Gaming Insider

Two weeks ago, Valve Software released — to critical and popular acclaim — the highly anticipated sequel to its comedic first-person puzzle game, Portal. The game was originally scheduled to launch on the digital distribution platform, Steam, on Tuesday, April 19, in the early morning. But it ended up being released nine and a half hours earlier as part of a promotional augmented reality game (ARG) designed by Valve and a group of indie game developers.

One of the indie developers, Rob Jagnow, has a lengthy discussion on Gamasutra of the entire ARG, the highs and the lows, and how Valve and its indie partners brought it all together. The concept of the ARG was simple — after solving a series of challenging puzzles that involved both online and offline locations, players discovered that GLaDOS, the villainous AI from the first Portal game, had infiltrated Steam’s servers and infected a set of indie games — conveniently sold as a bundle for the duration of the promotion — and was using the computers playing the games to power back up for her return in Portal 2. Players could speed up GLaDOS’s return (and therefore the release of Portal 2) by playing these indie games — each 48 hours played moved the progress bar 1%, and when the bar reached 100%, the game would be released on Steam, regardless of whether or not the retail street date had hit. In each of the indie games “infected,” the developers added special Portal content — mostly in the form of GLaDOS showing up.

Jagnow goes into the successes and failures of the ARG, with a few key takeaways for marketers who are looking to leverage a passionate fan base in the lead-up to a big release:

1. Give your promotional partners lots of creative freedom: Valve worked with some of the best indie developers in the world on this promotion, and knew that if they got creative freedom to use the Portal 2 IP, they would do great things. This required a leap of faith on the part of the Valve team — a leap most companies couldn’t make without locking their legal team in a closet for the duration. But great creative work doesn’t happen without taking some risks.

2. Make your consumers part of the experience: When we plan campaigns, often we want the plan to be fixed before launch — and after launch, to stick as closely to the plan as possible. But to allow for true interactivity, that isn’t really possible. As Valve’s players solved the initial set of puzzles, Valve watched very closely to see what they were doing and who was doing what, and then altered its promotional materials to weave the players’ user names and activities into the overall story. This made the players feel like they were part of a story rather than part of a promotional campaign.

3. Give the power to your fans: The payoff of the ARG was that Valve actually let fans affect the release date of its game. That isn’t a small thing — street dates for video games, especially games that are also being distributed digitally, are the culmination of multimillion dollar promotional campaigns, aimed at drilling the buy-it call-to-action into the heads of as many consumers as possible. By letting fans call an audible, Valve took a risk, but that gave its consumers the chance to feel in control. If Valve had tried to somehow fake it, that would have been found out, and the goodwill generated would have been totally reversed.

Overall, the Portal 2 launch campaign was a great exemplar of the ARG category, and has tons of great lessons for marketers. I highly recommend the full article at Gamasutra (here’s the link again), and if you haven’t played Portal, you should take off for the weekend early and pick it up on the way home.

This week, photo-sharing start-up Color made huge news by securing a boatload of venture capital, banking on the idea that people in close proximity to one another will want to share photos. CEO Dan Nguyen said that Color was designed to be used with groups, but its effect is often to connect strangers through their photos on their mobile phones.

Connecting strangers through an Internet connection has, in the past, gone terribly wrong. Take Chatroulette as an obvious example, where the service could not be used without encountering an anonymous man exposing himself on your screen.

Despite its pitfalls, there was something extremely powerful about connecting with a stranger, webcam-to-webcame, and Nguyen’s startup takes advantage of that draw while decreasing the risk of inappropriate conduct with two methods. The first: by adding proximity as an element that dilutes the anonymity of the interaction, thus decreasing the likelihood of bad behavior. The second, by further structuring the type of communication allowed — although it’s pretty easy to be offensive with a single image, it’s still a bit harder than it is through video with a full audio connection.

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Great news for people who love birds and hate pigs: this week Rovio, developer of some of the top iPhone games, announced that it’s bringing its marquee title “Angry Birds” to Facebook, adding in new features to make the game social-network-friendly.

Rovio’s top bird, Peter Vesterbacka, told The Next Web that the release was targeted for May, and that the Facebook version would have a more “collaborative nature” and give a larger role to the villains of the iPhone game, the pigs. “Angry Birds has taken the world of iPhone gaming, and indeed mobile gaming, by storm — Rovio reported last month that 200 million minutes of the game are played every day, and the game generates $1 million per month in ad revenue.

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Not everyone is the biggest fan of Farmville, Frontierville, Cityville and the like — at the very least, if you don’t play them, you’ve almost certainly hidden them from your newsfeed to avoid the constant requests. But one indie developer, Jonathan Blow, creator of the innovative platform/puzzle game “Braid”, takes this idea a little bit further. In an interview with PC Gamer magazine,the developer described the way social games on Facebook ask you to tap your friend list as an in-game resource as “evil.”

Above: Farmville is a popular Facebook game developed by Zynga.

“There’s no other word for it except evil. Of course you can debate anything, but the general definition of evil in the real world, where there isn’t… the villain in the mountain fortress, is selfishness to the detriment of others or to the detriment of the world. And that’s exactly what [most of these games are],” Blow told PC Gamer.

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Steam’s fastest-selling new release this month isn’t EA’s much-hyped Dead Space 2 (whose “Your Mom Will Hate It” ad campaign is a little puzzling for a game targeted at players aged 17+), but an indie title, Magicka, developed by Swedish firm Arrowhead Games. The startling success of Magicka is a continuing part of the rise of indie game developers who, while not having multimillion-dollar project budgets, nonetheless manage to create compelling and innovative games, avoiding the pitfalls of genre and industry tropes that often bedevil big-name triple-A titles from major publishers like EA and Activision.

What can marketers take away from the success of these indie titles? Why do gamers advocate so much more strongly for a game like Magick” than they do for more mainstream material? What drives this behavior, at least in part, is a feeling of ownership. Players who try out Magicka and sell it to their friends feel as if they partially own the success of the title; they’re part of the magic (no pun intended) that Magicka brings to its fans.

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Earlier this month, Microsoft hosted several press events to introduce its Kinect motion control product to fashion and lifestyle press and bloggers, aiming squarely at the casual set to sell its $200 competitor to Nintendo’s profitable domination of the casual console market.The message Microsoft wanted to send was that Kinect was for the cool kids, and decidedly not its core gamer audience. AtomicPC was at the event, and reported that Microsoft’s director of entertainment and devices, David McLean, quipped to his audience “Gaming’s not just for sweaty thirty year olds in Metallica t-shirts,” among other digs at “basement-dwelling nerds” and “impenetrable control schemes.”

The core gamer community’s reaction has been extremely negative. Atomic PC’s writer on the scene said “It’s a doubly galling revelation. For one, it takes the scales from one’s eyes in regards to how Microsoft regards the gaming audience, and secondly it seems to give a flying middle finger to our community’s ongoing effort to improve game ratings and censorship. There’s a huge movement desperately trying to educate government and society at large that gamers are, in a very real sense, everyone; while Microsoft at least gets the age thing right, reducing gamers to the image of barely socialised troglodytes doesn’t do anyone any favours.”

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“Gaming has come of age,” and is no longer confined to “Joystick-obsessed guys who once hunkered down in basements for hours,” Adweek declares in this week’s Digital Special Issue looking at the hobby in depth.

Despite the fact that Adweek also said that in 2009, there’s no doubt that today, gaming is fertile ground for marketers to reach consumers across numerous demographics in innovative and engaging ways. It seems like every month there’s a new study that aims to break our assumptions about who gamers are (the audience is older than you think and skews more female than you think), and the proliferation of mobile devices as gaming platforms means that more and more of people’s idle time is now spent gaming – which, for a savvy marketer, is an opportunity to reach people.

Adweek’s special issue is packed with some great insights into gaming culture and opportunities for marketers that are definitely worth checking out. Below we recap a handful of articles from the issue.

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