What Internet Marketers Can Learn From Video Game Designers.

Let me just start with this little disclaimer that I am by no means an expert at Internet marketing. In fact, I pretty much suck at it. So, with that said, take this post with a grain of salt.

In some of my previous posts I have alluded to the fact that I just started back at school full time for the spring semester. Being a computer science major, there are a ton of technical electives to choose from, and last semester I choose computer graphics. I really enjoyed that class, so I decided to take the follow up course entitled “Computer Game Design”, which being a long time gamer, should prove to be interesting.

Today we had a special guest lecturer from Harmonix music systems. You may not have heard of them, but I’m sure you have all heard of ‘Karaoke Revolution’, ‘Guitar Hero I’, ‘Guitar Hero II’ and ‘Rock Band’…yep, that was those guys. Our guest lecturer was one of the designers of all these games, and he was there not to tell us how to design a video game, but rather how not to design a video game. As I sat there listening, all I could think about was how much everything he said could apply to internet marketing, so I made up this quick list. Enjoy.

Keeping it simple

We have all played those video games that no matter how long you play, you just can’t seem to really figure out what the point is. A good video game will be challenging, but simple to understand. As a developer you may know a game inside and out, but your players have no idea that your level 8 mega sword can only be used after you launch the loompa doompa over chaos canyon, but not before saving Princess Kantara from the evil zarloonian dragon.

This same concept goes for any web site you might want to develop. Most of us are at least average computer and internet users, but there is still a huge demographic of users who really don’t know a whole lot about computers or the internet. If someone can’t figure out how your site works in the first 6.2 seconds, they’re gone. End of story. Your site needs to be powerful, but as simple as possible.

I can give you a great example of this very mistake that I made myself. My biggest traffic site, www.DigMyHonda.com sounded like an amazing idea when I first thought of the concept. It was simple, people would submit their car or a DIY article, and other people would vote on it. What I failed to realize is that I was an active Digg user, and pretty web2.0 savvy, so the idea was easy for me comprehend. The problem is that 95% of my traffic is car enthusiasts, who are normally blue collar citizens who work with their hands, not with computers. The “digg” concept is completely foreign to them, and no one understood what the hell was going on. Because of that, I get some organic google traffic from the content alone, but no one ever registers, and no one ever submits any content. Live and learn.

Don’t Mash every Idea you have.

This kind of goes hand in hand with the last concept, so I’ll keep it short. One big mistake that video game designers make is that they want to implement every idea they have floating around in their head into one game.

I want to create an awesome Halo style first person shooter, but it needs dancing…lots of dancing. Maybe I can throw in some frogger style action as well, and have the player solve a rubix cube before they can beat the game.

You can imagine how crappy a game that would be! Who wants to play Dance Dance Revolution while they are frying robots with a flamethrower and hopping through traffic at the same time? The game would have no focus, and people would most likely end up loosing interest in it pretty quickly.

Another problem with this is that every feature you add, no matter how small, can take a huge amount of time and effort to implement. The example he gave was to imagine you are developing a racing game, and you have this great idea that you should be able to jump out of the car, pick something up and jump back in. Its pretty simple on paper, but to actually implement that you would need to have animations for your character jumping out of the car, another animation for what happens when the character jumps out of the car too close to a wall, or while the vehicle is moving too fast. Next you need to implement a grabbing system so the character can pick something up, and finally you need more animations for the character getting back into the car. That simple idea turned into a month of work!

The same things apply to web sites. Swiss army knife websites not only take a huge amount of time to develop, but they end up loosing focus, and the users have a hard time trying to figure out what exactly the main theme of the site is. Sure you might have an idea  that looks simple at first, but you really need to think about just how much time and effort would be needed to implement that idea fully. The lesson here is to keep things simple and focused.

Use success to fund future success. Repeat

Did you know that many video games that are released are really just auditions for larger funding for bigger, better games? That was something I found interesting. Apparently many of the smaller companies develop and release games in order to impress the bigger companies, in hope of getting a development contract for a bigger game. This also holds true to sequals for games. Guitar Hero 1 did well, but the development team was able to use the revenue from Guitar Hero 1 to make Guitar Hero 2 bigger and better. They also had a lot more money to play with in terms of advertising.

This is especially true in Internet marking. Its really important when you are starting out to re-invest most of what you make online, in order to make even more money. You can start out with $8.00 like Paul from UberAffiliate.com, grow it to $28.00, then scale that to $60, and keep doubling your profit. This eventually creates an exponential increase in profits, and exponents get big fast. Obviously I can’t speak from experience on this point, but I would imagine you reach a point where you can start banking a good portion of what you make for things like retirement. Hopefully I’ll reach that point someday!

Work in milestone mode

This was a great tip that I picked up from our guest lecturer. He advised that you should have a high level plan for what you are going to do, and then set milestones in both time and budget during development. He gave the example of another game Harmonix developed a while back for the PS2 “Eye Toy”. The Game was called ‘Eye Toy: AntiGrav’, and the idea was that you were standing on a virtual hoverboard, and had to lean to the left and right to turn. The Camera would follow your eye and hand movements, and move your hovercraft accordingly.

Some of the milestones for development were to first see if the camera could track your eye movement. Next was to make sure it could track both your eyes and hands at the same time. Finally was the check that the game created a realistic feeling of riding on a hoverboard. This was done before any of the actual game development took place!

I personally work this same way on my programming projects. I like to start small and see if something works. If the proof of concept appears to show some promise, I’ll move onto the next step and write more code, and then tweak and move on again. What this allows you to do is to get rid of bad ideas early, and not spend time and money developing them.

You can’t beat Blizzard at Warcraft

For those who arn’t up to date on their computer games, Blizzard is the company who produces the game ‘World of Warcraft’, which has become one of the highest grosing video games of all time. In 2007 it brought in billions of dollars.

As a video game developer you may think you can produce a better game than warcraft. Maybe you will add more characters, weapons, or worlds, but the fact of the matter is that Blizzard has about 5 years of experience, and billions of dollars in revenue more than you do that they can use to create the next big War Craft style game.

Instead of trying to go head to head with Blizzard in a war craft war, why not take a little detour? Instead of  making your MMORPG in a magical medieval style setting, why not trying to make a game that is set in outer space, or some other planet? (oh wait, Blizzard has StarCraft too ). The idea is to deviate a little bit from the main course.

Does this sound familiar to you? Does the phrase “Niche Marketing” ring a bell? This is exactly what we as Internet marketers (’wannabe’ internet marketers, actually) do to try and make money! Lets face it, it would be pretty difficult to compete directly with eBay, but there is no reason we can’t break down their inventory and create smaller, niche stores to target a smaller, but very specific audience. This is one of the biggest secrets to success I have learned thus far.

Grab your hook and Go fishing

Of all the things I learned today for Chris at Harmonix, the most profound had to be the idea of a hook. A ‘hook’ is something that your game has that no one elses does. I used to be a huge fan of StarCraft, and one of the things that really made the game stand out was the fact that you could play online against millions of other people. The example of a hook Chris gave was in relation to Guitar Hero. There have been games like Guitar hero before Guitar Hero was created, but Guitar Hero has something no other game has…a physical, realistic looking plastic guitar. How crappy would Guitar Hero be without that little plastic guitar? I would probably be bored or frustrated with it in a matter of minutes.

There is nothing more important in Internet Marketing that having something no one else has. This is the Holy Grail of marketing, and should be something everyone strives for. Some famous online hooks I can think of off the top of my head:

• Google’s “Im Feeling Lucky” button (not useful, but fun).
• Gmail’s 6Gigs of online storage
• Yahoo Answers’ Rating system
• Facebook’s “Friend Feed” (not sure of the official name for that)

The list can go on and on, but you get the idea. If you want success, you need to have something that can’t be found anywhere else. Period.