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The Rise of the Super Team

An Editorial Addressing the Use of Star Power to Market a Studio

By Cody “Micajah” Bye

When you listen to music these days – rock and roll, hip hop, rap, or pop – it’s more than likely that you’ll run into what folks call a “super band”. These “super bands” are comprised of veteran singers, songwriters, and musicians who have already gotten their chops with other bands and are now eager to try out either different styles of music or just want a change of pace from their normal band. When this occurs, record labels are quick to publicize this band as “the members of X” combine with the “singer from Y” to generate excitement for this new product. Although the “super band” often produces quality music, it’s often disconcerting to see your favorite musicians and singers trying to win over the public with a new band.

The same sort of marketing campaign is now being attempted with video game development teams. Whenever you read about a new studio starting up, the first order of business is to list the experience the crew has had. Many of the current start-ups,

McKibbin and SOE have done a decent job of not "overhyping" his past experiences.

such as Colony Studios, Red 5, 38 Studios, Perpetual, and many, many others, constantly drive it into the skulls of the public that their newly integrated team has a bevy of experience behind them.

However, the marketing schemers that hatch these plots also walk a fine line between the benefits of such exploitation and the pitfalls. Let’s take a look at these pros and cons, and extrapolate what a marketing team could do to truly make sure the advantages outweigh the problems.

The Benefits

First and foremost, discussing your team’s experience with the public is a quick and easy way to tell your adoring fans that the people involved in the new studio are sound programmers, designers, or artists. For most gamers, names and faces may not be important, but the games that were on the records of these men and women are.

Let’s take Gods and Heroes for example. Both Stieg Hedlund and Chris McKibbin have some pretty awesome accolades. Stieg, before coming to work at Pepetual, was one of the main developers behind Diablo 2, Starcraft, and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2. McKibbin, while not a huge developer, has shipped a huge number of titles out the door during his watch and is just a force to be reckoned with when it comes to gaming.

Take either of these two men and start throwing games like Starcraft and Diablo into the mix, and players start drooling. SOE hasn’t ponied their past experiences around TOO much, and therefore they’ve stayed away from over selling the past of these two leaders. SOE is good at what they do.

Bob Salvatore is a great example of a developer that brings huge "star power" to a development team.

Despite the tremendous past experiences shared by McKibbin and Hedlund, gamers still have a bit of curiosity about their upcoming game, because Gods and Heroes is far from an RTS or a third-person single-player RPG. It’s an MMO.

Players are excited to see these two men working on an MMO title, due to their past titles, but they also don’t expect any sort of gameplay elements to follow with them from any of their previous games. Creating a “Super Team” with former MMO developers can lead marketing and PR reps into some of the biggest pitfalls the MMO industry has to offer.

Pitfalls

However, this tendency to market the past of current developers can lead to some severe problems, especially if you are intent on putting together a team with MMO experience. In the minds of many gamers, the more you talk about your past games, the more they begin to correlate this upcoming title you have with a past experience they might have had with the former game – good or bad.

Take Vanguard, for example. One of the bigger marketing pushes for this game was the fact that nearly the entire team had worked on the original Everquest. Brad McQuaid was the heavy hitter behind all this, and many people even publicly voiced their opinions that Vanguard would be the “true” EQ2.

Brad McQuaid and Vanguard suffered from too much comparison with Everquest.

And the marketing and PR firms did nothing to stop them. They liked the fact that the gamers were comparing Vanguard to another big title, and everyone was happy. That is, until people started getting into beta or the final release and seeing just how different Vanguard was from the game they had plotted out in their minds. It wasn’t Everquest 2 and it wasn’t Everquest. Vanguard is it’s own game, and whether you like it or not will always come from your personal experience with the game.

Overhyping can also occur when studios are running on their personalities alone. While I personally don’t think this has occurred, I’ve heard rumbling from the press that they are tired of hearing about certain studios that have relied on their “star power” for a few years now and have little to show for it.  

The Grand Scheme

In the end, most marketing companies will need to simply “feel out” the general interest of the communities they are attempting to court. By using “star power”, marketing and PR firms give themselves some instant gratification with the fans, but the eventual comparisons and the threat of “overhype” should always be watched for.

Bring those gamers in, but once they get in don’t keep shouting the call or you might drive away those players who are most interested in your product.

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