drayer provided some insight into Astro Gaming’s thinking about the gamer culture.

“It’s about creating a brand that supports that,” said Drayer. “Look at the action sports space — you’ve got Quicksilver, Hurley, DC. A lot of these kids who wear this stuff don’t actually ski or snowboard. They just identify with that culture. Gaming is twenty times bigger than action sports is, but there is no brand that’s saying ‘I’m a gamer’ in a cool way. That to me, is so much about what I want to do.”

The retail store and the product line is about much more than just headsets, according to Drayer. Astro Gaming is creating a line of apparel and gear for gamers that will both look good and represent the idea of gamers. “It’s the same thing as a kid wearing a Quicksilver shirt,” Drayer explained. “I want them wearing an Astro shirt so somebody looks at them and says ‘Oh, you’re a gamer.’ It’s the bags, it’s the apparel — that’s a key part of rounding out the brand story.”

The retail store is an interesting concept, and not a normal strategy for a company that’s used to selling through retailers. It’s made easier for Astro Gaming since the company’s headquarters have enough space for the retail store, and it’s located in a high-traffic location with good demographics. The store is small, but well-stocked with headsets from Astro Gaming and Skullcandy (which purchased Astro Gaming in 2011) along with screens showing streaming games, headset test stations, apparel and gaming gear.

Drayer acknowledged the challenges and expense of setting up a retail store, but feels it’s an important extension for the company to make. There’s nothing like a retail environment to get good feedback from customers, Drayer noted. And headsets in particular rely on first-person experience to sell them, how it fits and how it sounds. That’s not something you can do in a typical retail store environment, Drayer pointed out. Eventually, if the store proves itself as a useful tool for brand extension, consumer information gathering, and profits, Astro Gaming might open a retail spot in another city or two.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty going in in the current marketplace to keep Astro Gaming busy. It’s been a slow year for accessories due to the impending console transition, but there’s a strong upside potential for Astro Gaming. Will next-gen consoles with built-in streaming make eSports on consoles more popular “I’m really curious to see what happens with that,” Drayer said. “My understanding of it is it’s not going to be full high-def. I think it’s going to create more awareness around the concept of streaming. It’s going to be really interesting to see how people use it. That’s why we’re not racing to be first to market with Xbox One solutions.”

Drayer explained the company’s strategy. “We’re an eSports company, I want to see how eSports evolves and what these gamers actually need, and then we’ll design the product for them to solve those problems. We didn’t start shipping our first Mixamp and our first A40 until the Xbox 30 and the PS3 were almost five years old. We weren’t first movers on the last generation by a long shot, but I think we were the most well-thought out and well-designed solution and to us that’s more important.”

There’s plenty of other opportunities in the marketplace that Drayer sees. “The PC space is going crazy still, and the mobile space is just absolutely exploding,” Drayer said. “I like that because it’s going to introduce more people to using headsets. The truth is with most mobile games right now, do people even play with the sound on They don’t even uses headphones. Swords and Sorcery, they talk very explicitly when you load that game up: ‘Use headphones, it’s part of the experience.'” Drayer expects headset use with mobile games to expand as games come out that provide a richer audio experience, especially on tablets.

Astro Gaming is busy with preparation for the upcoming holidays as well as longer-term projects. “We announced at E3 we’re doing Battlefield 4 licensed products. There’s a special A50 that’s a full boxed product, and it comes with a special Battlefield audio profile setting that we tuned with the team,” Drayer. The future looks interesting, as well. “We’re in pretty deep negotiations with Microsoft and Sony at this point to make officially licensed Xbox One and PS 4 products, so we do expect to be doing that,” Drayer noted.

For Next-Gen, Marketing Is The Differentiator

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The history of the console business is one of major differences between the competition. The Super Nintendo and the Genesis had very different controllers, graphics, and basic architecture. The PlayStation was vastly different than the N64, with a CD providing a very different experience from a cartridge. The Xbox 360 and the PS3 have completely different internal architectures, with programmers specializing in one or the other.

Fast-forward to the next-gen rivalry between Sony’s PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Both use AMD’s unified CPU/GPU architecture with minor variations, and this is so similar to the standard PC architecture that putting a game on all three platforms is trivial. Well, trivial compared to the process of putting a game out for both the PS3 and the Xbox 360, that is. In any case, this is the first time in the history of the console business that the two leading consoles are so very similar. (Nintendo’s Wii U is very different still, both in terms of horsepower and in architecture.)

For a brief time after the unveiling of Microsoft’s Xbox One, it looked as though the two consoles might be strongly differentiated by their policies regarding used games, Internet access, and approach to indie developers. However, that’s no longer the case.

Microsoft has been rapidly changing its policies to resemble Sony’s policies, whether it’s on used games or on working with indie developers. Just as the Xbox One and the PS4 share the same basic architecture, so too will the consoles share similar business models. Free games monthly with your premium subscription on PlayStation That’s done very well for Sony, so Microsoft has added that. Requiring a premium subscription to player multi-player online games Microsoft has made billions doing that, so now Sony’s added that little feature to its premium subscription. Neither company is likely to get too far ahead of the other in terms of business models. Microsoft saw what happened when it tried to push too rapidly into the digital future.

Ultimately both Sony and Microsoft realize the need for next-gen consoles to have a broader range of content than traditional publishers can provide, in order to compete with PC, online and mobile platforms’ enormous array of choices. Both companies still have a long way to go. Sony’s been trying to get indie developers on the PS Vita for a while, with some success — yet that hasn’t turned into big sales for the handheld. Regardless, both Sony and Microsoft will be indie-friendly for next-gen consoles.

There will be some exclusive games for each console, but no major genre will be left unfilled. Those exclusives will be significant to gamers who are fans of a particular brand. Given the hardware similarities, the software differences will be more important than ever. Beyond the exclusives, it’s important to note that all the biggest third-party games will be on both consoles. We may see some exclusive content differences, or a short window where a title is only available on one next-gen console, but for the most part you can count on seeing every title from major publishers on both platforms.

Even the quantities of games available for both platforms will be about the same on a practical level. Both the PS 4 and the Xbox One will have at least a couple of dozen titles available by the end of the year, far more than most gamers could play or afford. There are a number of top titles in a variety of genres on both platforms at launch.

The cool advanced features of next-gen consoles, like easy streaming of games or integration of smartphones and tablets, are available on both next-gen consoles. Motion control Standard on Xbox One, optional on PS 4. Lots of video content, music, social network integration Check, check, and check.

The biggest difference between the Xbox One and the PS 4 is really the $100 premium that the Xbox One is charging, which can be attributed to the inclusion of the Kinect. Microsoft will certainly be putting effort into convincing customers the added functionality is well worth the price, and that process has already begun.

Marketing will need to come to the rescue for both Sony and Microsoft. While both companies will be showing gorgeous graphics and amazing action, marketing’s challenge will be to take the small differences between the two consoles and enlarge them into actionable selling points. Customers need to be convinced that some feature or game only found on one console is the reason to make them buy that console. TV ads and viral videos will probably be focusing on such points, and look for social media being used to amplify that.

In the end, the two consoles are in the same market chasing the same customers with the same basic hardware, and their policies will be very similar. If you want something really different in a console, try Nintendo or Ouya.

Ninja PR Advice For Indies

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Developing a mobile game is only the first step in the process of generating revenue from a game. Finding an audience is becoming the most difficult hurdle for small developers who don’t have the advantage of an existing base of fans. Every independent game developer knows how difficult it is to compete with AAA companies with their multi-million marketing budgets, and in order to succeed, they need to work smarter — not harder.

That’s why PRninja was created, to help indies with their marketing and public relations campaigns, and help them break into international markets. PRninja is an interactive guide and tool for the iPad that helps developers and small game studios with the planning, scheduling, and execution of their PR and marketing campaigns. “It guides them through the main rounds of PR for video games, and helps them to get media attention they deserve,” said Maryna Petrenko, developer of PRninja, who spoke to [a]list daily. “I did extensive research on PR and marketing for small developers, and I took all this knowledge and put it into this app.”

The app grew out of Petrenko’s experience working in PR, primarily with video games, and seeing the struggles indie developers had to get their apps noticed. “It’s exceedingly difficult to get reviews, to get anyone to notice your game,” said Petrenko. “Small indie developers from America and Europe were wondering how much our services cost, and most of them could not afford to pay this much money for marketing and PR. So they would decide to go with their own efforts, and sometimes I would wonder how they would go about it.”

The difficulty for indie developers is only climbing. “It’s getting more and more competitive,” said Petrenko. “It’s getting really difficult, even for PR people. It’s really impossible for an ordinary person who doesn’t know how to write a pitch or approach a journalist.”

“You should start working on game marketing before you even sign with a PR agency,” Petrenko advises. “Get your media base, work with your friends and family to spread the word about your game. Do everything you can before the game is actually ready.”

In addition to a variety of helpful marketing tips and tricks, PRninja offers interactive developer and PR/marketing checklists; guides to building your own media bases, and lists of utility tools that every small indie developer can benefit from. The app provides 2, 4, and 6 week game launch campaigns along with the basics of App Store optimization and lists of media to target.

PRninja is now available on the App Store for free download, and more information is available on the website.