The relationship between video game developers and their marketing departments is usually akin to a bulletstorm between two warring sides in one of their shoot-em-up titles.
Or so Kudo Tsunoda, creative director for Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller (pictured left), and Danny Bilson, THQ’s head of core games, implied in speeches at the MI6 video game marketing conference on Thursday – while pointing out that the respective successes of Kinect and THQ’s Homefront game have been forged by exceptions to that rule.
“When I walked into THQ for the first time, marketing and product development were like Germany and England in World War Two,” Mr Bilson told the MI6 audience.
“They were at war, it was absolute hate, distrust, lying, manipulation. I was like, what is this? How are we going to function? …this is a nightmare!”
Mr Bilson treated the marketing department as if it were as creative as the product development teams and brought the two departments together under his leadership.
It led to Homefront, a game where North Korea invades the United States, getting “the most powerful marketing campaign that THQ has ever put on,” in many people’s eyes, he said.
It sold more than 1m copies in its first ten days on sale last month.
Microsoft’s Kinect launched last November and became the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history. It had sold 10m units by March and more than 10m Kinect-enabled games.
Kudi Tsunoda put a lot of this success down to the unusually close relationship between his creative team and the marketing department.
He showed an early promotional video put together by developers where Kinect was represented as an unappealing giant green and red blinking eye on the screen and developers threw footballs through the screen at one another.
This was later softened by marketing and research to promos of families playing the game together and kids enjoying “stroking” animals in Kinectimals as their parents looked on.
Extensive usability testing with kids and their parents of the device and games also helped.
“The marketing team went off and did a great job of figuring out exactly who are the customers and what kind of experiences they need,” said Mr Tsunoda.
Creative principles were developed about what should be unique to Kinect – its approachability, social aspects in being as fun to watch people make fools of themselves as to take part and being a full-body experience for motion that allowed people to play how they wanted to play.
“If you can really get your teams fused together at this level, this stuff happens naturally, we were never out of step, we were totally in sync because we did everything together.”
His conclusion: “Why the heck wouldn’t we do this with all products?”
In fact, Kinect’s success does appear to have inspired changes at Microsoft:
“At Microsoft now, almost all the game developments teams, no matter what product, and throughout all the marketing and PR and sales organisations – everyone sees how this collaboration led to a very successful product release in Kinect and that’s the stuff we’re encouraging worldwide.”
