14 DAY TRIAL // At the MI6 Game Marketing Conference in San Francisco, Greg Short and Geoffrey Zatkin of game research firm EEDAR talked about how games, despite being a hit-driven industry, don't make the most of the opportunities that achievement systems and DLC have to offer.
The company is tracking some 7,000 Achievements over the Xbox 360 library, sorted into category types such as advancement, exploration, score, community, time, and victory. From the data extracted by EEDAR it seems that planning achievements as an integral part of the game makes the game more prone to success, mainly commercial but also critical. To create a great achievement system you don't need to include a great number of them, but rather create diversity, so that the player feels like he has different and competing objectives, thereby introducing an element of excitement and suspense in the game.
Greg Short believes that accomplishments are "as important as trailers or screenshots" or maybe even more important because they can generate the best kind of advertisement, the word of mouth. Gamers tend to trust friends talking about a game more than magazines or game sites and achievements are a good way to get one gamer to praise a game.
The two analysts observed that, up to now, only the Xbox 360 has a clear, well defined and implemented reward system in the Achievements it offers. The PC does not have anything similar apart from gaming sites or Steam initiatives for player reward, while the PlayStation 3 is set to get something similar with the Trophies proposed upgrade.
Downloadable content is another potential key to a games success. The game developing companies need to think in advance and understand that: "A $60 one-time sale can become a $100 ongoing sale," as Greg Short said. If Microsoft and Bungie create a DLC element for Halo 3 that sells for $5 DLC and that is bought by 10% of Halo 3 gamers, then the companies could make another 25 million dollars in revenue.
The analysts also took on the demo as a marketing tool, showing data which demonstrated that releasing a demo early in the game's life could well be detrimental to its success. They say that demos, as DLC, need to make an appearance late in a game's shelf life, when a demo can actually increase sales a bit.