Call of Duty: Black Ops (classmate and outsider link)

Hello guys, this last post will be dedicated to Call of Duty: Black Ops

An amazing game, the Call of Duty game line keeps providing good quality games, with consistently good (yet somewhat cheesy) story lines, graphics, and game play. This week however, I wanted to focus not on the game, but on opportunities games like this create. In this case, the opportunity presented itself to Jeep. This first came to my attention by reading a friend of mine's post, you can check what he has to say about this jeep here: http://blogs.ubc.ca/alexmk/2010/11/07/gaming-and-reality/


While Alex finds the approach an interesting, new way of marketing for games, I beg to differ.

               I think it is really interesting for a video game to inspire production for a real car. It seems somewhat ineffective, in my opinion, to release a vehicle targeted at video gamers. The main reason being: its a CAR YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT! Sure, it is pretty cool to buy a wrangler designed after a game, but as far as buying it just because it is, for all intents and purposes, named after a game... come on! The car and the game have nothing in common except the name. Sure I would consider buying it if I liked wranglers, but I would never factor in video games in my car-purchasing decision. Ever.

The following blog writes states that: "
While labelling yourself as 'hardcore' may equate to having built an enviable online kill count or gathering hundreds of gameplay hours, we here at The Tech Herald believe you're not quite as hardcore as you think.
More pointedly, truly hardcore Call of Duty fans will be looking to order themselves a swanky and strictly limited edition Black Ops-themed Jeep Wrangler, which costs a pocket-testing $30,000 USD and comes equipped with special Call of Duty design features."

While I agree that extremely hardcore COD fans with $30k to spend might buy this vehicle, I should not have been geared towards gamers. The possibilities and rewards could be much higher in other market segments, and even though the idea is cool, and I would like to see more products based on video games, I don't believe a car would be a good idea for a promotion strategy.

If you're interested in finding out more about the specs and prices and what-not, check out this guy's blog: http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201042/6310/Black-Ops-Jeep-Wrangler-caters-to-Call-of-Duty-hardcore

Minecraft, a strange game (classmate link)

Hey guys, today I wanted to talk about a very strange game: Minecraft.

Minecraft is not actually a game in the sense that it has no storyline, no characters, no objectives, nothing.
Just as me, you may be thinking, well, why is it popular then? Minecraft is nothing more than a sandbox, where the main and basically only feature is construction. The game has no manual, tutorial or any other kind of learning experience for the player, it simply shoves you into the world and you need to fend for yourself. There is only one thing to do, mine caves. Players mine caves, and can then use the materials gathered to build anything they want. The possibilities are quite limited as far as material options goes, but hey, if you want to build a giant castle out of nothing but rock you don't really need much else but... well, rocks. The game has graphics worthy of a 1989 video game, and a basically non-existent physics engine, with nothing but basic water interaction, and not much else, it astounds me how this game has become so popular.



The creator of the game took a week to develop it, were talking about one man, and 7 days to produce a game, and yet it has over 700,000 customers who have all paid $15 to play this game. Now, I will concede to the creator that the game is put simply, fun. Building things is very fun, and very rewarding if you mined every single one of your two thousand square blocks to build your castle, the game does provide a sense of self-fulfillment and I have seen very impressive works of art made in-game. However, I do not believe this game gets even close to being worth $15, and it amazes me that so many people have bought it, a crappy, empty game. I would also like to take the opportunity to link to Calvin's blog, where he has some intersting thisngs to say about pricing strategies:  http://blogs.ubc.ca/calvinkwok/2010/11/12/43/

Anyway, the point I wanted to make is, even though this game has had no advertisements, no marketing campaign. The only two things this game relied on to get popular was product and price. The product, we have established, is... crappy. Entertaining, but crappy, very crappy. Why oh why would a crappy game charge $15, are they crazy? Well, what I believe is that this is actually the reason the game became popular. By slapping a $15 price tag on it, consumers automatically assume a certain level of quality. This makes the game stand out from the rest of the crappy, independent games, and then keeps its fan base by providing a virtual Lego game, where you mine your own Lego blocks. As you can see from the image above, Lego Rock Raiders, a game quite similar in some ways to Minecraft, had better graphics, and it was released more than 10 years ago.




In short, did not like this game at all and I think it is nowhere near deserving of the amount of money it has made.

Cataclysm

Free MMOS: Vindictus (Mabinogi Heroes)

    Ok guys, todays post will be about Free MMORPGs vs Pay-to play MMORPGs. To those who dont know what the hell I'm talking about, MMORPG stands for massive multiplayer online roleplaying game. Games such as World of Warcraft, Silkroad and Guild Wars are classified as MMORPGs. The wikipedia definition for MMORPG is: "is a genre of computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world. As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a character (often in a fantasy world) and take control over many of that character's actions.^[1] MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player RPGs by the number of players, and by the game's persistent world, usually hosted by the game's publisher, which continues to exist and evolve while the player is away from the game."
They can then be classified as FTP(free to play) or PTP (pay to play) on the basis of whether or not the game has a monthly fee.

While, both free and pay-to-play games are popular, the crowds that play them are worlds apart. In general, the Asian community prefers FTP, while the American commuity prefers PTP. It has come to such an extent that FTP games in Asia are PTP in America. Why would a company spend millions of dollars developing a game and then make it free to play? Well, they can count on more players trying them out, since they are risk-free, and have a wide range of options unlocked just because of this. Many rely on advertising, others make it so the game is free, but certain special items can only acquired by purchasing online. 

I have found that in America, free to play games are usually not even considered on the basis that since they are free, they are of poor quality. Asian FTP games have fought against this stereotype for years, and I believe FTP games are becoming more popular and in some instances are even better than their PTP counterparts, the example I wanted to give was Vindictus, a prequel to the popular FTP MMO Mabinogi. The game was released about 2 weeks ago, and I must say, they outdid themselves. The graphics are exceptional, the game play intense and the story deep, nay, epic. Now, I'm almost ashamed to admit I believed FTP games were inferior.

Diablo III

Hey guys!

So something really cool happened this week, the last class for Diablo was announced at Blizzcon! That's right Diablo fans, the classes will be: Monk, Barbarian, Wizard, Demon Hunter and Witch Doctor. Really cool stuff!

Now for the fun part (I know right?, marketing=fun!). I was looking at some old posts about what the 5th class was, so at this time, nobody knew what Blizz had cooking at the time, and I noticed that Blizzard has slowly but surely released classes for 2 years. The game has been in development since 2001, that's 9 years ago! Now, i want to set aside all the other things Blizzard has done to promote D3, and focus solely on the strategic release of characters. Yup, you heard me, the order of release is in fact, marketing. If we look at the order these classes were revealed in, we can notice a couple things: The Barbarian and the Witch Doctor were both revealed when the game was announced in June, 2008. So we have a re-hash from D2, and a completely new class revealed together. Next comes the Wizard, announced in Blizzcon 2008, a ranged magical user. We have the Monk a year later at Blizzcon 2009, the game's second melee class. And finally, we have the Demon Hunter at Blizzcon 2010. So Blizzard reveals 2 when the game comes out, and then one for each Blizzcon after.

The way I see this, Blizzard is trying to keep all kinds of players interested. They release a Melee and Hybrid first, then Caster, then Melee, and then Ranged. Releasing so far apart also entails marketing, raising the hype as much as possible, and rewarding those who stay on top of the game with periodic information about the upcoming game is enough to make hardcore fans crawl. I even read about this guy who created an algorithm or some other nerdy thing so he could estimate the number of letters in the 5th class' name based on the space taken by the tabs of the the other classes on the D3 webiste, what did I just say about crawling?

Starcraft 2

          Now its time to talk about one of my favorite games of all time, Starcraft 2. Yes, this is a relatively new game, but it has already nested deep within my heart to be considered one of the best RTS games of all time. The game shows quality in both graphics and game play, its is amazingly balanced for a game with 3 completely different races, and most importantly, like is predecessor, it takes strategic thinking to the next level. This game is like chess on steroids with a depth so intense, it is mind blowing.
         How did Blizzard achieve this? We will be recurring to the theme of quality related to production time when we talk about blizzard games. It took them 10 years to release this game after the original Starcraft came out, and with good reason, the balancing, graphics and just general quality are impressive and something that I consider deserves a good amount of respect. Time and time again we have seen companies that have great game ideas, but fail in the quality front, but lets not mention any names *cough*EA*cough*. This recurrent theme of quality differentiates Blizzard from other companies and greatly increases consumer loyalty. This makes any new game Blizzard launches and instant success, why? Because everyone knows its going to be a good game. Take me, for example, I never played Diablo and mildly enjoyed the second, but as things are now, as soon as that Diablo3 launches, I'm buying it no questions asked.

Halo Reach

Okay, so this weeks post will be about the new Halo game series that seems to be on everyone's mind: Reach

    I actually had a chance to try out this game yesterday, my roomate brought it over from his place and we sat down and played for about 2 hours, and I have to say guys.... Its just like Halo1,2 or 3. So far, I have not seen anything but a few new weapons and enemies, which got me thinking.... why is this game so popular? Most of my friends are going crazy about it and I do not see any original ideas going into this project. This brings us over to the task that is forcibly imposed on me: tying this in to marketing. Okay, so why would Bungie, a respectable video game company put so little effort into this game? In my personal opinion, Bungie was simply trying to squeeze out a few more buck for their successful Halo franchise, building on a already depleted storyline with minimal effort in making it feel fresh because the brand is already popular. It then follows that in the public eye, the game promises as much freshness as the first three, but the game does not deliver, in my opinion at least. Any other games out there you guys feel fit the description of the "cash cow" franchise? Post it here!

Blizzard INC

Hey guys, Daniel here!

      I wanted to start a blog about Blizzard, the video game company. It seems only yesterday when Blizzard started launching quality games that were not as widespread as today's. We all remember Warcraft 1 and 2, Diablo, Starcraft amongst others not quite as massive as the ones we know today. World of Warcraft, with its 4 Million subscribers has a larger population than my home country of Costa Rica. Starcraft 2 has about 6 Million sales at this moment, and I wanted to ask you guys... what has changed between those good games of old and the new-era versions? Is it the industry as a whole? Mostly the company itself, perhaps? What makes Blizzard such a successful video game company?