Game Branding
Posted by
Nechrol
on
Games are like breakfast cereals at a supermarket. You have your long established brands that offer their pillars of the morning food industry, like Nintendo, Bethesda, Bioware, to name a few recognizable ones. You’re most probably aware of their back catalog, the releases that basically support the brand as a whole.
While these companies bring out more improved versions every couple of years or so, with improved sugar, more space marines, 30% more side-boob, you pretty much know what you’re buying. And you hope it tastes as good as it did before, though you only really know when spooning it into your mouth. Will the sugar make it even sweeter, or does it harbor the risk of dissolving your molars like a spoonful of acid? Either way, they’re guaranteed that it’ll fly off the shelves.
Sometimes these companies will stray from cereal (we’re staying with this analogy) and release, say, a breakfast bar which could be a portable spinoff or a Facebook game. You may think it won’t be as good, such as Castlevania Judgment, DOA: Extreme Beach Volleyball in which case you can shrug it off and promise you won’t do it again.
Others might take off and create a whole new kind of cereal beast that eventually becomes a brand in its own right like Portal or WOW. When that happens, you know you’ve made it. That sweat cereal cash cow that spurts money from its udders to splash the faces of executives on a beach somewhere is something you could happily retire on.
In rare instances a type of cereal can appear on the shelves out of nowhere and became a sensation seemingly overnight. This would be games like Minecraft or Angry Birds to name but two. These phenomena can drop on some people a little late and are duly met with such disdain by those who have been playing them since the alpha release. It solicits the sort of pent up anger akin to some users wanting to reach in through their monitors and throttle you for being so technologically unsavvy. Like a backwards caveman that just discovered fire while the rest of the tribe are all off barbecuing a woolly mammoth. No one wants to be that guy.
Other times your brand is on the wane and the old formula that once nourished the populace now tastes bitter and dated. Like when you forget to close a packet of potato chips and they go all weird and soft. No one enjoys that.
So what do you do? You could try the breakfast bar route, creating subpar games in an attempt to resuscitate a dying franchise. Oh, that failed? Maybe you could re-launch the game in shiny new packaging, talking about how you’ve ‘gone back to our roots on this one’ when in fact you’ve done nothing except give it a facelift. A bad one, so that the eyebrows are stuck to your hairline and your cheeks now occupy your eye sockets. Sonic Unleashed…
The product’s still dying though, its pulse is weakening; you could pull the plug, say it had a good ride and will be dearly missed. Or. OR! You could perhaps merge it will another very popular product that has stood the test of time, a little man with a mustache who has penchant for Princesses. There’s Sonic and Mario at the Olympic Winter Games for you.
Then, in an insane move you choose to go into the business of creating industrial landfill material and spit out Sonic Free Riders like the dying hairball hacked up by a freshly run over cat. A harsh analogy I know but scarily appropriate, like going to a circus performers funeral dressed as a clown.
So, you stand broken, gazing at your adulterated product. It doesn’t even look like itself anymore. There’s torn packaging from where you’d cut corners. Mismatched and cross pollinated it tastes like spooning handfuls of your own wasted time and money mixed with sewage into your mouth. The salt from your tears perhaps adding the slightest hint of flavour.
In the end you’re stood clawing at the dust of the projects crushed dreams and food colorant with your sore and sweaty hands. You think the shear crushing pain of this failed endeavor that has come crashing down on you like anvils full of angry review websites and magazines would be punishment itself.
It isn’t.
You are now forced by the company’s executive to go around to the forty people that actually bought your game and let them dropkick you in the crotch. Only then will you have truly learned your lesson. That is, until you get the green light to start on Sonic Free Riders 2.
One more thing, I’m not directing all this unbridled hate at Sonic, more so at the industry that perpetuates his continued existence. There’s flogging a dead horse and then there’s continually hammering it to the point where it’s reached an atomic state.
You’re certainly not the only franchise guilty of it. Look at Mario, the man has so many jobs and commitments that the stress of it all is probably getting to him. I wouldn’t be surprised if his next Wii incarnation is one where you get to hang him using the Wiimote to tie the noose and push the chair away. He isn’t even a real Doctor!
To reiterate, I love you Sonic, I really do. It’s just soon I feel like I’ll have to break into that assisted living facility you’re trapped in and smother you with Tails while weeping about the death of my childhood.