Robin Kaminsky

EVP of Publishing, Activision

What drives commercial success?  What does it take to make great games that sell?  Costs going up, so sales threshold to profit is going up, and competition is rising.  600 titles launched last year, relatively few truly large scale commercial successes.  How do we offset risk and position titles in the marketplace?

Making great games is what makes our industry tick.  Great game does not guarantee sales success though.  Difficult, but not enough to make it profitable.  Great games are the cost of entry, but insufficient alone.

Gameranking analysis: higher ranking games sell better.  0.62 correlation between rating and scale.  Anything larger that 0.5 considered highly correlated.  Every 5 pts over 80 on average doubled sales.  Didn’t guarantee sales, some games above 80 didn’t sell.  Correlation to large sales improvement even above 70.

90+ last year, 18 90+ rated titles.  Only 2 did better than 7 million.  7 did less than a million.  12 titles less than 2 million.  2/3 of 90+ rated games did not achieve large scale commercial success.  90+ rating is incredibly hard but it doesn’t insure success.

Activision: “We Make Great Games That Sell”.  Delivering game and building awareness and desire is key. 

Independent Development studios with culture and identity: Treyarch, VV, Bizarre, Neversoft, Raven, IW, Toys for Bob.  Same leaders as before acquisition.  Deliver games that are part of the passion of that particular team.  Simple reward system: incentives for profit to create shared goals between devs and publishing. 

Development focuses on Consumer Need.  10s of millions of dollars in the game you need scale in the selling process.  What are the biggest opportunities.  Analysis of the market, fish where the fish are.  Analysis of racing led them to acquire Bizarre.  “Franchise Gap Analysis”.  Marketing & devs submit concepts together building off of brand equity work.  Quanitative and qualitative analysis.  How do consumers respond to this concept and what are the key features?

Conduct user research throughout development.  What do people react to, and build on those.  Foster creativity in places where player is most likely to react to it.  There was a time where devs were representative – if devs loved it, customers will too.  But now audience is bigger and that isn’t true, requires cooperation between dev + production + sales + marketing.

Hardcore vs Mass market.  Three concentric circles: mass market > casual gamers > hardcore gamers in the middle.  It is important to reach that hardcore gamer, but it is not enough.  All three audiences combined are what make the true mega successes.  Plan to drive that awareness and “desire to buy”.  Vote with their dollars and their time and there are a lot of other options.

Call of Duty 4.  Creating that awesome game was the start.  Started with brand equity work to see where to take the IP.  Testing to see whether modern warfare would have broad scale demand.  Marketing to build first buzz.  High impact reveal – first trailer on NFL football draft.  Trial first to the hardcore “first to play” events then 360 demo / beta.  Mass market with high profile efficient media.  Post launch DLC and tournaments and media buys.

Results: #1 title for calendar 2007.  7 million units worldwide in 2 months.  94 rating.  Was the marketing part of it though?  Reveal trailer most downloaded trailer in history.  20 million downloads, 1 million views in first 5 days.  #4 video on YouTube on release day.  It helps to have a great game but you need to get people to see it to buy it.   CharlieOscarDelta.com website to engage consumers in a dialog.  500k beta keys delivered.

“Satellite” ad achieved +27 pt purchase intent shift with final p.i. at 83%  #1 most liked new TV spot for Nov as measured by AdAge.  Take reviewer accolades and make a new ad to focus on the late adopter.

Marvel Ult Alliance VIP website.  CRM = customer relationship management.  Currency model to promote evangelists, 60% viral invites.  One-way comms are losing potency – modern approach is facebook and social networking.  Evangelists bring your message out sooner, advocates trusted opinions influence others.  Create advocates by creating a community, reward with exclusive content and VIP message boards.  Give them a reason to market your game for you.  For Transformers they built a minigame and let the community influence the outcome.  Consumers are part of the marketing of the brand.

Retail:  Presell > Launch > Momentum > Catalog.  Part business to consumer, part business to business.  Retail category management.  Account specific plans around this 4-phase lifecycle.  Not just about getting on the shelf, but premium placement in ads, etc.  Consumers need to find the game.  Highly integrated retailer marketing to tie together retail and PR.  Presence at launch via the retail staff.  More different points to reach the consumer = more likely to have success.

Activision consistent record of growth: 16 yrs of consecutive retail growth.  Revenue doubles 4-5 yrs.  Biggest publisher in 2007. 

Q: With Blizzard / Acti merger. We see Blizz titles on console?  That’s up to Blizzard, they remain independent and drive their own business.

Q: Why merged Acti Blizz and not Acti Vivendi?  Blizzard is really important and that reflects the value.