Monday, April 12, 2010

Can Word of Mouth Really Help?

On last week's episode of The Multiverse (where they also gave me a rather generous shout-out, thanks guys), Riknas' rant focuses on unknown free to play developers. As he says, some of the smaller - and most successful - free to play games are being made by studios that no one has heard of. Chris adds that, for players, supporting studios that we haven't heard of is the only way to drive real change. I don't disagree with either sentiment, but allow me to play devil's advocate.

Over the weekend, I got an out-of-the-blue apology email from a longtime commenter who felt in hindsight that he'd given me too much of a hard time for my take on his favorite MMO. The email said that he felt that defending the game against blog comments was necessary - i.e. that, if untrue claims were not countered, they could drive off new players and ultimately hurt the success of the game and its ability to continue. Personally, I don't think that any such apology is really needed - comes with the territory of expressing an opinion, especially if you're brave/foolish enough to play as many games as I do. It does drive home the point that the perceived stakes in the word of mouth business can be high. But is that really true?

Beyond the reach of Grassroots?
For those of us who aren't Curt Schilling, the fact is that our individual contributions don't make all that much of a difference in the fate of a game. (Schilling, incidentally, sounds like he's having a bit of buyer's remorse about having tied most of his net worth to his new studio.) A few players here or there, or even all of their friends, aren't going to make or break the success of a game with a multi-million dollar budget (that is to say, almost any game that could credibly deliver "massively multiplayer") in the short to medium term. The product either does or does not deliver, and the majority are going to base their payment decisions on that truth, rather than any matter of principle word of mouth crusades.

The paradox with supporting the studio that no one has heard of is that there is a factor that is correlated to whether the game can deliver - its development budget. No one is that worried about the mystery fourth Blizzard project, the supposed EQ3 at SOE, or the mystery possibly-Harry-Potter project at Turbine because these companies have the money to finish the development job. When you look at some studio that has yet to deliver a working product, like, say, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment or Flagship Studios, it turns out that neither had the resources to actually produce the promised games.

CME's situation was so dire that they went under without ever launching their MMO (though they did try a non-MMO prototype that I'm gathering did not fare so well from the lack of fanfare). Hellgate's legendary launch failure brought down the studio, complete with the more promising Mythos project. Any additional funds that a player sent in the direction of those studios (e.g. purchasing additional copies just to support what the devs were doing) would have ended up in the pockets of creditors when the shops went under.

Is success pre-determined?
So here's a question - when we see a game that launches big and flames out - like, say, Warhammer or the two Cryptic games - versus a game that launches small and builds on positive buzz - perhaps Eve, Wizard 101, Runes of Magic, etc - can we really credit the word of mouth with that success? Or is the positive word of mouth just another effect caused by the games' success? Clearly, you can create a PR disaster bad enough to affect your reputation, but I'm less convinced that the effect in the opposite direction works enough to change outcomes.

Games live and die on their quality, and most of the work on that front isn't really something that can be patched in later because subscription numbers were 10% higher than expected.

5 comments:

  1. I have to say, I think it's a correlation rather than a causation relationship.

    Good games get good word of mouth, and do well.

    Bad games get bad word of mouth, and do badly.

    I'm struggling to think of any games which I think are genuinely good, but got bad word of mouth and did badly. Or if they did, it's a case of having launched badly, gotten the initial bad press, and never having been able to recover.

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  2. I would have to say that Bill Roper brought bad word of mouth to Cryptic. It could be that Cryptic might have failed well enough without Roper's help, but after the Hellgate fiasco, I just can not imagine anyone "in the know" would have supported anything more that had his name attached to it.

    He now has three highly anticipated bombs on his hands. There must be a phenomenal cloud of bad word of mouth following him by now.

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  3. Word of mouth to me gets me to buy the game. Quality content gets me a subscription. Even with my closest gaming friends, if the game sucked, I didn't continue to play it because they told me it was awesome. I was not a fan of Warhammer or AoC. But I bought both because of word of mouth. I see it having a more direct reflection in initial box sales than anything. Like I said earlier though, great word of mouth will get people to look at the game, but you need the content to keep them interested.

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  4. Word of mouth got me playing WoW and was what got me to try lotro. It was WoW being a good game that kept the subscription money rolling in. Lotro, not so much; the graphics ended up looking terrible at settings that ran well on my computer (perhaps that's my fault, but I do like games that don't need a newish system), and I constantly felt like I was an observer rather than possibly mattering. Even when WoW was unheroic you at least felt like a trainee rather than just a nobody loser.

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  5. My earlier rant missed the main topic a little.

    I too was drawn into WoW by word of mouth. But it wasn't easy. I came to the game kicking and screaming.

    See, I did not play the original strategy games, nor did I like the artistic style. Also, I was dead-set against online games to begin with because...well, I'm not sure why anymore.

    So, a friend of mine began playing about six months after WoW came out. He wouldn't shut up about it. After about three months of his positive influence, I finally bought the game...and loved it.

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