Video games might come across as merely child’s play to some people, but there is a huge business behind it. As some video game companies announce growth despite the recession, more and more talk surrounds the idea of video games with “long tail sales.”
“The Long Tail” is a term used describing a video game that continues to sell long after its initial release. A good example of a video game with a long tail would be Mario Kart DS, which has sold nearly 15 million copies world wide. That is a huge statistic for a video game. Rarely will a video game sell monumental amounts of copies, but with the advent of the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii, new demographics have opened up for companies looking to sell more copies of their software. While titles like Nintendogs and Wii Fit will always be in demand by new owners of video game consoles, companies are trying to extend this “Long Tail” sales philosophy to more hardcore-centric titles.
What happens when the core video game demographic is marketed to? The core video game demographic tends to buy titles immediately, and then pass on the ones they don’t pick up right away. As the business side of the video game industry starts to attack this issue in order to increase sales, we see tactics like those of developers Valve and Criterion Games rise in popularity. These methods of development take titles and continuously shake them in front of gamers in an effort to keep the attention and the sales driving forward.
First off is Valve’s Team Fortress 2. TF2 launched packed together with other Valve titles like Half-Life 2 and Portal, and while those titles certainly made a splash together when they were released back in 2007, TF2 has been continuously updated. Every other month one of the character classes in the game will receive an update. New weapons, achievements, maps, and game modes will be released for the PC version of the game. More and more gamers will buy the game with each update and as such Valve has seen specific sales spikes every time they have an update or free-play weekend for the game. This allows Valve continued sales, marketing, and awareness.
Criterion Games has also continuously updated their title Burnout Paradise, an open-world racing game where players can commune online and crash into eachother across “Paradise City.” At the outset, updates merely fixed bugs and glitches, but those were followed quickly by updates that included more game modes to play with friends, and the addition of motorcycles. As Criterion’s updates grew in size and content, they started to charge for each update. While this might turn off some gamers, many more jumped on board in order to further their experience in Paradise City.
Long tail sales might seem out of reach for many developers, but its an ideal that many strive for. As the video game industry transforms into a a business at the front of an economy struggling to reestablish itself, more and more of these business terms will come to the fore front. As game budgets get bigger and bigger, more of these sales models will have to be developed to make ends meet for the developers that remain open through the recession. If not, we’ll all be forced to play iPhone games for the rest of our lives.
You can check out more of Daniel’s writing on Video Games at playreadwrite.blogspot.com.
