BandwidthCamp

With E3 coming to a close this week and a few interesting news pieces coming out of E3. The one very interesting part that I loved seeing is the continued success of music based video games including Rock Band 2. You can check out the list of tracks here.

Guns N’ Roses new album “Chinese Democracy” is going to have a track, “Shackler’s Revenge,” on the next game for the fall season. When you see that the Rock Band sold 2.5m copies and has brought in extra revenue from downloads, of which more than 15m have sold at $1.99 each. You start to see the bigger picture of why Guns N’ Roses, MTV and Universal Music Group want to get togerher for a deal with Rock Band 2. Other songs are going to include Let There Be Rock by AC/DC, Tangled Up In Blue by Bob Dylan and Pinball Wizard by The Who. The Who song reminds me of a bar I drank at in Paris, France a few years ago.

The short of it is that video games are showing more ways that advertisers can bring two industries together. Adding music to Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and The Sim DJ is enhancing and complimenting the experience that each gamer is going to have. We are really making the experience more real and making sure that we are not intruding on the gaming experience.

Last week I sent out a tweet about the Top Facebook Applications website. I spent the last week going over the top 10 and seeing what the traditional games all have in common. There are only two traditional games in the top 10… Scrabulous & Texas HoldEm Poker. I find this interesting when you see that Funwall and Super Wall hold the number one and two spots, respectively, for daily active users. What do these two games have in common?

1. They have a multi-player aspect to the game. These are games you can’t play by yourself
2. Both games represent continuous innovation
3. They maintain a high number of active users
4. Requires players to strategies about their next move
5. Both are turn based

There is only one other game within the top 20 for daily active users and that is Mob Wars. Even Mob Wars holds some of the traits that Scrabulous & Texas HoldEm Poker have. What are the other traits that make a game popular on Facebook?

Penny Arcade is one of the top webcomics devoted to the gaming industry. It’s one part critic site, one part humor and one part community website. A few years ago they decided to go and make a game of their own and partnered with Hothead Games to produce “On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness“, an episodic video game released today for Xbox 360 and PC/Mac/Linux… and also on their new digital download service Green House.

Being critics them selves they decided to turn the table and using someones distaste for the game as part of their marketing program.

Their launch campaign for the game includes banners on their own site that feature a quote.

“this game sucks and anyone who likes it sucks. Penny Arcade sucks and is as funny as something that’s not funny at all.”
Posted by: ddf
Wired blog | comments

There are more then a few companies that could learn a thing from this situation. A lot of companies are extremely afraid of opening themselves up to criticism but the Penny Arcade boys don’t seem to be one of them. Could this be the start of a trend?

So I sat down last night to write my 400 words on my marketing tragedy. It allowed me to really site down and reflect on the last two years of my life… and a bit of 2008. I often find that I don’t site down and reflect on the past enough. I’m always just looking to move forward and forge ahead to the next goal in life. However, with the rain coming down last night in the background… I just thought about what has been. This lead me to really think about what I learned in the last few years and how that applied to my marketing tragedy:

Mind you, I’m getting ahead of myself and should mention my first lesson of 2006. I’m freelancing because you can’t escape office politics. I tried to avoid it but the one person who didn’t like me became my boss and fried me. It was a hard blow to my confidence and made me question myself for weeks to come. However, it taught me a valuable lesson. You need to stand up for what you believe in, even if you are the only one. Anyways,…

This is only a small part of what I learned in those three months in 2006. The lessons learned would stay with me and form part of my manifesto when it comes to freelancing and running Creative Traction. Even this past weekend, I remember one of those lessons and past on a potential project because it conflicted with what I believe in.

Mike Manuel over at media guerrilla has a great post about what Sony has learned in the last year since launching their American focused blog. Until recently, Sony has been very quite when it came to blogging, social media and when to engage their customers. Sony learned a lot in 2006 with their “first” blog and almost a year and half later they have come full circle. One of the interesting lesson was:

 …very early on they learned their @name comment replies were helpful, but just getting lost with volumes like this, so they developed a custom WordPress plugin that allows their authors to reply in-line to all the comments…

The Playstation guys were sharing at the NewComm Forum. By the end of the session, the PlayStation guys had shared 15 lessons learned over the last year. Check out the post and you might learn a thing or two.