SXSW 2016 "Lessons" From Game Marketers

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Published on ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1EVtRzJyW8



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This video was taken from a SXSWi 2016 session: Creating Brand Fans: Lessons from Game Marketers which took place Monday March 14, 2016 at the Four Seasons in downtown Austin, Texas.

At SXSW 2016, as a digital marketer myself and avid gamer, I was very excited to attend this session, Lessons from Game Marketers! When I sat down in this packed room and started listening to the presenters, I started to get annoyed. It quickly dawned on me that the presenters, all powerful people within the gaming industry, were out of touch with the players. Their job is to build buzz, often times spending millions of dollars on marketing campaigns to get us to buy $60-70 games, even if the end product is utter crap.

Marlo Huang (VP of Strategy at Liquid Advertising) commented that she didn't like it when her clients would ask her to activate influencers. Her company had to hire a full time employee just to research all the influencers, find out what their follower count is (potential reach), if they were "brand safe" then try to calculate an ROI of engaging with them. She didn't feel it was worth the effort.

Dave Miller (VP Global Marketing at Warner Brothers Interactive) said the average console game (assuming AAA title) costs $80m to develop then another 60m in cost goods and marketing. With that budget size games are delayed because they weren't able to create enough buzz about the game to ensure early success.

Rick Banks (Director of Media at Ubisoft) said that just like Hollywood, with budgets of $140 sunk into games, companies can't afford flops, and that "no company has never had a flop." This inspired me to ask my questions.

(I apologize in advance if my questions come across clumsy, the nerves got to me)

My questions:
1) We’ve got some pretty significant leaders on the panel, COO, VP VP director. I’m curious could we go down the line and could you say how many hours per week you’re logging in and playing game or consuming games on things like Twitch or YouTube?

- I asked this to see if any of the presenters actually played the games they were marketing. Notice the "I've got kids" excuse from all of them, as if the responsibility of raising their children admonishes them of the responsibility to honestly market their products TO MOSTLY CHILDREN.

2) So earlier it was mentioned that with $140 million dollar budget studios have a ton of pressure to have hits, and that no studio has never had a flop. I’d like to respectfully disagree with that statement. The example that I can point to is Blizzard Entertainment. They’ve never had a flop and when they get the sense that a game may not work, they scrap it, no matter how many millions of dollars and years of development went into the game. And I think the biggest reason is the leaders at Blizzard actually play their games and understand where the games are lacking.

How can leaders be confident that their marketing decisions are correct when they haven’t personally invested their own time into the game themselves?

- The response that Dave Miller gave was that they have teams of people who they trust. Sorry, but as it was mentioned earlier, with $140m sunk into the production of games, no marketing underling is going to stick his/her neck out on the line to these VP's and say, "Yeah, this game is a broken piece of crap."

The bottom line is, bad games (specifically annuals) are going to continue to be made and millions of dollars are going to be spent marketed them to us. Pre-orders and DLC packs MUST be resisted unless the studio/publisher has proven track record of respecting the community. And yes, I may be a "Blizzard Fan Boy", but after playing their games for almost two decades without a single "flop", they've earned it.







Tags:
SXSW 2016
Lessons from Game Marketers
Creating Brand Fans Lessons from Game Marketers
SXSW 2016 Creating Brand Fans
Blizzard Entertainment
Marlo Huang
Rick Banks Ubisoft
Walker Jacobs Wikia
Dave Miller Warner Bros
Dave Miller VP Global Marketing Warner Brothers
Marlo Huang Liquid Advertising