Game Branding
An Editorial discussing the many ways franchises attempt to secure their place in the market
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.
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Mar 8, 2011 10:39:13 (Mar 8, 2011 10:39)
