Serious Business at UNBC: Preview for Special Lecture on the Business of Videogames

A Tale of Two Trailers

As we head into the final staging area before Christmas chaos, game studios are pumping out the goods. Last week, Call of Duty: Black Ops dropped and provided additional distractions from school work (the class chatter for my COMM 240 course today was dominated by it). At midnight on December 7th, a mere 3 hours after the final for this class ends, Blizzard Entertainment's third expansion for World of Warcraft goes live. While World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will have me pasted to my monitor for most of December (for academic reasons, of course), I'd like to direct your attention to a shrewd marketing move that Blizzard pulled to hype / protect the previous expansion, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, in 2008.

In August 2008, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and World of Warcraft had a cinematic trailer showdown. To provide some context, Warhammer is developed by Mythic Entertainment, which is owned by Electronic Arts. EA is one of the two biggest players in the game industry. In other words, it owns almost half of everything that matters. For example, it owns Harmonix (and therefore RockBand) and Bioware (the Edmonton studio responsible for Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Knights of the Republic) and just recently sold its stake in UbiSoft (Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy, Prince of Persia). EA is also well known for its EA Sports franchise.

Blizzard Entertainment is owned by Activision, which is the other biggest name in gaming and owns the other almost half of everything that matters, including Guitar Hero and Call of Duty. With an established franchise and over 12 million subscribers, World of Warcraft was a big time cash cow for Activision. It was also a pretty obvious target for newcomers to measure themselves against and try to take down.

Something that have to understand about the video game industry is that gamers only have room for one game of a particular type in their lives. If you are a hardcore WoW player, you don't have time for other MMO games. If you are a hardcore Halo fan, you don't have a lot of time for Call of Duty or Team Fortress. If you have gotten really good at EA Sports' NHL 2011, why would you start from scratch on 2K Games' NHL 2k11 instead of continuing to hone your skills. If you have an enormous library of downloaded RockBand songs, there is little incentive to start over in Guitar Hero. Furthermore, games are social. People want to play games with their friends. By extension, network effects apply, simply meaning that the network becomes better as more people use it: in online games, players rely on one another in order to accomplish cooperative tasks, so having more people around makes that process easier. These factors contribute to the fanaticism in the videogame market. Gamers defend their favorite brands and attack other brands viciously and irrationally. It is simply a reflection of the buying behavior characteristic of that market.

Back to the topic at hand, World of Warcraft was a big target, with a critical mass of loyal fans (avid players) shelling out millions of dollars per month in subscription fees. While other games from the prey WoW era held onto MMO niche populations and eeked out some manner of profitability, it was understood that if a studio wanted to make a big MMO, it had to be a killer. It had to dethrone Blizzard's monstrosity. It had to take WoW's players away, because nobody was going to share those gamers.

Mythic had its ducks in a row. Age of Reckoning was built on the Warhammer franchise, which represents decades of fantasy gaming. Just as WoW brought players up into the MMO genre from their franchise of Warcraft strategy games, Warhammer would bring its loyal followers into the realm of massively multiplayer online (subscription) gaming. Mythic was backed by EA to boot, so it carried big name support.

To top it off, they put good effort into an engaging cinematic trailer, which was released to the Internet on August 19th, 2008.

Now here's something else that you have to understand about the game industry: trailers are a big deal. First of all, they are different than movie trailers because while a movie trailer gives some samples of a film, a modern game trailer does something else entirely. Since it cannot effectively demonstrate game play (the audience is just watching instead of playing) it tells a story, or conveys a mood. Many modern game trailers use a vignette, a short impressionistic story to tell something about the game's setting or characters. This method gives viewers an ideological or stylistic idea of what a character is about since it cannot provide a deep understanding of game mechanics. In that way, they are much like toy commercials that provide a sleek, animated dramatization of the toy instead of simply showing children playing with it. In short, the trailer engages the imagination.

Again, this method contributes to hype and fanaticism. The Warhammer trailer was well crafted, well promoted, and gave an overview of characters in a coherent scene. It was quite long, because it had to demonstrate a large selection of characters and took its time in doing so. The Internets ate it up. Gamers and bloggers and reviewers imagined what it would be like to play their chosen favorite character type and hashed out how cool it would be cast fireballs and command monsters. Warhammer was exciting and new versus the drudgery of the familiar World of Warcraft. Warhammer was coming out soon: soon enough to get excited about but far enough away to build up some anticipation. Meanwhile, WoW had an expansion on the way but that was a long time away. Like three or four months.

The pre-orders spooled up. Finally, someone had built a WoW killer.

On August 20th, ONE DAY after the Warhammer trailer, Blizzard Entertainment did this:

This is not the kind of thing you make over night. Blizzard had their trailer ready to go, anticipating EA's move. Knowing how important trailers are for engaging the imagination and building hype, Blizzard held back to make sure that their promotion was not overshadowed by the competitor's. Furthermore, it didn't need to accomplish the same task as EA / Mythic's. The 12 million subscribers in question were keenly aware of Blizzard's existing game and characters. They didn't have to sit through a long montage of character introductions. Instead, Blizzard could get by with something purely stylistic: a slow, chilling vignette that oozes style (as much style as a nerdy fantasy game can give).

This example illustrates the aggressiveness of promotion in the games industry, and the importance of trying to overwhelm the competition with HYPE!

Not Your Normal Game Trailer

Blizzard has adopted a distinct style of trailer. The promotional cinematics are slow paced, and more concerned with setting a mood than with showcasing game-play. Since WoW, Diablo and Starcraft are established franchises, Blizzard can get away with very pretty, finely crafted trailers that have nothing to do with game-play. The transition from "character introduction" trailers to the more artsy "mood" trailer can be seen in the progression from the WoW original cinematic, through the two expansion packs: Burning Crusade (below) and Wrath of the Lich King. (above)

World of Warcraft Original Cinematic Trailer

World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Trailer

Bungie's Halo series trailers have become even more "artsy" than Blizzard's. Again, the game play differences in each installment in the series would be poorly communicated through a passive video. Instead, the trailers work very hard at establishing mood, story and style. Check out the plethora of commercials and trailers in the progression from introducing a new game franchise to positioning it and reminding gamers about its next installment.

Halo 1