Why can’t I pull myself away and go on vacation? There are just too many good stories to comment on.

This is an interview with Peter Moore. Hush reader, and let us listen to what he says.

Is anyone not surprised that the first question is:

EA Freestyle is a new brand targeting the casual gamer. Sounds like Nintendo’s Marketing strategy…?

Time is being compressed and people have less time to play games, so we have to create game experiences that are catered to them.

As said before in “Finding Nintendo’s Sword”, Peter Moore is not a birdman. He understands what is going on and what Nintendo is doing. There is a picture of Iwata hanging in EA Sports he place to remind everyone there of that fact. Freestyle is what is called a ‘purpose brand’. Nintendo’s ‘Touch Generation’ is a purpose brand as well.

Pretend you are in control of EA Sports. The Wii comes out and all these new gamers come into the market. What do you do? EA Sports is already a huge cashcow, and you don’t want to risk fixing what is broken on that end. So what DO you do?

A birdman, often a marketer who can’t see the forest for the trees, would say, “New demographics have appeared! We must pander to them. Since it works with video games prior as they used to be mostly young males, it should work with old people, families, and women!” They then design a game for that specific demographic.

“Like a baby game for the Wii since Wii are owned by babies,” speaks a reader.

Yes. And once the game comes out, it does not sell. People buy products to perform jobs. Simply drenching a game in pink stuffed with girly stereotypes does not mean the game will sell to females. Pandering doesn’t work.

In “Finding Nintendo’s Sword”, the Parable of Milkshakes goes into this more in detail. Instead of finding out the demographics of where the milkshakes were being sold, sales increased when marketers focused on what job milkshakes were doing.

About Ubisoft:

“I think they get it. By get it, I mean the formula for succeeding in videogames.” – Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter

There is no source for this story. It just ‘appeared’. The complaints about Ubisoft are not that they don’t know how to succeed in videogames but that they don’t know how to succeed on the Wii. While it is true many third parties are confused and baffled about how to approach the Wii, Ubisoft had the keys to the New Market and then destroyed it.

During the Wii launch, all the third parties were jealous of Ubisoft. Ubisoft was supporting the Wii hard with many titles including Rayman Raving Rabbits and Red Steel at launch. Both Raving Rabbits and Red Steel sold very well, over a million each I believe. While Red Steel was panned and could be said for having high sales due to the launch, what can’t be denied is that there is demand for games like Red Steel on the Wii. Launch games are difficult to make (for any game console), but Red Steel did show some promise as a franchise. What people expected was Ubisoft to build on its beginning Wii approach. Instead, Ubisoft went from Red Steel to babies. Why are gamers angry? Imagine if Ubisoft decided to replace Splinter Cell on Xbox 360 with Rubber Ducky game. When Xbox 360 gamers protest, Ubisoft replies, “You guys don’t know business. We must appeal to the demographics of the system.” You only appeal to demographics if you are running for Congress. Politicians pander. Businesses make products. If your product’s differentiation is just pandering, it won’t sell. If the product’s differentiation is better performing a job, it will sell.

Ubisoft complained that its ports didn’t sell on the Wii like the godawful Farcry (not the game, but the port itself. Do a search on screenshots of the game to get a feel of how bad it was). Ubisoft needs to adopt an outside-in approach to the Wii instead of the inside-out approach it is currently doing. This means that Ubisoft thinks of cutting costs within its business model such as putting out terrible ports. When they didn’t sell, the marketers said, “Well! Obviously, the demographics are not there on the system. Let us make baby games instead!” Had they done an outside-in approach, they would have quickly discovered that the Wii audience did not have a good experience with such games. The focus should always be on the customer experience. Ubisoft focused on the Ubisoft Experience. What is worse is that Ubisoft was making the right moves earlier and then just went completely backward. My guess is that some clueless marketers took control.

When you have Pachter declaring your company to “know how to do their job”, you know the train is off the tracks. Investors have to be outraged how Ubisoft started off as the third party most poised to take advantage of the Wii phenomenon only to become the third party the Wii userbase distrusts the most.

But has Ubisoft learned? Are they now making purpose brands?

“With our new Play Zone party titles, the Wii gamers who like to spend time with friends and family will have fun with the Wii through innovative and involving mini-games,” said Ubisoft’s EMEA Marketing Director John Parkes.

“The Play Zone label will provide them with the best games to mingle and compete together in a fun and friendly atmosphere.”

Oh my.

Let us discuss the purpose of ‘Purpose Brands’. Why do they exist in the first place? why, to protect the core brand. EA Sports can’t twist all their sports games to the new customers since they have a very large core customer base. Also, Freestyle brand has never been said to be Wii-exclusive as far as I know (which hints at motion controls from the HD Twins). Another example is Kodak who invented a disposable camera that didn’t take any film. Naturally, the film division in the company was against such a product. Kodak obviously couldn’t twist their camera business to disposables. So they made a purpose brand called ‘Fun Saver’ which placed the disposable camera for its intended job: for people to use on vacations, or other areas where a regular camera won’t work. It sold to a new market and brought in new revenue growth.

Purpose brands allow a company to ‘tweak’ an older core product to perform a different job which allows it to serve a new market.

What exactly is the core brand that ‘Play Zone’ was required to be made? Nintendo’s Touch Generation was with its regular Nintendo games. EA’s Freestyle was with its standard EA Sports games. But Ubisoft’s Wii-Exclusive ‘Play Zone’ is… to what? To Xbox 360 and Play Station 3 party games? The ‘Play Zone’ doesn’t make sense.

Here is what does make sense: stop fishing for gold from streams everyone else is at. On the Wii, so many companies are trying to make ‘casual’ games (retarded games for dumb users in their minds) that you would think, “Hey. Everyone is making these type of games. Let us do something different. Then our product will stand out.” Amazingly, it is like this on all the consoles. “What! Their HD games are all brown and gray? Then let us make our game brown and gray too.” “There are many World War II FPS. I have an idea! Let us make another one!”

Wii games like ‘Mad World’ and ‘Conduit’ and even ‘Gyrostar’ have far more potential on market impact simply because they are doing things differently than the other games. And that is why the Wii was really successful in the first place. It wasn’t because Wii was pandered to non-gaming demographics but because the Wii WAS different and interesting in a new set of values.

Copycats need to die.

Oh, but let us return to that Peter Moore interview.

So, is ‘casual’ the way forward?

Moore: Well, look at Rock Band. It really came home for me when we were in Munich for our global marketing meeting and we took over the Hard Rock Café for the night and had a Rock Band competition. There were a hundred of us and it was like a real rock concert. It was a blast. I stood back and I thought that this was an incredible cultural phenomenon.

The crowd were going wild, but all we were doing was playing on toy guitars, toy drums and singing badly into a microphone. Now the beer might have had something to do with it, I don’t know, but it was a great social thing. And I said, “Boy, this product is going to change the way we think about games.”

Peter Moore has publicly come out against the word ‘casual gamer’. Despite that, the journalist keeps using the phrase on and on. I love Moore’s answer here. He was asked about ‘casual gaming’, and he talks about ‘Rock Band’! hahaha He refers to it as a ’social game’ which is pretty good way to nail it down and admits, as we all should, that it challenged him to think about games in different contexts.

Hardcore do not refer to Rock Band as ‘casual’ because it didn’t appear on Wii first. If it did, then Rock Band and Guitar Hero would have been declared ‘casual’ and ‘destroying the industry’. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are both ‘New Generation’ games and are expanded audience games. Two years ago, in the ‘Theory of Cycles’, I placed Guitar Hero as a sign for the future. This was well before the massive sales of Guitar Hero 2.

Do you think there’s any crossover between the core and casual markets?

Stop the tape. What does this question have to do with anything? If you’ve notice, Moore doesn’t use the phrase ‘casual market’ or ‘casual gamers’ at all in this interview. Kudos to him!

It is like there is this fear out there that the so-called casual gamers (down market) will march upward into the so-called core (upper market) and POLLUTE all gaming with their evil, disgusting, casual filth and disease! At least, that appears to be the snobbish sentiment going around. Anyway, Peter Moore, answer the question:

Moore: What I love about where we are at the moment is that the three gaming platforms are three distinctive experiences. Nintendo are trying to get people off the couch and you play more intuitively so you have brand new consumers there. Microsoft continues to do well with Xbox Live, but it’s still a little too hardcore for where they would like to be at this point. That was something we tried to change when I was there.

I love this answer too. Moore completely forgot to mention Play Station 3. His answer to the ‘crossover’ was that MICROSOFT would be moving DOWN to these new consumers, at least try to. E3 is not going to make Xbox die hard fans happy.