1. Computer Games Revision

2. Integrated Marketing Campaign
• Advertising and sponsorship
• Print/traditional marketing
• Exhibitions and events
• Research
• Digital marketing
• Public relations (PR)

3. Ways in which games are promoted and marketed
• Posters/billboards/point of sales advertising/standees
• Cover art (game boxes)
• Trailers (TV, cinema, online (YouTube, website, Amazon etc)
• Print (magazine coverage, newspaper reviews, press releases)
• Radio advertising and promotional interviews
• Television – promotional interviews
• Word of mouth
• Game website
• Producer’s website
• Demos/downloads – whether free or paid for
• Viral video adverts
• Blogs/forums/social media – viral marketing
• Direct marketing – leaflets/emails etc.
• Celebrity endorsement
• In Game Advertising

4. Pre-Order
• Increasingly important
• An imperative to entice people to buy
• Often with exclusive content and discounts as an
incentive
• Used to predict demand – pre-order charts, such
as Amazon, can create anticipation for the game
• Can cut out the disappointment of not being able
to obtain a game on the official release day if it
sells out quickly.

5. Successful Marketing Campaigns
• Mass Effect 3 (2012) – six copies of the game were
attached to weather balloons fitted with a GPS tracker
launched from locations across Europe and the USA.
Eager fans could track their progress through the ME3
website to encourage a free-for-all – first person who
found one of the balloons received a copy of the game
before its release.
• Halo 3 (2007) a ‘Believe’ campaign ran before and
during the game’s release – promotional videos that
adopted the tag, ‘Believe’, to create hype – cost $10
million. Halo beta code was included with the release
of Crackdown – surge in sales for Crackdown. Halo 3
made $170 million in the US on its first day of release.

6. Types of Gaming
• Social Network Gaming – online games played through
social network sites e.g. Mafia Wars, Farmville
• Console Gaming – played using a gaming unit like Xbox
360 or Wii etc.
• Android Gaming – played using mobile devices
downloaded as apps e.g. Angry Birds
• Online Gaming – played using the interne – encorages
online gaming communities – Massively Multiplayer
Online Role-Playing Games and Massively Multiplayer
Online Social Games – like World of Warcraft

7. The Pitch for your promotional campaign
• Organize your pitch. Start with a short summary of the movie, then expand
a little at a time if the producer wants to hear more.
• State the genre of the movie, so the producer can correctly interpret your
pitch.
• The first few seconds of your pitch should be centred on your log line -
your 1 or 2 sentence description of your movie. Begin with a rhetorical
question, then give the log line. For example, you might ask, "How might
your life change when you win the lottery? This is the story of a man who
won millions but lost everything he loved.“
• Follow with an explanation of what you intend to do to market the game.
• How does your trailer appeal to your target audience? Narrative/character
appeal?
• How do you refer to the brief you were given to imply that participating
will keep you healthy/fit or improve your mental skills?
• What is the game’s Unique Selling Point (USP)? Anything else that will help
it sell?
• There may be an opportunity here to set out a time scale – remember
you’ve got from the middle of June, when the competition ends, to the
middle of November, when the game is released – not long!

8. Demo Promotion
• Free demonstration of an upcoming or
recently released game.
• Playable BUT some features will be disabled or
it might allow the player to complete only the
first mission.
• Closed Beta Trials – ‘experts’ invited to play the
games – their recommendations/comments
are leaked to tease the target audience
• Followed by Open Beta Trials

9. Regulatory Bodies
• ASA: Advertising Standards Authority – the UK’s
independent regulator of advertising across ALL
media sectors
• PEGI: Pan European Game Information – provides
an age rating of games based on their content.
Similar to BBFC Film Classifications – suggests a
suitable age for games (3,7,12,16 and 18) based
on the content of the game. E.g. Pegi 18 may
contain violence unsuitable for under eighteens.
• Remember your target audience consists of
families.

10. Pleasures and Audience Engagement
• Action games/shooters/adventure etc – narrative
pleasures and a sense of reward for mastering
necessary techniques to achieve your goal.
• May also be excitement of the battle and sense of
achievement at becoming more skilful, especially
as the level of challenge increases as the player
moves through the game – which can bring
reward and empowerment
• Sense of pleasure moving through the narrative
and for character development.

11. Pleasures and Audience Engagement
• Open world games like GTA – range of different goals and
tasks – and gratifications – freedom to make choices and
progress – player’s success is down to decisions rather than
pre-defined narrative.
• Aspirational – possible to create an idealised (within that
virtual world) living environment.
• Ideological pleasures – especially role playing games that
create identification between player and character and
satisfaction as character’s abilities improve; narrative and
ideological pleasures are present as players need to make
choices based on game’s internal morality.
• Strategy games – players take turns to meet certain
objectives – satisfaction as the objectives are completed
and rewards gained.

12. Pleasures and Audience Engagement
• Cerebral pleasures (Tetris) – as player completes
‘puzzles’ – the difficulty of which increases.
• Exergames (like Just Dance 4) – competition and
physical exertion – and a sense of achievement.
• Sports (Fifa) – sense of achievement as players master
the games being played.
• Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, like
World of Warcraft – allow players to interact with a
community; sense of achievement and satisfaction
when rewarded – sometimes rewards can be within
and outside the game’s world and can be sold to other
players.

13. • Appeal of Video Games
• Immersive nature of some gaming narratives –
audiences not passive, but active participants and
can interact not only with the game’s characters
and its narrative but with other gamers.
• Games can create a world free from consequence
where violent and immoral actions are rewarded -
gamers flee the stresses of modern life for the
hyper-reality of the game world – first person
shooter games…
• Many games offer simple choices – but those with
complex narratives that offer choices that can
drastically affect the world the game is set in as well
as the narrative e.g

14. Types of Audience
• Casual Audiences – do not experience the product as a special
event.
• Devoted/Dedicated Audience – makes a specific choice to access a
media product and will return to it several times. They will identify
themselves with some media products over others and will enjoy
the experience. They are likely to play MMOFPS as a single player.
• Avid/Loyal Audience – will want to involve themselves in a media
product beyond a simple (often passive) engagement – the chosen
product becomes part of a person’s life. They are likely to subscribe
to an online game to access more rewards and they may well take
part in the social networking aspects of the game. They will also
want to buy associated merchandise.
• Niche Audience – a small audience with a specific interest.
• Core/Primary audience – main audience for the text
• Mainstream – conventional audience – the most amount of people
• Demographic – measurement of the audience in terms of
gender/age/income etc.

15. Uses and Gratifications Theory
• This theory states that audiences are attracted to media texts
that are USEFUL or which provide them with some
GRATIFICATION (pleasure)
• Blumler and Katz (1979) theorised that these uses and
gratifications fell into four categories:
– Diversion – something to pass the time
– Personal Relationships – something which allows you to
make more productive friendships, for example by giving
you something to talk to your friends about
– Personal Identity – something which allows you to define
who you are
– Surveillance – something which allows you to find out
about the world around you

16. Uses and Gratifications Theory
• David Morley (1991) argued that there were five
types of uses and gratifications:
– Cognitive (learning – the text helps you find out
something)
– Affective (the text affects you and provides emotional
satisfaction)
– Tension Release (the text allows you to relax or let off
steam)
– Personal Integrative (the text helps you to define your
own personal identity)
– Social Integrative (the text helps you with social
interactions e.g. by providing a topic of conversation or
way or interacting with others)

17. Richard Dyer’s Utopian Solutions
Real World Problem
• Exhaustion
• Dreariness
• Boredom
• Fragmentation/Loneliness
• Scarcity/poverty
Entertainment World Utopian
Solution
• Energy
• Intensity
• Excitement
• Community/companion
ship
• Abundance/wealth
“Utopia” is an imaginary ideal world
Richard Dyer argues that “entertainment offers the image of
‘something better’ to set against the realities of day-to-day
existence.”
This is the idea of “escapism”
Inside the world of a video game your existence can be “better”
than in the reality of day-to-day existence

18. The idea of aspiration
• Aspiration is the idea of wanting something
better than what you have
• Advertising, marketing and promotional
material will often present an idealised
representation of the world – a Utopian
Solution – as audiences will aspire to that
lifestyle and its trappings

19. • Desensitisation Theory – long-term exposure
to certain media messages eventually makes
the audience susceptible to the product’s
message.
• Two-Step Flow Theory – suggests there are
opinion leaders (like gaming magazines such
as PlayGamer or PlayStation or PCGamer or
gaming magazine apps like Atomix, the first
exclusive gaming magazine for iPad) that can
influence people’s opinions and attitudes –
think also of ‘celebrities’ who endorse games

20. • Concern – especially first person shooter games
– immerse the gamer in the experience to the
extent they can be influenced by the ideology of
the game – for instance in games like Battlefield
3 where the enemies are Iranian terrorists, the
PLR– could both play on and encourage racial
prejudice and a simplistic view of world events
amongst the gamers.
• Fear of media measures being injected into an
audience to persuade them to act a certain way
derives from The Hypodermic Syringe Theory.
This runs counter to the Uses and Gratifications
Theory that suggests audiences are active
consumers of media products and pick and
choose the gratifications they get from them.

21. Games are about social interaction
• 72% of players have played with others
• 81% have played with others in person
• 54% of social network players have played
with others over a network
• 41% of browser games are played with
strangers

22. When do people play?

23. Audience
• The average gamer is 30 years old and has been playing for
more than 12 years.
• 82% of gamers are 16 or over
• 42% of gamers are women.
• Women over the age of 18 are one of the industry’s fastest
growing demographics
• Adult women represent a greater portion of the gaming
audience (37%) than boys aged 17 or younger (13%)
• 29% of gamers are over 50, an increase from 9% in 1999
• 65% of gamers play games with other gamers in person
• 55% play games on their phone or a handheld device
• There is now a well-defined gay demographic group of
gamers – ‘gaymers’
• 91% of children aged 2-17 are gamers.

24. Why the games industry is important
• Immensely profitable for the economy
• Sales of entertainment software are greater than the
DVD/Blu-Ray market AND Cinema box office spending.
• The UK video market is one of the largest in the world
( along with Japan, China, The USA, South Korea and
Canada).
• 2010 US report showed the annual growth rate of the
computer game industry was around 16.7% compared
to 2.8% for the US economy as a whole.
• In 2010, Call of Duty: Black Ops took over $650 million
in the first five days of its release, setting a five day
global record for any film, book or game.
• In 2014, the global video game market is expected to
be valued at $86.7 billion

25. Why the games industry is important
• In 2011, the UK games market reached £1.92 billion, with
DVD/Blu-Ray on £1.8 bn and music on £1.06 bn.
• The computer games workforce is distributed evenly across
the UK – the rest of the creative/media sector tends to be
based around London.
• Over 7000 people are directly employed in the UK gaming
industry
• The UK sector generated £2bn in global sales
• One of the most popular games, Grand Theft Auto, was
created by a British studio, DMA Design Ltd, based in
Edinburgh. Since 1999, the comonay has been part of
Rockstar Games, owned by Take-Two Interactive, an
American multinational publisher.