Market Leader

Sean Dromgoole is the founder of Some Research, a qualititative consumer research agency. He's been involved with the games industry for more than a decade now, and works regularly with the three major platform holders plus publishers such as EA, Vivendi, THQ and Ubisoft.

Next month Dromgoole will deliver a speech at the London Games Summit, which is scheduled to take place from 4 - 5 October. His session will be titled 'Information is Power - What you Need to Know - When - to Succeed with New IP.'

In this interview, Dromgoole discusses why he believes the balance is likely to shift away from sequels and back to original IP in the future, along with how the platform holders differ in their views of IP and what the implications of the European PS3 delay are likely to be.

Sean Dromgoole: I've been working for 12 years in the games industry, doing consumer research, and the idea is to show all the different things you can find out, or should know, at the different stages of launching a new piece of IP.

So it'll start with an assessment of what you've got in the form of writing a communication concept... Then you need to hammer out your strategy for communicating the game - what things can we say about this game that are true, are motivating, are going to make it stand out from the pack and appear distinctive?

Then you need to find a means of saying those things. Ten years ago it was all about television and games magazines. Now it's a more complicated media marketplace, much more Internet-based, much more to do with picking out the niche of gamers that you think are going to come for this game, and knowing where to find them.

Then you commit yourself to a way of talking to people, you make some ads, you make sure that they say exactly the right things to exactly the right people. And if you're clever - a lot of companies do this now - you check and see that the ads have worked by doing what's called pre- and post-testing for the awareness and the extent that people are interested in the game. Then you launch the game, cross your fingers and hope for the best...

Publishers are often criticised for becoming more and more reliant on tried and trusted franchises, rather than opting to produce new IP. How big a problem do you think that is?

I think it is a problem. I always look at the film industry for parallels, just because it's 50 years older. There was certainly a phase in the life of the film industry, about ten years ago, where they wanted to go for constant sequels rather than launch new IP. It's playing safe, of course.

Basically, if you look at the videogames industry, you had this mad, nutty period where it was run by the people who created games. Which was fine, but they were wonderful enthusiasts who didn't neccessarily know that much about big business and / or marketing.

Then you had this swing in the opposite direction where the money moved in. The money wanted to be able to make predictions on a quarterly basis for how many units were going to be sold and so on. Now, that automatically asks for sequels, because it's much easier to predict their performance.

It's easy to predict that you might have ten games, and out of those, seven will do fairly well, two will flop completely and one will be an absolute hit. It's not easy to predict which of those ten are going to fall into which categories, given that the volume is such that most publishers can only release so many things a quarter.

So, finally, what will happen is there will be a balance between sequels and new IP, because huge new hits don't come from just constantly making sequels. It doesn't work that way.

You've worked with all three of the platform holders, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. Do you find that they have differing approaches when it comes to new IP?

I'm in no position to comment about that. I've not been at the bit when they're sorting out what they want to do. What I'm aware of in two of their cases - and I'm sorry to be vague, but they've kind of spent a lot of money - is really intensive efforts to use the array of IP that they're offering as part of the brand identiy of the console that they're offering.

Two of those three fully understand that the games that go with the hardware form a very clear part of how consumers perceive that hardware. They work at that really, really hard.

And you can't say which two those are?

I can't. But what I will say is that given they have an overall brand strategy for a piece of hardware, obviously that's going to have some implications for the sort of software that they are going to select and promote. And that has implications for which games they have exclusively on their hardware.

You've seen a lot of activity from one of them recently on that basis; they want to say things about their hardware with their software choices. Obviously, that has big implications for how they work with developers. If it fits, great. If it doesn't fit, it's going to be hard for them to make it fit, because they have a clear idea of the identity they want to present. You can work out who I'm talking about, I'm just not going to tell you...

With the benefit of your consumer research experience, what do you think of the news that the PS3 is being delayed in Europe? Is that likely to have a big impact on consumers?

Yes, it is. If you look at the picture from a place like Spain, or a place like Italy, you're looking at a very, very PlayStation-dominated market. Much more so than say, the UK, or France, or Germany, which is much more PC. It's going to be quite weird for some of those markets to see the two other products get to market way ahead in time for Christmas - and PlayStation not be there.

They have a fantastic position of dominance in Europe. I don't know about the American or the Japanese position, but they have a fantastic position, and this can't help. It just can't help.

Does Sony still have a chance to be market leader this time around, though?

They have a very strong brand, and what will be interesting for marketing geeks like me will be seeing how that brand strength holds up in the absence of product, when others are bringing out new products.

Remember what gaming was like before PlayStation. It's been a complete change since then, and lots and lots of households naturally have a PlayStation in for gaming on. Whether that mass market just blindly hangs on to their PlayStation loyalties in the absence of product will be interesting to see.

These things always move much slower than we think they do in marketing. They're big ships at sea, and they're slow to turn. It may well be that it doesn't really count, and everyone just waits for a PlayStation, or lots and lots of people wait for a PlayStation. We'll just have to see.

I very much liked Peter Moore's comment that for the cost of a new PlayStation you can get both a 360 and a Wii. That's the strangest bit of business collaboration I've ever seen, but I really enjoyed it.