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General: Over-Marketing and The Beta Effect
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com's Garrett Fuller uses his column this week to take a look at the over-marketing of MMORPGs and the problems that it can cause, including what Fuller describes as "The Beta Effect".
I had a good friend write to me for the Reader Mail Blog this week asking why games are so overhyped before they come out. It was such a good question that I decided to focus my column on not only answering that question, but to finding solutions as well. What is the hype machine, how did it happen and how the heck did it get so out of control?
My old boss used to talk about "managing expectations" all the time. It's really just a fancy term for making sure you give people what they expect. Right now, for whatever reason, MMOs as a collective are failing at this. Expectations for nearly every new release are simply too high.
The reality is that these games take an eternity to develop, and even once you launch a game you suddenly are thrown in the thick of it with patches, fixes, and updates. Why MMO companies start setting their fans' expectations three or four years before they are ready is baffling.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
It's all becoming clear now. The reason that all the recent games are so much alike is because they keep choosing the same beta testers over and over again, lol. I have to agree with you, the pre-order special edition beta key gimmicks have gotten way out of hand. But like you said, it's all about the investors, and many of them want to see results before the game is released to the public. And the "beta testers" to a large degree enjoy the upper hand once the release goes public. It's not really fair to anyone in my opinion.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
I think the inevitable cleanup of the hype and industry is already happening naturally. There are only going to be so many multimillion dollar MMO's that tank before moronic investors start being more careful with their money in this industry. Today, they see the kind of money WoW pulls down, and they think anyone can do it. It seriously freaks me out how ignorant some investors and corporations are about the people they are selling these games to and what we expect from a modern MMO. In the case of MMOs, more competition has not caused better value or quality to emerge. All we are seeing here is garbage game after garbage game.
MMOs are evolving at a snail's pace both visually and in game play. When was the last time we saw a significant jump in the complexity of AI or any other game feature? It's no wonder so many of us are bored. These lame companies continue to just play it safe and crank out clones using the same old ideas and 'standards'.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
wout it be in bad taste to mention the MMO i'm developing and hope to beta in 2020 ?
((fyi i 'm semi serious)
Where is the part where the player also should learn to take some responsibility? Didn't see any of that, all I saw was blaming something else. Not saying it's cool of developers to just promise many things and unable to keep that promise as sure that's a bad thing, but just because certain people will enter a beta to just see if the game is right for them, does not mean beta is not meant for testing or some marketing trick as even if people only decide to just play and not test the game the way it is intended it is still being tested in many way's, just a simple thing like server load can already be tested without the "beta tester" doing anything else then just play the game, obvious and luckely I know plenty of beta testers that do indeed test, some of us even beta test games we have no intention of playing at release but are glad to be of help with the testing, they actual testing, yes I know we are a minority and sure it's true that I also feel the majority only uses beta test to see if the game is right for them. But still I believe that players at some point should take some responsibility.
Let's take a look at rl commercials, tell me, are you able to handle any situation in rl when you drink Coca Cola Zero? Are waves of woman flocking at your feet when you use AXE? How about seeing the food on a picture and then seeing what you ordered on your plate?
What also could help is not follow a game to closely if the game looks intrested to get on release, I would even say if a game looks very intresting ignore a beta test and just develop some patients to when the game is released.
Who cares about over-marketing and betas when companies don't even have anough money to finish their game. Classic examples would be AOC and Warhammer, both majorly over-marketed, over-hyped and both failed miserably.
Learn 2 Read
So what are the answers to managing expectations? Both players and marketing divisions can play a role in rolling back the damage that is caused by early over-hype. I will start with the players:
Keep in mind that game companies are really trying to make the best game they can, or at least the developers are. Remember that almost every developer out there is also a gamer at heart and that they want to make games they like to play. So as a player stick with them, trust them. I am not talking about trusting the corporate monsters, business people, or investors. I am talking about trusting your developers. Also if you are lucky enough to get into a beta test early on, take it seriously. Give as much feedback as you can. Use your beta key to help make a better game. Okay, they may not listen, but you do have their ear with a beta key, hopefully they will.
Right at the beginning of the article the writer says that managing expectations is making sure you give people what they expect. That is sort of a minor misinterpretation of the idea. Managing expectations is, more specifically, ensuring that expecations are the same as the delivered product, or the delivered product could even be better than what was expected. The best way to manage expectations is to under promise and over deliver. The reverse effect is what happens in the MMO world, heck the sales & marketing world as whole, and people are tired of being sold crap with a pretty package.
I just fell for it again recently with an MMO release that wil remain nameless for this post. I followed it through development and believed all that the publisher was telling me about how great it would be. I got a hold of a beta key and found that the beta version was full of trouble right up until release day. The publisher went ahaead and released the game inspite of the many, many bugs and problems that were reported by the beta test community. The beta testing period was simply not long enough to address all the issues, and the game did not meet the expectations created in my mind by the publishers marketing team. So they got my $50.00 but I cancelled my monthly sub, as did many other players who felt the same way. I'm not sure why this keeps happening with MMOs. The monthly sub is the bread and butter and they get it back from me after 3-4 months of play time. Why don't they value that more highly than my retail purchase dollars? I played one MMO for 4 years on 3 month recurring subs, thats aprox. $770.00 just in monthly subs! the retail cash is a pitance in comparison.
I agree that beta keys and games in general are totally over hyped prior to launch but do understand the need to create a buzz in order to generate big launch day sales, and build a subscriber base in order to begin generating the risiduals. I think this could be done better by simply putting a paid ad on a big network like Fox for say 3 weeks prior to launch, rather than years of hyping, over promising and under delivering.
Consumers in ALL markets are becoming savvy to the marketing ploy of telling them that a product is fabulous and then selling them a pretty looking piece of crap. I work in sales/ marketing. What seems to be the best approach for repeat business, and I would say that MMO subs are definitely a good example of a highly competative repeat business market, the right way to secure business is all about one thing. Excellent honest customer service where the customer service representative does a whole lot more listening that talking. A smart marketer listens to what the customer or market is asking for and attempts to fill a need based on customer majority feedback. In alot of cases the listening to the needs of the customer is the part of the process that is overlooked, and is IMHO the most important factor to the success of an MMO, or an appliance, or a car, or a swimming pool manufacturer for that matter. When you get people what they need/ want they tend to place a higher value on it, and tend to want to pay more for it, and/or become extremely happy with what they did or will pay for it as they see a great deal of value in a product so closely tailored to their needs and desires.
Listen to the customer and give them a little more than they ask for and you and your Financial Analysts will be happy at the end of the fiscal year.
I dont think a customer should ever take responsibility for the quality of a product they purchase. that responsiblity lies solely with the supplier of the goods or service. the most a customer can do is get the facts from the seller of the product and compare it to other similars. But if the competitors all give you the same line of bull "It's F***ing great, buy it!" how does one make an educated choice? Once you open a video game you've bought it. Most game sotres don't allow returns of opened software. I don't how you'd even begin to try and get your cash back on an online downloaded game.
If a publisher gives out 10,000 beta keys as a marketing gimmick through some online game-zine site to boost the buzz of their upcoming release then they are not so much concerned with actuall beta testing as they are with looking for cheap promotion of their upcoming release.
I agree that TV ads are out to lunch with the way they over promise and under deliver on the end user product.
Very well done. I approve of this!
"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know." William Saroyan
ya most corporate only see potential revenue
they dont understand that blizzard is popular because they are the davincy of todays mmo
from lore to raid
blizzard lost some luster since activision baught them ,even lot of gamer saw it and lot of them left
if you dont have the money to support a team of dev for 4 year dont start a mmo start a chess game instead
True. A good article!
Garrett Fuller wrote:
> Okay, they may not listen, but you do have their ear with a beta key, hopefully they will.
Maybe this topic is worth an extra article. How betas can take the wind out of the sailboat Hype. A thing I have seen repeatedly done wrong is taking the beta players not serious, giving them no feedback or even ignoring them.
Yes, it may be true that there are a lot of players who actually don't want to test, but on the other hand my experience with beta tests showed me that there is still a huge amount left that actually invest a lot of time in thinking about improvements and writing them down in the forums.
But what follows is often like a massacre!
In the forum there is no person with grounded knowledge about the game and how to moderate who cares for the forum. Only forum moderators that hardly know a tiny bit more than the casual player and have no experience in leading discussions or giving feedback that satisfies the beta testers needs in getting acknowledged and taken serious.
Why massacre? Because this mixture leads to anarchic discussions that are very frustrating for the person who has invested his time in thinking about improvements. He doesn't get his needs fulfilled, moderators try to act as though they know more than they actually do and become easily irritated when someone actually looks through their mask and other players start to throw in flames and empty phrases that go contrary against all principles of a constructive discussion.
This happens again and again and players start to doubt the quality of developers that allow such an unprofessional forum and lack in communication to its testers. And they are not that wrong. How tests are organized and actually done shadows to a degree the professionalism of the developing organization. Not everyone might share this opinion, but reading a book about software engineering would easily teach them for the better.
The mentioned doubts start to leak through the whole community and lead to a more careful investment in the game. Who wants to invest in a game with developers that are under suspicion to not get bugs fixed and features implemented that are highly demand by the players, and during a beta there is still a lot to do for the development team. But this is the message that a frustrated beta tester gets when there is no serious reply to it's idea. This is born out of thoughts like: I'm ignored, nobody cares about what I write, my ideas will never reach the developers, they'll do whatever they want without listening to the fan base, maybe there are not even enough developers to actually improve the game because there is nobody willing to invest money in it, the whole beta is a farce maybe the game will too...
Garrett, if you want to take the hype out of a game, this is the easiest way. No, I'm just kidding. This actually proves your point! The players have high expectations and in a lot of game development projects they start falling out of the sky as soon as the beta starts. Of course there are a lot of other failures you can do to trip over the hype and make a nightmare out of it, this is only one very common example!
This site is also a contributor to the hype AND relies on hype - it feeds on and is fed by hype.
For myself I don't come here for games once they are released - other sites are much better for information and community on released games.
96.32% of the time that I am here is to find out about coming games. And I suspect if this site only covered released games traffic would be down substantially.
lol do you follow a sport ,say football ,49 ers annouce x player for their team this season
they know that monster alone will mean full seat good for that stadium
now the same marketing guy that sold the publicity for 49 ers is trying to use same strategy for AOC
sorry it just doesnt work that way ,ho you ll get curious for the first week but you better hope EAor BLIZZARD boss
and marketing guys tested the game because if they didnt ,you ll see thosde game go with the pile of flop game that were lunched after wow
and we all know there are hundreds of those lol
Should I get these patients from the ICU or the psychiatric ward?
this whole system has gone outta whack. players want to be testers cause they think its fun amd a faster way to get to play a game. when the hell did testing become fun? i remeber sitting on the same screen/ area for 2 hours walking up and down the map loookin for bugs then writing a report then starting the whole prossess over again. beta has somehow become some kinda glamorious thing everyone wants to do. thats the problem with the hype machine. with so many people testing and leaking information you pretty much know everything about a game before its ever released. i say make betas work again and we wont have all these crap cookie cutter games coming at us.
What I got from this article, is that more MMO companies should be like ArenaNet. For instance, most people that have been following the Guild Wars franchise have known about GW2 for nearly two and half years (about 4 months before the release of Eye of the North) and yet we know very little about the game. I know so little, I probably would use only hand to count the significant official info: 1) the game takes place 200 or more years later, 2) there are dragons, 3) there's now z-axis, 4) PvP will have a persistent area, 5) there are more playable races. And thats about all I know of significance (sure there's more minor details in-between, but those are subordinate to the other info). And thats just the view from outside the company; from what I know of the company (from reading the wiki entries, Facebook, etc) the PR is done from within the development team, so the PR person not only is completely in the know, but is also (as Garrett said: the developers are gamers at heart, and by extrapolation) a gamer. And this is just for GW2. As far as I can remember, the PR strategy for the original was also a departure from the modern MMO PR hype train: instead of hyping particulars of the game, they touted the credentials of the development team that was making the game and also touted their marketing scheme.
I guess what I'm getting at, is that I agree with Garrett's conclusion of the article. There needs to be some changes with PR strategies (and the methods used by A-net are prime examples of what can be used effectively without creating hype that breaks the game), and Beta players need to be responsible.
have a blessed thread.
Good article and great question. It seems pretty simple to me:
Hope relates to hype. It sure seems like there are a LOT of folks hoping for something new...
There are different tactics that could be used by the game companies. You could "hype" a game by releasing bits of lore and describing (w/ screenshots) a zone, faction or important figure in the game. Such a tactic has advantages over talking about features if the game has an interesting world. Making it about the game's world likely make a stronger, more lasting impression (if the world is worth a damn) than the typical method we see today. It's also a method that can be sustained over a long time.
Use this as your main "hype" tactic for the year or two before beta. Occasionally do the more familiar stuff (features), doing these more often as you approach open beta/ launch.
The gaming sites and magazines hold a tremendous amount of responsibility--as they are the direct conduit from the game companies to the gamers.
Gaming sites and magazines make money by telling the public about the hype coming from the gaming companies so it's hard to imagine these sites and magazines setting forth a set of standards and expectations for information from the gaming companies that does much to ensure accountability and accuracy, and to quell the premature explosion of information.
And until then, this issue will assuredly be left unchecked.
To be frank, you cant un-make this development anymore. Its a one-way street. Or rather, it would take so much time, and a lot of failing MMOs, messy betas and remarkably wise and selfless business decisions for the good of the industry to undo the damage done already, before people change their now-confirmed views.
Which nobody will do.
The best way to fix it is to go ahead, take the current situation, and build on it.
As an example, screw the whole "alpha, beta, open beta, closed beta, internal beta, pre-alpha" terminology, at least for your marketing purposes. Have the current style of "beta" as a free demo, which it already is, and put a lengthy ALPHA before it, where people can join in small numbers to selectively test certain features..... you know, like a beta used to be.
By re-inventing the alpha as a process open to the playerbase, you can set the rules, and test your unfinished, buggy product, without losing the hype of the beta.
Also, about marketing and hype, the problem is that very likely the interest of those putting money on the table are not long-term. They MUCH MUCH MUCH prefer, as anyone with a bit of experience in finance can tell you and probably quickly explain, a big launch, fat payday, and then get the hell out before the ship starts sinking. The shorter the wait for the pay-off, the better. Those who profit from longevity are the company itself (which is just a vehicle to get more money for most investors) and the people working there.
However, reality today demands that its virtually unavoidable to lose a lot of control over your game if you want to make a big MMORPG, simply because you need so much external funding, which comes from people with different aims.
There have been people who got rich on Age of Conan, who got rich on WAR, and who got out in time. They would do the same thing again with the next game they can jump on, most likely. These games are not failures, financially speaking, for those who got out in time.
Learn 2 Read
So what are the answers to managing expectations? Both players and marketing divisions can play a role in rolling back the damage that is caused by early over-hype. I will start with the players:
Keep in mind that game companies are really trying to make the best game they can, or at least the developers are. Remember that almost every developer out there is also a gamer at heart and that they want to make games they like to play. So as a player stick with them, trust them. I am not talking about trusting the corporate monsters, business people, or investors. I am talking about trusting your developers. Also if you are lucky enough to get into a beta test early on, take it seriously. Give as much feedback as you can. Use your beta key to help make a better game. Okay, they may not listen, but you do have their ear with a beta key, hopefully they will.
Thanks. but don't need to learn to read, but should have read it better.
Because if games werent hyped we wouldnt make any money as Gaming journalist perhaps?
Nice topic GFuller!!
And therein lies the problem - game journalism is mostly limited to following the hype and act as a mere extension of the industry. Articles like this as well as the rest of the columns are, imho, a good step towards countering the 'traditional' status of gaming journalism, although they need to follow the arguments a bit deeper. Like this article, for example, opened a good topic of discussion but I felt it could've said quite a lot more, and after a solid introduction it sort of suddenly fell quiet.
It's OK to point fingers and all, you know. Like what Cryptic did with the Lifetime membership of Champions: offer betas for a game (Star Trek) surely to make an impact on the gaming community (sections of which might not necessarily be geeky) and make a profit based on the new idea that beta test is basically "play the game early" and no longer a real test. I know of a lot of people who bought the lifetime sub to Champs just because of the Star Trek thing, and not because of the game per se. Beta, turned into a noun and no longer an adjective of 'test', has become a marketing aspect, but the problem with it is that it seems that no one has told the developers of games themselves yet, and they continue to treat it as test, tweaking things and changing the gameplay oftentimes considerably to the detriment of those silly people who were just in to try the game out for free, who, usually, complain to no end in forums like these. What they need to do is create a sort of 'limited-time free trial' just after launch to appeal to all those people while at the same time being more careful about their tests.
Following that same example, people, including reviewers, therefore tend to fall into the trap and violently react to any wide change made to the game during beta test in the silliest manners possible; the Gamespy review of Champions was riddled with stuff only those 'I'm playing the game early' people would be concerned over, like the launch day patch that made mobs harder. Instead of giving a decent overview of the game, its aims, the design choices, the possible meaning it might all have in your life ('will I become addicted to boredom and play 5 hours a day even when I don't like it, like WoW?'), the review was just kind of a short rant about a before that didn't even EXIST for players who bought the game when it launched and an after that is actually the more realistic standard measure for an evaluation.
Gaming journalism is almost an oxymoron. A lot of the sites live off revenue from the very games they are reviewing make it almost impossible to get an unbiased opinion. They don't spend enough time with the game, rarely seem to write about release day bugs that everyone else manages to run into within a couple of hours, completely gloss over DRM issues (obviously not an issue with MMOs), and hardly ever talk about prince. Gaming corp. has set prices and for some reason, gaming journalist gobble it up without question. (obviously there are exceptions, especially the sites that don't advertise as heavily as say IGN and Gamespot).
I think the real problem with MMO hypes though is that at the beginning, publishers/developers list all these features that are supposed to make their game so much different from all the other games already out there, and then the beta comes and most of those features are removed giving you the same cookie cutter game that is already out there. If you are going too base your entire game on wars between realms, you better make sure that that feature actually works. I don't think it is a failing on the player side to expect that a primary feature of a game actually be implemented and work on day one. Or how about actually listening to beta testers. I've been in a handful of beta's. None of those games listen much to feedback and you see the exact same bugs that showed up months ago in the beta months later after release day.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.