Four marketing VPs on one stage, including Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan.
Although gamers' focus on the DICE Summit is the Interactive Achievement
Awards, the summit also features two full days of seminars for developers. Since Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan was speaking, PGC attended the
second seminar this morning, entitled "Targeting Tomorrow's Consumer Today".
Moderated by Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, the panel featured marketing vice-presidents from
EA, Nintendo, THQ, and Ubisoft.
The discussion actually dealt less specifically with gearing up for the next round
of hardware than with a number of current marketing issues, such as demographic
trends and the timing of release schedules. Kaplan kept to the standard
Nintendo responses throughout the session, and often managed to slide in
GBA sales numbers, mentioning that it was the best-selling system of 2003 and
that the new Pokemon games in Japan (Fire Red and Leaf Green) have already sold two million copies.
Once again, Kaplan showed the big difference between Nintendo's attitude
towards online gaming compared to the other companies. The other
representatives were all very excited about the potential of online games, and they
were very clear that players should pay for extra content and the extra development effort that
would be spent on online games versus traditional offline games. EA's representative
pointed out that while it may be difficult for PC gamers to accept new payment
plans, there's still time to establish the business side of online games for
consoles. Kaplan again stated that Nintendo is not interested in charging
gamers more money for games they've already purchased, and she brought up the
potential of connecting wirelessly as was implemented with the recent
Pokemon releases in Japan.
Another part of the discussion dealt with promoting interest in older games, since
the movie and music industries generate a lot of revenue based on catalog
sales. Player's Choice programs were commonly seen as one of the best
measures to promote sales, as classics cannot compete at the same price point
as newer games. One interesting concept that came up was generating interest
in new titles by adding trailers of upcoming games to a game when it takes on
Greatest Hits status. Perrin said that Nintendo classics generally do very well,
and that they have been trying similar strategies -- possibly referring to the
various bonus discs Nintendo released last year.
Timing was another important issue, with more and more
games coming out during the holiday season. Beyond Good & Evil was
specifically brought up, and while Ubisoft admits that the game got buried, Tony
Kee expressed that since it is such an artsy game, it's not clear that it would
have done better in another quarter. The panelists all generally agreed that
gamers only have so many dollars and so many hours in November, and there
have been more successful releases outside of the fourth quarter timeframe in
the past few years. Kaplan also mentioned the importance of other times of the
year that can be taken advantage of, such as when school lets out for the
summer.
PGC will have more coming from DICE and the Interactive Achievement Awards
as the summit continues.