Feldon NOTE: This is a commentary piece by Morgan Feldon and is not intended to reflect the opinion of anyone else.
In recent years, it seems like there is a special day for just about everything. Grandparents Day, Office Assistant day, Take Your Ferret to Work Day (ok maybe I made that one up), you get the point. In that spirit, we’d like to declare September 15th as Justify Your Marketing Department Day.
The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yet despite a decade of numerous debacles which we have thoroughly chronicled on EQ2Wire, the SOE/Daybreak Marketing Dept seems to have once again shoehorned their way into the decision-making process for EverQuest II’s next expansion and diminished any chance for pre-expansion hype, interviews, previews, commentary, etc.
Instead of an already overdue full reveal of the expansion as we were expecting today, it seems clear after reading today’s EQ2 Producer’s Letter that the EQ2 team have been asked to post a watered down teaser. The timetable seems to have been revised so that EverQuest II’s twelfth expansion will be revealed and go on sale (pre-order) all on October 1st. As we’ve seen over the years, SOE/DGC Marketing’s modus operandi is to punt until the last possible second and then hope Press sites will carry the flag and do all the promotion, never mind that this approach is less effective for established games like EverQuest II.
Marketing’s all-hands-on-deck call for Press sites to talk about this spring’s Rum Cellar Campaign yielded the usual suspects — Massively, MMORPG, and ZAM. These are sites that would write about EQ2 whether they got invited by SOE/DGC’s finicky Marketing/PR departments or not. However this summer, with absolutely no involvement from Marketing, the introduction of a Drunder “prison server” to EQ2 attracted the attention of no less than 21 media and press sites.
In eight years of covering EQ2, I cannot immediately recall an occasion where SOE/DGC’s Marketing Department has proven beneficial to either players or developers of EverQuest II. That is quite a track record, yet every year, Marketing is given full ownership and frightening control over product launches and messaging, despite demonstrating an almost monumental inability to do so.
In the last 10 years, SOE/Daybreak as a company has shrunk by 2/3rds. This should call for an immediate audit of all past practices and policies that have gotten us to this point. All options for improvement should be on the table. It’s not enough for Daybreak to SAY it’s a new company and then still act like a lumbering corporate troglodyte. It must actually make changes more in tune with Indie development. That means letting the game teams talk to the public and build up hype and momentum for content releases. An October 1st announcement date greatly diminishes that.
The EQ2 team have been working late nights and weekends to bring players what we want, while marketing kicks back with mai tais and keeps it 9 to 5. I leave you with this Dilbert comic that sums up my opinion:
Wait, DaybreakOE has a Marketing department? How come you never see them doing any, y’know, actual marketing for the game, hmm?
Right on the money.
As dear as I hold EQ2, i agree that marketing has done more of a disservice to Everquest’s brand than anything else.
It’s due time to rattle the system and do some internal changes to the culprits in order to make Everquest and Everquest 2 a more enjoyable playing experience for developers and consumers alike.
sheesh, sounds like they took lessons from Bioware and Star Wars : the Old Republic —- it’s 1 month and 5 days till early release, and we’ve heard nothing (what we’ve heard mostly from has been datamined; and we all know how accurate that is .. ) — teasers, nothing more —
so EQ2 is not alone in that approach
I cannot fault the analysis, at the very least trying something different would be a more promising option.
It seems like every company wants to emulate the practices (as they see it) of the big corporate companies, yet most corporate companies are lumbering stodgy unprofitable outfits. It would be refreshing if we say Daybreak just sit down and work out what would interest them and make a jump to assume that will interest their audience too.
As far as I can tell marketing there has been about being years behind and just copying what anyone else is doing when they do move.
I’d put all my effort into streamers honestly. Weekly promotions where people streaming will get in game rewards. ‘Featured’ streamers selected by the company and showcased on the EQ2 site itself. Regular interviews of streamers by the staff during the players stream session. Putting out the overall feeling that If you stream EQ2 enough, you will get attention.
I was hoping that the move away from Sony and Smed leaving would actually change things. Where do you find a CEO nowadays that thinks marketing is unimportant? Are there special recruiters specialized in finding these rare creatures?
Advertisements and promotions DO work. I’m living proof. I started playing EQ2 after buying “The Shattered Lands” with Coke Points way back in 2006 during a long and dreary winter.
You can see enfeebled attempts to create low cost/high yield “viral marketing” with the inclusion of some social media tools and video recording technology. But ultimately those are limited as the player base is small and the not terribly interactive being such a long established community, it’s mostly formed into cliques and the outcome of “social media” interacts mostly with other players.
I’m neither saying nor suggesting a multi million dollar ad campaign is needed, but surely we can do better than what we’ve seen over the bulk of the past decade. Hell, just ask for some fucking suggestions on the forum, people love the game and would punt suggestions for free that any scam business would also come up with for a hell of a lot more money.
Nothing wrong with marketing…as long as it isn’t corrupt. SoE/DBG still has a lot of self serving cronies left in it’s company. Smedley is gone, but his friends he put in these positions still exist. They always had bad marketing. I don’t remember when they did have good marketing. Just take a look at the most viewed EQNext video on YouTube. It only has 870,000 views…in the past two years. That’s not god. That says how unknown the EQ franchise has become.
You don’t even need marketing because let’s be real here – outside of WoW does any MMO really market its self anymore? What Daybreak REALLY needs to do and have needed to do for so many years (when it was SOE) is to be transparent with their customers. Give them all the information regarding everything especially new content. Changes being made should always be explained and feedback should be welcomed. Instead, things are snuck in without warning, new content is announced at the last second, and big changes to the game are rarely announced and when questioned you never get any answers.
Just be more transparent Daybreak. Tell your customers what’s really going on.
Guild Wars 2 markets their stuff, with advertisements on youtube and elsewhere.
Dilbert is probably a patron saint of dev.
If you get everything with a pre-order of the expansion, why would you buy AoM and Rum Celler on sale now? I’m guessing it would be to get the collector’s edition items. But if you don’t want those, what possible reason would there be to buy that on sale now when it comes with the expansion for free?
Am I missing something?
In the spirit of transparency, here’s some of the current marketing people at Daybreak Games:
Candace Brenner
https://www.linkedin.com/in/candacebrenner
http://www.alistdaily.com/news/interview-daybreaks-candace-brenner-talks-gaming-independence
Senior Director of Global Brand Marketing Daybreak Games
James Floyd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesafloyd
Associate Brand Manager Daybreak Games
Ryan Hilz
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ryan-hilz/1a/355/a78?trk=seokp-title_posts_secondary_cluster_res_author_name
Global Brand Manager at Daybreak Games
Laura Naviaux
http://www.gamemarketingsummit.com/gms-board/laura-naviaux/
Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing Daybreak Games
Daniel Talavera
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieltalavera
Email Marketing Manager Daybreak Games
Might as well give credit where credit is due. 😉
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“This is the entertainment industry, so game designers have to have a creative mind and also have to be able to stand up against the marketing people at their company – otherwise they cannot be creative.”
Shigeru Miyamoto
I fully agree with you Feldon (once more 🙂 I told approximately the same thing on my site http://www.guerrier-celeste.fr/48-frontnews/533-il-y-aura-une-extension-12.html yesterday evening (late in the night in fact) but with less talent (sorry you’ll remain my mentor for still some years …).
As I am used too I will translate your article on http://www.guerrier-celeste.fr as soon as possible.
for @ Katz : you did not mess anything I pointed it too yesterday :
I honestly have no clue how EQ2 can even be marketed outside of its audience. New players seem a rarity. And hype seems to be low even with new xpacs.
What I want to see is just a time table they will try to stick too.
So, they can go “You get 1 DLC a year which is a small one consisting of x many zones, y many collections with an overall reward, Z many quests, a merchant for things and new ways to earn ferrin” and “You get 1 xpac a year, which is a large DLC, advances the story, adds x many new overlands, x many new instances, x many new raids, new currancy, new aa” etc.
Right now, is Rum Cellar a flash in the pain or a sign of continuing DLCs?
It was a one off adventure pack. Expansions are back, baby!
I dislike. I was really hoping for 1 Adventure Pack sized xpac. 1 fabled dungeons sized free update. Then 1 Xpac.
Then on top of that, I would like the Adventure Packs to be pushed a little in terms of stuff and build up. Like, another class defining ability would be nice. Not something horrifically OP but something like Bloodline giving Devastation Fist and world events building up to it.
I want a pony.
Talk to Qho.
You mean ..
*Ragefilled voice* Qhooooooooooooooo
It’s actually Qhoda, and he uses Jedi mind tricks to get you to harvest for him.
“Bring me raw materials you will.
Pony you shall have.
Yes… hmmm.”
Here is an idea on how to market EQ2 and hit their target audience:
Gaming PC’s. Gamers buy them and build them. If components or builds came with x% off the latest X-pac, or x# of Krono’s, or free Heroic character… when you buy this product- even if they buy another product they saw the offer. the brand gets seen.
Just gotta partner with some one. I see an invida logo when I log in. Why not cross promote?
There are tons of great ideas out there. Just none in there
Except then some would complain: “Oh the irony, bundling EQ2 with a gaming PC which runs EQ2 barely better than a 5 year old office desktop.” 😉
Have you seen some of the machines gamers build to play minecraft on?
Retro gaming is a big deal. My son and his friends go nuts at the pawn shops and flea markets for old game systems and sidescroller games.
DBG has plenty of modern games as well that could benefit from the marketing of EQ2 (and vice versa)
Brand recognition works long term not just for yearly xpac sales.
As bemused as I have been over the years when it comes to some of SOE’s marketing ventures, and keeping in mind their long record of running hot and cold when it comes to their most loyal fan sites, I am not sure I am seeing enough there to agree without question that the “EQ2 team have been muzzled” in any new or special way when it comes to this announcement.
We have a history of SOE/DGC waiting until late in the year to announce the inevitable November expansion. We can go back and find producer’s letters where somebody belatidly admitted that yes, there would be an expansion, details to come. But there is also the reality of their sales channel, wherein only the latest expansion is worth buying and bundles everything that came before into it. This hint before the announcement gives them a chance to drive some sales of the deluxe version of the Altar of Malice expansion for those who want the special bits.
Which is I guess is more saying that the EQ2 team, or any team at SOE, has always been muzzled as opposed to this being any sort of special occasion. To come back to RadarX’s comment on on Twitter, yes the company has been Daybreak for seven months now, but the shadow and the culture and the habits of SOE still seem to remain, regardless of their newfound opportunity to publish games on the XBox One. If there is one thing I have learned over the decades, it is that culture eats change for breakfast.
So I suppose I don’t necessarily disagree with you so much as I cannot build up the emotion to get angry about the continiation of longstanding and often pointless tradition.
But if you want to get out the torches and pitchforks over who thought Adventure Packs would be a good idea the second time around, I’ll join in! Can we pin that on marketing?
Fan Faire / SOE Live has had a way of forcing disclosure of EQ2’s expansions, although as you say details like pricing tend to drag out until the last possible moment. On balance, the article was pretty tough just based on this one event. It was more a cumulative reaction. And as RadarX told us, we can be held accountable for cumulative action.
You hit the nail on the head with this article, Feldon. Well done.
In over a decade, I have NEVER seen any EverQuest 2 advertising, anywhere. There should be paid advertising all over the place, certainly banner ads on any and all gaming sites, but also TV ads. Some dinky, crap-to-play PHONE APPS are doing big TV ads!
On the other hand, ad blocking is the new god, including for phones. Users are going pretty Howard Beale* and becoming much less tolerant of display ads. That suggests this marketing department would have to be — uh-oh — creative, rather than just create ads and buy placement. As it is…
*http://tinyurl.com/qd3rnkp