This wasn’t supposed to happen. The plan was since Casamassina’ s bad column generated many views (for the same reason a car crash does) that a podcast filled with the same would also generate many views. The gaming groupie that works at IGN (a more accurate term for these “game journalists”) intentionally placed all the comments they know would infuriate fans of Nintendo like poking a hornet’s nest with a stick. We got the ‘Wii is gimmick’, ‘Wii is going to lead to a 1983 crash’, ‘Wii games suck because they don’t have epic stories’, and so on. And, sure enough, fans of Nintendo (who are the only ones will listen to a Nintendo podcast) end up becoming disgusted and riled up.
But then something happened they didn’t want. Usually, someone writes a summary of these Nintendo podcasts on GAF or somewhere else. So I decided to do it myself. I post it up there and was done with my little site for the day thinking nothing of it. Everyone links to that blog post because no one wanted to listen to the podcast to get a summary. The last place the ‘gaming groupies’ want viewers to go is to this anti-game industry site.
The viral marketers panicked. Immediately, they began to denounce this website, myself, and incredibly put up their own ‘summaries’ in a desperate attempt to get people from coming to this website. This all happened as soon as others linked to that blog post. It is as if these marketers are just sitting around there, refreshing the webpages, and immediately went into action as soon as the links appeared. Just look at how fast they responded!
Usually this site is full of commentary but that blog post of a summary I didn’t make any usual commentary. It was just what I heard, and I wrote it down. Many of it were exact quotes. Hilariously, the marketers rushed to accuse me of ‘taking IGN out of context’ and that I was ‘teh biased’. Have you ever seen an IGN podcast summary so examined and re-examined as mine was? I had no idea this was going to happen when I wrote it. Take this as an example:
– “Says Nintendo stopped doing this because they couldn’t compete. (No mention of Blue Ocean Strategy.)”
His fanboy bias there is pretty apparent as he’s just searching for a way to defend Nintendo.
Yes, because clearly best selling business books are ‘teh fanboy bias!11!!’ Nintendo is hailed and paraded around as the most visible ‘Blue Ocean Company’ by the authors of that best selling book. Everyone knows Nintendo execs would name drop ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ into every speech they gave from 2005 up to even 2009. Nintendo could most certainly compete as they had around a 8 billion dollar warchest at the start of this generation. Nintendo did, indeed, compete directly with the Gamecube and N64 and were more profitable than their competitors.
Blue Ocean Strategy as well as disruption are big problems to our Viral Marketing friends. They cannot refute them (for not even the greatest business minds can really refute them). Since they can’t bring down the message, they have to go after the messenger. “Malstrom is teh raging fanboy!!1!!” “Blue Ocean Strategy is teh fanboy defense!11!!” “That summary was teh biased!!” It is so funny. You guys have no idea how much fun I am having this generation. Once people know what Blue Ocean Strategy is or what disruption is, nothing the marketer says can make any dent.
That IGN podcast cannot be taken out of context. The groupie at IGN did insult people who liked Nintendo by calling them brainwashed. They called Wii a gimmick. They said that Wii would crash the industry like the 1983 crash. They compared Wii to the plastic plug-and-play guitars you get in the line at Walgreens.
It’s not about me, it’s not about IGN, and it’s not about our marketing trojan horses masquerading as average gamers. It is about the gamers. And gamers deserve to be better treated no matter what console they are on.
The groupie at IGN thinks this was a great ratings stunt, and it will blow over. But it will not blow over. Not anymore. After Cassamassina’s bizarre editorials of “Can Uncharted 2 save gaming?” and “Nintendo is lazy”, people question the sanity of Cassamassina (and moderators have been removing any threads that appear on the subject in the IGN forums). After that Nintendo podcast, why on earth would any Nintendo player trust IGN? What we’re witnessing is IGN destroy its trust with readers in days what took years to build. Yes, they will get a bump in hits from all this but the long term damage is done. I don’t think IGN will be able to recover from this.
Gamers are tired of this crap.
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