Core gamers and magazines/sites hyping NSMB Wii worries me

[Erik Aston]

theprof00 said:
word of mouth is people talking to each other.

 

theprof00 said:
word of mouth is a marketing strategy

Haha. Those are pretty much contradictory. Word of mouth can be good or bad, and it comes from customers, not from marketers at companies.

You understand that in the term "word-of-mouth marketing," "word-of-mouth" is being used as a modifier; as in, "marketing designed to generate good word-of-mouth." Word of mouth itself is a different thing.

Anyways, right now Nintendo is hyping NSMBW to generate awareness and excitement. But you can have awareness and excitement and never have a product. And once you launch a product, you can't control what people say about it. If people don't like the game once they play it, sales can fall off quickly, ie a highly hyped game can have bad word of mouth once released.

I guess the point being, that simply having a lot of hype doesn't mean the game will fail. Because of the gap between the AAA Nintendo products and the crappy and/or niche games third parties put on the console, there have been a lot of B games on Wii which were hyped up. Then when they are mediocre or niche, they have bad word of mouth, and end up with bad lifetime sales. So the problem is not that the game was highly hyped, it is that it is a bad game or a niche game with too-big expectations. NSMBW is certainly not a niche game, and if it is a ton of fun, then it will generate good word of mouth, and have long tail sales.