| Ail said: And coming back to the Conduit, games that have a decent TV add campaign( I've seen the commercial like 20 times over the last 3 weeks on cable channels and I really don't watch tv that much) are expected to have strong beginning. That's just the way TV adds work. They lead to people purchasing products on impulse. TV adds do not create legs... Right now the only thing we can tell is that the marketing campaign failed to generate enough sales to justify its existence. Even if the game ends up having decent legs and selling well, I doubt any game similar to the Conduit will get the same kind of marketing in the future. Something else will have to be tried... Marketing third party core games for the Wii on TV does not seem to work ( and this has very little to do with review scores). That should at least answer all the Wii owners that blame low sales of previous core third party Wii games to the lack of marketing, it's better to have low marketing than a marketing that can't even generate additional sales to pay for itself... |
I'm once again going to have to bring up Carnival Games as an example of a game with a long TV campaign and long legs to match. Wii Music had a huge television campaign and a tepid launch. Call of Duty: WaW sales picked up in part thanks to Wii-specific ads which started airing well after launch.
Now, I'm not saying that I necessarily expect Conduit to achieve a long tail like these games (Wii Music and Call of Duty had the advantage of launching just in time for the holidays), and I suppose it's possible that the legs of these games is completely coincidental to their ad campaigns, but they really do suggest that TV ads can sell games beyond the first month of release. On the Wii, at least.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
