Early Access – A marketing challenge

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I’m inspired by the „Question Time“ session during an annual press event of a computer game publisher. Is the marketing of early access games really a hard challenge?

Computer game publisher Slitherine[1] hosted their annual press conference „Home of Wargamers“[2] this week in Milan. Aside from game presentations and meetings with the developers, Slitherine organized also a question time over twitch.tv, where the audience at the event as well as the stream viewers were able to ask the panel questions. The panel consisted of JD McNeil (Chairman), Iain McNeil (Development Director) and Marco Minoli (Marketing Director).

Being interested in the opportunities resulting from Early Access Releases (EA)[3], I sent a question in as well: „How would you rate the importance of early access releases concerning marketing and development opportunities?“

Slitherine is currently experimenting with two EAs[5][6] to figure out how far they can benefit from this approach compared to a normal approach with a closed beta phase and a clear release date. According to the panel, one of the two running EAs has received a great change due to the feedback of the community[3]. However, it is hard to estimate whether the EA was providing more feedback compared to a normal beta phase or not. In this case, it is still unclear if the game publisher really benefits from providing EAs.

On the other hand, providing an EA could be still very beneficial for a game publisher, because this approach allows interested players to experience the game already at a very early stage of the development process compared to a normal beta test. At this early stage, changes can be done relatively easy and the game can be adjusted right away to make it fitting to most of the interests of the target group.
If these assumptions could be proven as true, then EAs can also become quite important to well established game publishers, because normally EAs are used by small developers, who are not funded by a publisher and who need the revenue of the EA to finance their development processes[4].

However, according to marketing director Marco Minoli[8], an EA is quite challenging from the marketing perspective. Compared to the normal approach of a game release, it is difficult to pinpoint important dates of a game development process. Furthermore, it is very complicated to plan marketing activities on a constantly evolving game which is already open to the public. On the other hand, an EA does not need so much of PR to be introduced to the public: a community will establish around the game over time and start to make it more popular by sharing their experiences.

The insight that EAs are getting popular over time on their own can result in a shift of the marketing activities. Traditionally, the marketing of a game release was often connected with press events and marketing campaigns. Today, this is still true, but EAs have opened up an additional communication channel to get in contact with the target group. Marketing becomes more and more connected with the community management, because engaging with the community can become a very effective tool of marketing a game these days.

Contests and community events which require the community to share their contributions over social networks can help to increase the popularity of a game by a significant degree. A single twitter message like „What was your greatest moment in our game?“ can result in a huge amount of incoming tweets, which can be retweeted to keep the momentum going. Additionally, these tweets are not just visible to the receiver – they can be seen by every follower of the sender. Apart from the fact that these events help to spread the word, the resulting advertisement has also a second dimension: it is written by someone who has the trust of the reader: the tweet is not comming from a company, instead it is coming from a friend or someone worth following on Twitter.

Naturally, traditionally marketing tools like release announcements are still very usefull. From my point of view, the marketing of an EA can be compared with the marketing of a running Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO). Both games are already played and both games receive updates on a frequent schedule.
The MMO has a first launch date that could be compared with the EA release date – an event that can be celebrated. An MMO also receives new contents in form of content patches or expansion packs. The content patches can be compared with major game updates increasing the functionality of the EA and they can be announced in a similar way to a content patch of an MMO which is often done with a trailer and a feature list. The release of an expansion pack is often celebrated in a glamorous way and can be often compared to a release of a game.
In conclusion, an EA would allow to advertize major game updates in a conservative way. Moreover, an EA also features two main events: the EA release and the full game release. Events which can be announced and celebrated in a glamorous way. Additionally, this would result in two major events to advertize the game compared to a single release event of a traditional development process.

Finally, I like to end this week’s article with a very special example. The full release event of Minecraft, one of the most successful EA games, took place in Las Vegas after a 2 1/2 years development phase[7].