Painful

Again, some notes but not comprehensive:

Business Summit: Follow the Leaders

Gerhard Florin, VP EA
Jay Cohen, VP UbiSoft
Russell Shanks, COO Sony Online
Jim Moloshok, SVP Yahoo!

Let’s talk about the present. What have you done in the last coupla quarters that you think was really smart?

Jay: I think UbiSoft has taken a really aggressive stance with online console gaming, particularly with xbox live. 14m machines worldwide, not even half ps2, but they took a real aggressive stance with taking broadband gaming into the living room, and we wanted to be a part of that. We took splintercell to the xbox and it’s really proven to be successful for extending your brand and improving the shelflife of the product.. also totally new gameplay mechanics and design.

Jim: Games on Demand. Consumers no longer need to go to a store to buy a game, they just download it. It’s really a CD experience, so now we’re a distributor of entertainment content. Also we’ve launched new Yahoo messenger, and community is such a huge part of games, we built it with all the hooks already in there. You can play games right in the messenger environment. It really does give up the ability to take an established base of messenger users and migrate them back into games… In the case of GOD, gaming companies are finding that this doesn’t conflict or cannibalise shrinkwrap, it gives the early adopters an advantage who then make it work for us virally. With Messenger, the games are elementary and selfbuilt.

Russell: I think we’ve grown the online space considerably by rolling out SWG and Planetside.. we’ve attracted people from consoles, and we’ve redoubled our efforts to listen and provide the best customer service we possibly can. Digital distribution models. Expansion pack purchases from home without having to go to the retail store.

The housewife playing Everquest. How did she start?

Russell: usually her Significant Other has brought the game home and started playing, and she’s shoved him off the PC and taken over. This is a wonderful thing, it reinforces the fact that just a little more care in the content means it can appeal to everyone. Also alternative distribution models are equally important, because these people aren’t typical folk to walk into those specialist retail game stores and pick up a game.

Gerhard: We’re very busy to move our market from nichey game audience to interactive entertainment play. We’re marketing and positioning our games differently.. often people think games are for males 8-18 but the average gamer is 25+ and adult and they want to be talked to in a different way. That’s our biggest European achievement. Gaming is an interactive entertainment, and online will become more serious.

Jim: In 99-2000 I was working on daytime TV. We did a lot of marketplace reseearch with women at home supposed to be watching soap operas and Oprah. These women were shifting from watching talkshows to gaming. As talkshows shifted to single topic instead of multi, it’s very hard to come in 32 mins after the hour and understand what’s happening. With games, they can get it, have a social experience, and games are an expandable time experience – they can be paused. Yahoo have more and more women beginning to play the more complicated games, the more console games and the downloadable games. They were drawn in with games like canasta (70%) women and then we migrate them.

Could you get a new audience via, say, an xbox? Can we attract women to games rather than have them hoovering around it?

Russell: Allowing those games to network is huge. One of the biggest draws to these games is the social aspect, and women gravitate towards that. We’re finding that in the large social organisation that form within the MMO games, it’s the norm that the women are the leadership of those groups.

Gerhard: Given the offering we currently have, it is very difficult to appeal to women. It’s just not made for them, we ignore this other side of the industry, the studios are dominated by men. Our one exception is the Sims, between 4-6 Sims games in the top ten because there is no competition, the head of the studios is a lady, and the company there has more female programmers than anywhere else.

If you have a radical departure from the game, you don’t build a women’s gam per se, but say a game that’s not for traditional gamers, will they come when you build it?

Jay: yeah, we’re not talking to that segment at all and we’re overlooking it. We took a chance a year ago with Bratz, and we released on Playstation. Nearly half a million units later the game was flying out of the stores. We realised ok, wait up, these girls are on average 8 years old. What’s going to happen when they’re 12, 13, 14? We need to talk to them. They’re familiar with the controllers, and controls. So we’re spending a lot of money on research on that now. I think that will be the largest and fastest growing segment in the next ten years.

Jim: There’s a huge appeal of games for women. But women are not going to go into stores to buy a game, however if you put it in the home and make it easy for them to get.. ok there’s a porn analogy here, but you make it available to them and they can sample it, it’s a great way of introducing them. You have to break the mould, change the development techniques and marketing techniques.

Russell: My wife loves games, and she’s my test case for a long time because she’d only play what I brought home, or ask for something. She wouldn’t go out and buy something.
This speaks volumes for the digital download model.

Gerhard: I disagree. The second biggest buying group is females, in the UK. Mothers, of course, they don’t play them but they will buy them. I don’t think there’s any problem about going into a shop.

Are we just putting games in the wrong spot then?

Russell: well the shops that I go to they’re all over the place. The games are in the right place. Maybe it’s the designs? Or the marketing efforts?

So you put an xbox playable disk on the cover of a women’s magazine, say. What are you doing in the future for sure around this sort of thing?

Jay: Not on the magazine. On the phone. Put it on a device that’s a natural part of their lifestyle.

Jim: Rather than on the magazine, you need word of mouth, for all audiences. I’d say you put in a segment on say, Oprah. If you have brand association with people they trust every day, then it works. The closer you can get it to them while making it their choice, and also using the social community aspect, like a friend or like Oprah, then I think you can introduce women to games if it has the right elements for them.

Russell: Well for SOE we’re trying to broaden the demographics that we attract. Marketing is not my expertise but we’re very much trying to open up the gameplay styles and genres. If we can just create a rich enough environment …

Gerhard: The joypad is a hurdle for most people. EyeToy and dancemats and microphones are really popular. If we don’t communicate properly and our marketing teams ignore the group, then we’ll never get anywhere.

Jim: It’s not just women. What about the older generation? There are a lot of people who used to play games and then they got busy and walked away.. on the floor you see a lot of the old nostalgic games coming back onto the market. Not dissimilar to the box office – remakes of shows successful 20 years ago.. brands people remember.

Gerhard: the TV broadcasters are dying. The younger generation is hungry for control, interactivity and multitasking. We – people our age - can’t handle both kids and a game, it’s too much.. but the next generation is wired so that this isn’t a problem. These kids will grow with their habit and the multitasking won’t be a problem.

Jim: Yes. Once you’re interactive you’ll always be interactive. Once you’ve TiVO’d, you can’t go back to the old way of watching television.

What genuinely surprised you?

Jim: When I went to Yahoo games, I was SHOCKED at the amount of women in there. There are the serious gamers, a lot of people who buy games, and this other island of people that was basically Proctor and Gamble heaven, on there every single day.

Russell: I travelled a lot to Asia, and wanted to investigate the online environment there. The walks of life and diversity of players was boggling. So high priority for us is expanding into those areas and culturalising the games. Making them in such a way that they’ll be well received by local territories.

Was it the Sims that got women in, or was it the marketing?

Gerhard: it was the Sims. It wasn’t the marketing. We weren’t that smart.

Any last thoughts?

Jim: I really believe that there’s a lot of interactivity that people are interested in, and as they grow up never knowing a time when there wasn’t an interactive device in the household, and as you see movies and games coming out at the same time… as you look to the future there’s gonna be a time where the interactivity between the worlds of entertainment, game and online becomes one. We’ll expand to new people who’ve been scared of games until now.

Gerhard: Our market has easily the potential to – minimally - double in the next five years. Based on youth gamers and compelling content, and games becoming emotional. Add it all together, and it shows you easily where the opportunities are.

Russell: I’m really excited about the network connected devices coming out. We have huge opportunities to expand what we think games are, and working with big Intellectual Properties and really interactive entertainment.. and I’m excited about the opportunity as players to experience new things and new social experiences.

Jay: As industry leaders in interactive entertainment I’m always surprised that we’re repeatedly asked “when are the movie companies gonna produce games?” I’m thinking, when are the games companies gonna produce movies?

[ end ]

I have a few things to say now, speaking as a female player and game-buyer (from the shops!):

1. 25 years of gaming history has sent out the marketing message that games are for boys and men. If you change that message, women will buy more games.

2. I think that it's not a lack of games that will appeal to women that's the problem - there are LOTS - it's women even knowing they exist, and that they're fun, and worth the purchase.

3. In *my* 25 years of gaming history, I have never once seen a game explicitly marketed to me, in "female media" or ordinary media like newspapers. Online, in neutral environments (say, Yahoo) a game banner ad tells me a game is available, but the message that that advert is for boys and men is still subconscious. I'll click because clearly I'm a freak, but will a non-gaming female click if that message isn't changed? Will her eye even notice the banner?

4. I want Playstation teeshirts that aren't in XXL and man-shaped.

5. Daytime TV ad slots are cheap as chips. If you advertise a game there like, say, SSX 3, and women (or men) can see how pretty it is, and fun it could be, you may find the message changing slowly. Surely this is worth an experiment. My dear previously-non-gamer flatmate is now an SSX addict after seeing it play..

6. Making games for women at home who have kids will be tricky because they are time-poor - start with the teenage females and "Sugar" magazine or Habbo Hotel, but don't discount the mothers: they'll be bored during certain hours of the day and eager for entertainment. Oh and can we all stop calling them 'they' with that curious aftertaste?

7. If the Sims was so popular with women, how come there are only 80,000 Sims subscribers? Could it be because lots of people may not even know it even exists? How many of you have even heard of Alphaville (no, not the 80s band)?

8. You may have to spend money to make money. Start changing that message that games are only for men, without expecting change overnight.

9. Buy ads on google keywords like 'global domination' or 'flirt' or 'meeting people' or 'bored' or 'EastEnders' for Sims Online and see what happens.

9. Make more survival horror games please, they're my favourite.

Comments

[Phil Gyford]

"How many of you have even heard of Alphaville (no, not the 80s band)"

What, you mean the Jean Luc Godard film (I don't think I've heard of the band)? :)

I'm loving your conference reports btw!

[Ted Mielczarek]

"If the Sims was so popular with women, how come there are only 80,000 Sims subscribers?"

I think they meant The Sims game, not The Sims Online. The Sims has sold millions of copies, presumably many of those to women.

[ganzern]

As another female pc gamer, who was playing games before I met my husband, I don't know how in the hell you could have sat through that entire session without screaming profanity at the top of your lungs and then jumping up and saying in a sweet lil' voice, "fiddly dee, I just don't know what came over lil' ol' me." BTW, I have never played SIMS, never had the desire too--its a game for those too weak minded to play real games.
Thanks for the report!

[Alice]

Ted, they didn't mean the Sims game, they meant Sims Online. The Sims has indeed sold in the millions, and I heard 50% of players (ish) were women. Yet Sims Online only has 80K subs. My point was, they haven't marketed Sims Online to ladies even though ladies make up half their normal playerbase.

Bit silly, that.

[Emil Ng]

I think part of the reason why the Sims Online doesn't have as many subscribers is because people don't want to feel like they HAVE to spend time playing a game. The other reason is if you believe any of the reviews out there is because the game just doesn't add enough to the gameplay of the original game to make it worthwhile for people to pay for a subscription.

[Alison Scott]

I'm a lifelong gamer who's also a 'time-poor' mum. pick-up-and-put-down games are good. (Popcap games, say). I know lots of other women who play games, and met loads in pick-up-and-put-down online games (I played a multiplayer online Wheel of Fortune clone, Puzzle A Go Go, for a while). These always seem to be full of women.

My local game shops have several serious problems, but the main one seems to be that the staff simply know nothing about gaming outside a very narrow sphere. So they're just not a good place to buy games. It is, for example, impossible to buy a dance mat of any quality from a retail shop in the UK, and when I wanted to get a snowboard controller I found it very difficult. 'But it's not as efficient a way to play the game as a regular controller', they explained. It didn't, as far as I could tell, occur to them that efficiency in hitting high scores wasn't the only thing people were looking for in games.

[Dan Kaminsky]

(Man, I'm probably going to get my ass kicked for this. Oh well. I got introduced to gaming by my Ms. Pac Man addicted sister, that's gotta count for something.)

You know, I read this blog entry a few days ago when it was first linked on Boingboing, and it stuck in my mind.

Now I know why: Alice, what exactly do you disagree with? I'm serious, you've proferred it as self-evident that something is dreadfully wrong with these four men deigning to discuss selling to women, and yet a rebuttal seems curiously missing.

Suppose, as you say, twenty-five years of marketing history has sent out the message that games are for boys and men. OK. What to do about that? According to you, "Daytime TV ad slots are cheap as chips." Great idea! Except according to Jim, "I'd say you put a segment on, say, Oprah."

You know, Oprah's run during the daytime. Given that one of these guys knows way more about Daytime than both of us combined (that whole "worked in Daytime from 1999-2000" line of Jim's), I suspect he knows ad rates to the dollar for the top thirty ad markets.

The topic of placing XBox CDs on the cover of Cosmo/Vogue came up, and was (rather quickly) shot down. I think we can all agree that first somebody has to buy the XBox before they can make use of something that helps them acquire accessories for it. But I don't think there's any objection to print advertising in the "female media" reflected here -- and certainly there's enough of an untapped market identified here that people are willing to invest quite a bit of time, energy, and money into encouraging the female customer.

The open question, the one as a Quake player that you seem at greatest odds against (but never actually expressed) is that girls should play girly games and boys should play manly games.

You know, there's an argument there. You're a Quake player, and sadly seem a bit defensive about that (and I quote, "I'm a freak"). Your nightmare scenario, if I may be incredibly bold by suggesting, is having girl-pandering crap like Bratz shoved at you like you're supposed to buy it and play it and then go put on some more makeup. Ewww. But you know what? Even these guys, these horrible four guys who deigned talk about female gaming, point out that Bratz is great for the eight year olds, but what happens even when they start becoming a teenager?

They're, rather rightfully, quite disgusted. And don't think guys can't get in on that annoyance; I'm a 25 year old Gameboy Advance player, do you realize how few of the games on this system even approximate playability? For crying out loud, they took Final Fantasy Tactics and recast it into eight year olds having a snowball fight!

Nobody wants to play stupid games. Nobody wants to try to sell you stupid games. The one thing these guys have pointed out is that girls do seem to prefer more social games, and from everything I've seen, that's quite true. Even Quake 3 is a game that, ultimately, was designed to be played as a group experience. Your level of disagreement seems to be limited to the claim that there are many existing games that can be remarketed successfully to a female crowd, that remain not social experiences. You cite as an example SSX3, which your roommate started playing after sitting there, socially, watching you play (I used to do that with my roommate all the time too -- www.ssxfan.com). Ignoring the fact that SSX3 is one of a relatively small set of games that doesn't involve blowing s*** up good, your roomie did seem to get socially introduced to the game, much as predicted.

Regarding your T-Shirt quandry -- you know, there's just not that many women who go to E3, but Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy was selling small T-Shirts. I know this, because they were the only shirts left by the time I wound my way through the line to buy myself a Manly Dear Friends shirt :-)

Incidentally, lots of "time-poor" people on both sides of the gender fence. Do you know how many people I know are explicitly terrified of MMO's because of people they know who, say, had to drop out of school because of them? Yeah.

[Dan Kaminsky]

Alice,

If The Sims Online has 80,000 subscribers, it's because the game itself is terrible, or at least not worth a monthly subscription fee to millions of people. There's alot of failed conversions to go around.

[Alice]

Heh, where to start!
I'll just dive in. I have no problem with the guys talking about selling to women. I have no problem - actually - with games designed specifically for women, any more than I do books and films. Each to their own taste.

What I *do* have a problem with is the lack of balls - pardon the pun - in the business management. The games industry is the only media industry up there (music, film, television, print) it seems that has a mainly one-gender audience. Why is that? As businessmen, as all four chaps were, they should be bending over backwards to make their product more appealing to a broader customer base, as clearly if they were to, they would sell more.

But, y'know, the industry is a little male, a little geeky, a little shy, and it has trouble talking to women and asking them what they want. It's a shame and a pity, because as a player (and I apologise, the freak comment is my Britishness, I am by no means ever apologetic or self-denigrating about my games passion...) I'd like to see games appreciated by more people, and the creative range broadened for the benefit of all of us. There are four football games in the top ten at the moment, it's just a little too bloody same-y.

So there you go. These guys will get there, faster if they experiment. But they have to have guts to do that.

WRT the Sims Online being a bad game (haven't played it yet), I've heard a few people say this. Still, as far as I know, it's not like the game had large subscriber uptake and then downtake (as you would if it were broadly marketed but then rubbished). It seems that it just didn't get many at all, and all I know is, from my experience, I never saw it advertised, so I can't help but suspect that this had something to do with it.

Either way, investigating that game's sales history is on my to-do list, so if I find out more, I'll post more....

A.

[Dan Kaminsky]

Alice,

At what point in that entire discussion you so excellently blogged did you not get the point that they were, to use your words, "bending over backwards to make their product more appealing to a broader customer base, as clearly if they were to, they would sell more?"

It doesn't seem that any of these four chaps were arguing that, say, women ought to be ignored, that they're making just enough money as is, and that gaming was clearly not something that women had any interest in. I know people who might make that argument, but anyone watching the money notices that women aren't exactly broke (notice the primary gender catered to at malls) and are buying certain games hand over fist, totally altering the charts. Indeed -- here I saw people who actually understood the markets they were in. They understood that the female gaming set had both a "hardcore" contingent and the Proctor and Gamble set (which is totally true). They even volunteered such previously unknown factoids such as the heavy female programmership of the massively successful Sims series.

It goes on. Gerhard says, "The joypad is a hurdle for most people." Alison replies by pointing out her difficulties getting a snowboard controller -- sounds like Gerhard had a point. Now, if you want to talk about the creativity issues in the gaming industry as a whole -- I think this is a rather gender neutral argument, and there's been quite a bit of soul searching on this very discussion. How precisely is sexualizing the topic helpful?

Regarding the Sims Online, social games expand socially, i.e. early adopters advocate the game to their friends, who advocate to their friends, etc. No advocation, no drop off -- the customers just don't show up in the first place. Again, neither gender has particularly adopted the game in force. Advertising could change that, I suppose, but I didn't exactly see these guys say that such marketing was to be ruled out.

So here's the bottom line, Alice. You certainly seem to be an intelligent and interesting girl -- and you're a very good writer, well, when you're not calling an entire industry shy, geeky, and antisocial. Surely you can identify something you disagree with, something "unbelievably stupid" or "painful", besides (well) the Y chromosomes on stage?

Something? Anything?

[Alice]

Hmm.
- Alison's point was she couldn't *find* the snowboard controller, not that she had problems using it.
- I don't think the industry is marketing to women properly, and in some areas not at all. I find it curious.
- I referred to creative range in tandem with the football game comment. Clearly there's not a massively creative range, and the majority of games are shooting/sport games. There's therefore room for expansion.
- WRT marketing the Sims: you're right, they haven't ruled it out. But it's getting late in the day now.
- I'm happy to stand by my comment that the industry is a little shy, a little geeky. Ask anyone in it, they'll usually say something similar; it's not the first time that people will have heard 'by men, for men', and the industry folk are the first to admit that that's been the history.
- I have never mentioned 'antisocial'. I've never mentioned 'unbelievably stupid'.

You seem to be looking for me to disagree with something, and I'm not sure why. My notes were for people who weren't there to get a taste of what went on; I'm sure there's a recording out there somewhere. I have my opinions on games and marketing, and I made some suggestions - with the fond hope that they would ultimately be helpful.
Hope that clears it up!

A.

[Dan Kaminsky]

Alice--

Thank you for your prompt response -- I do hope I have not come off too harshly. My concern really focuses on your subject line: Painful. I guess I simply don't see why that was necessary. It seems to me that the end result was to hold four guys up for public pillory, while simultaneously not objecting to anything they've said.

Your message has been read in an astonishingly negative light -- people are referring to what those guys said as "unbelievably stupid" based entirely on ideas you agree with. I can't imagine it'd be too much to ask that you correct those who misunderstood your contribution to a worthwhile cause -- more female gamers :-)

[Alice]

Painful describes the session, and it was *very painful* from where I was sitting, so very necessary.

If - on reading it - you can't see painful elements in the transcript, but others do and refer to it as 'unbelievably stupid', well - there's not much I can do about that. Sorry!

[Dan Kaminsky]

Alice--

Still trying to give you the benefit of the doubt...what exactly was *very painful*?

[Tiffany]

it seems that the trick in drawing non-gamers into gaming is to make more titles that are easy to pick up, but hard to master. games like nba live are just too complicated to learn, IMO, unless you're already a hard core gamer. (but then, what do i know? i'm not much of a gamer.)