The Child Problem

Let us pretend you are a parent for a moment (which should scare the hell out of you if you don’t have kids. If you do have kids, you are likely numb already).

You have a ‘child problem’. The darling little child is actually a barbarian who frequently disrupts your social, mental, and financial life. Luckily, there is help for you. Things like a television set, when parked in front of the ‘darling little child’ will distract the barbarian for good lengths of time while you can engage with your social, mental, and financial life. In more recent decades, a video game console is placed in front of the ‘darling little child’ to keep the barbarian distracted further. (This is perhaps a reason why older adults, who never experience games at a younger age, only view them in the context of ‘child bait’ as keeping the barbarians distracted.)

During the holidays, there is much need to get rid of the ‘child problem’. Unless it is clothes or some bizarre educational product (often given by the mother who thinks she has discovered a superior form of parenting), gifts to the child are bait to distract it from being a ‘child problem’. This is why kids often get toys… but they aren’t cool toys. They get a video game… but it is often a crappy video game because the older adult doesn’t know video games. If you wonder why some bad games sell, and these are usually licensed games, it is because the gamer is not purchasing them. It is almost always the non-gaming older adult who gets the game to the unsuspecting kid to stop the ‘child problem’. “Here is some Imagine Babiez!” “Uhhh, thanks… I guess…”

To those unfortunate souls who have worked as clerks at game stores know all about the parent who comes in, knows he has to get something for the child because of a birthday, and doesn’t know what the hell this thing called ‘gaming’ is. “Please tell me what to get!” sometimes they say in desperation. Often, they say, “I think she said to get something like this. But… I am not sure.” And the unfortunate soul of a clerk who has to work with this customer is then expected to do mind reading of the parent’s child because the the parent has no idea what to get. Around Christmas, these parents become more of the norm at the game stores.

In a previous post, I made comparison between the Kinect and 32X by pointing out (which I am pleased to do because no one else is) how 32X was in huge demand and was completely sold out. Sega could not make them fast enough. Now, I am going to show how Kinect and 32X are not different. Where they are different is that the 32X was aimed at the experienced gamer and Kinect is aimed at…

Mom.

You ever wonder why Nintendo never gives us cool business information anymore like they used to such as Reggie Fils-Aime breakfast speech in latter 2005 about disruption and Blue Ocean Strategy? The reason why is their competitors are listening. In one of the things Nintendo said (back around 2005, 2006 prior to the Wii being released) that they identified the mother being the biggest barrier to gaming. So they began to target the mother. Once mom was into gaming, the kids and the husband would easily follow.

Much of Kinect’s marketing does seem aimed at the parent. And I look at all this, quite fascinated. Much of Kinect is revolving around “the Child Problem”. What I am seeing is the husband only plays Call of Duty games and does so at night when the kids are asleep. The husband gets the wife on board to get something like Kinect because “the kids will like it”. The husband already feels guilty playing his Call of Duty, alone, in the middle of the night anyway. This will give him the pleasure that it is “for the family”. The wife might think that she will be able to finally put the Xbox 360 console, that unproductive husband device, into productive service now.

One of the reasons why the Xbox 360 is unsuccessful in nations that do not speak English is because marketing is extremely culture sensitive. It is why Nintendo relies on, say, Reggie to do marketing for America instead of, say, Iwata. Iwata isn’t a natural English speaker and his ideas for marketing in the West would likely be a little ‘off’. And for marketing for Europe, Nintendo hires Europeans to do it.

Much of Microsoft’s muscle in the console business is marketing. Remember, Microsoft is actually a marketing company, not a software company. Microsoft’s business focus is never to create ‘the best product’ but to make a product that is centered on ‘need’ (e.g. you ‘need’ Windows, you ‘need’ Office) and market the hell out of it to mask that ‘need’ as if you ‘chose’ something like Windows outside of other products (like what? Linux? A Mac? Hah!).

But as soon as the marketing muscle enters a non-English nation, it turns limp. Sony is more successful with worldwide sales because they already were a successful consumer electronics company. Nintendo is also more successful because their software cannot be pigeonholed in any culture. Mario is well liked anywhere in the world. But Microsoft, being primarily a marketing company first, finds it difficult to penetrate non-English speaking nations.

The ‘take funny pictures of you and send them to Facebook’ seems right from the page of marketing egg-heads. I wouldn’t be surprised if at amusement parks where they take a photo of you right when the rollercoaster drops that they start uploading those photos to facebook too (or give you an option).

What I am seeing is that many of the hardware sales of Kinect are revolving around the Child Problem. And this situation actually revolves more around the ‘need’ rather than the ‘choice’.

When the Wii came out on the market, people did not buy it to solve the ‘Child Problem’. Maybe some did, but a console does not become sold out for years based on that. What the Wii did was present software for people who wanted to play games but were not being helped. It was satisfying a thirst in the market that game consoles were not doing. I keep referring to this as the ‘old school gaming’. Wii Sports Tennis is very reminiscent to PONG, for example. Wii Play’s Tanks is reminiscent to Atari’s Combat. (Although Wii Fit doesn’t fit this paradigm. It totally is new. I haven’t seen a game create that sort of phenomenon before.) It is one of the reason why I think Mario Kart Wii sales are so outrageously good. It would be considered a late old school type game. When you hear old school, think “simple but with depth”. Like Asteroids is a simple game. But boy, there is quite amount of depth to it.

Industry games have become inside out of ‘simple but with depth’ as ‘not-simple and with no depth’. Not understanding this, the Great Cliche was made this generation of ‘Hardcore Gamers’ and ‘Casual Gamers’ which missed the point. I have constantly wondered why the Industry kept dividing gamers that way.

And then I remembered that the Industry sees everything from the context of Sony. When they said ‘Casual Games’, they meant something like the eyetoy which put out simple but ridiculous games that were likely very fun at a party as people would laugh at one another. So when they made these ‘Eyetoy-esque’ (Casual games) for the Wii, they all failed. And where is the eyetoy today? You can get it cheap with a collection of games for next to nothing.

If I asked you about the ‘great eyetoy games’, you would not give me an answer. The eyetoy games aren’t supposed to be ‘great’. They just had you be silly in front of the camera.

I expect Kinect’s fate to be similar. I have yet to hear about anyone saying anything specifically cool about any Kinect game. They only talk about the device. And this is a red flag. Gaming revolves around games, not devices. No one said The Wii is fun. They said, Wii Sports is fun. They did not say, The Wii Controller works. They said, Twilight Princess Zelda is cool! Excitetruck is cool! It was the Wii software that propelled the Wii, not so much its marketing or its hardware. (Remember that all marketing does is just lead people to the product which it either satisfies the person or not.)

Prediction: Marketing will get some parents to buy it to help with their ‘Child Problem’. Kinect will be placed alongside the Eyetoy and 32X and Move as a fun curiosity of a corporation with more money than sense, and no one will remember any Kinect game. Hell, no one speaks of the Kinect games now.

Here is my playbook given to anyone who wants to have fun with a Kinect viral marketer (because, Lord God, they infest sites like termites). Not all people who say this are marketers, of course. Some are easily manipulated people who just drank the kool-aid.

I do this in service to help with the flushing out the Internet, and I relish in  ruining multi-million dollar advertising schemes:

-“Kinect is fun!”

Ask them to name individual software and specifics on that software. Gamers have fun with games, never with the hardware.

-“Microsoft sales keep going up and up!”

Ask them why these sales are only in America and not worldwide. Microsoft cannot sell in non-English speaking nations such as Japan. Also ask why Microsoft was unable to transition the PlayStation 2 gamers to the Xbox 360. In comparison to last generation, the Xbox 360 is in decline in comparison to the PS2. So is the PS3. Where did all the PS2 gamers go? We know they didn’t go to the Wii.

-“The analysts are all excited about Xbox 360 and Kinect.”

They were also all excited about the PS3 and Move. What happened there? Just a year ago, the analysts were having an orgasm over PS3’s high sales (much of it due to the re-design). One analyst said the PS3 and Move is “Wii-HD”.

Just one year later, these same exact analysts, who everyone quotes as if their utterances are commandments from heaven, are now saying Xbox 360 and Kinect are the new godsends. Every year, it is something different. The only consistency is that these analysts have is betting on the wrong horse.

Keep in mind the analysts we hear in the press are not all analysts. Speaking to the press is not their job. They speak to the press for some other reason. Often, it is to advertise themselves as consultants. It may also be to manipulate the news cycle. The point is that analysts whose words are valuable do not give them away for free. They make investors pay for good information. Bad information is always given away for free.