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5 Cardinal Sins of Official Game Sites
4. Your site is slow and difficult to access.
Gamers want to get into a product site and immediately get what they came for. This is a problem when your site loads like cold molasses (a common symptom of a Flash-only site) and is difficult to sort through and share.
Four out of five sites that I visited did not support link sharing. In other words, I went to specific content like a trailer, decided I wanted to share this with a friend, and four out of fives times it didn't work because the link simply went to the landing page.
Word-of-mouth marketing will never trace back to your site if that site has easily avoidable technical barriers like this. Such sites could easily be friendlier to sharing.
5. Your site is difficult to navigate.
Part of the problem with official game sites is that they are unpredictable. It's very comforting to visit a mainstream game site because the layout never changes. In other words I always know exactly how to find the information that I came for.
But at a product site, I frequently find myself clicking on irrelevant words, images, or animated "things" to navigate around. Menus are most functional and intuitive when they contain relevant words and images. While the desire to create an "experience site" is strong, it's more important to cater to a large audience, not just a small segment of gamers that worship your game and like to play with your Flash toys.
Consider what gamers really want when they visit your site; descriptions and features, game trailers, screenshots. Stop putting up barriers to your audience and create navigation menus that focus on the gamers’ objectives – looking at images and videos from your game.
About Evolution Research
Evolution Research is the leading market research firm in the game industry. Since 2006 Evolution has been leading a shift in how market research is performed in the game industry. The firm's combination of hybrid quantitative-qualitative methodologies, rapid execution time, and unparalleled industry expertise have transformed how publishers and developers are able to use research in creating and selling their games.
Owen Davis currently serves as the President of Evolution.
To contact him please visit evogameconsulting.com, or email info@evogameconsulting.com.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Wow, the Dead Space one is cool! They even have it in Czech language ... wich is kind of strange, because ... even the Mafia II homepage is not in Czech, whilst it is actually developed by Czech folks :o) EA might not be making the best games, but they really now how to support them.
While accurate, i believe those things to be the effects or symptoms, and little was said about the causes.
By their very nature, official sites are driven by the desire to sell the product (marketing) , in contrast community sites report or display news as it becomes available.
But the true nature of the problem may come from the use of "contracted" website developers that are divorced from the product. Add to that the fact that the sites have a limited window in which they appear, some at first teasing with a counter and then slowly feeding carefully screened tidbits of information.
Not only are the community sites familiar, but they have a vibrant established community, usually made up of loyal followers... if they depended on only one or two games to maintain eyeballs, they would surely fail.
The result then seems a self fulfilling prophecy: without enough of a fan base or traffic only a limited budget is allocated to the site since there is very little return on investment, as such the site ends up lacking in quality/content, and perhaps maintenance.
I will go out on a limb here and express that it may be that official sites are right where they want to be, they hit the right balance of return on investment (after all who feeds the community sites their videos) if they wanted that HD content in their page wouldn't they put it there... why pay for that infrastructure when other sites will host that info... for free.
It may be misleading to simply look at official sites from a quality of content perspective, and count the amount of trailers they host, but rather look at the overall marketing/financial aspect. A fair comparison would account for the above, adding traffic as a barometer. Even then a comparison to community sites its just not fitting; a better study comes from official sites pre- and post- launch.
I know ive dragged this on a bit too much but allow me to close by saying this... there is one thing that official sites do that no other site can...
An that is make that release date OFFICIAL.
Nothing but truth in this article. And now from the other side: How to do it right - http://www.2kgames.com/mafia2
Add http://deadspace.ea.com/ along with http://www.noknownsurvivors.com
Sure they had bandwith and navigation issues but that was the best piece of game marketing i saw last year... or in a while for that mater
Videos, comics, contest, ARG... you name it!
I think the only official game site I visited in the past year was for Smash Bros. That site was great at always updating, giving away parts of the soundtrack, and breaking down what would be in the game for newcomers and old pros. I didn't buy the game though...
This was a great read, and oh so true. Then again, one key difference between mainstream game information sites and official game sites is that one doesn't have to push a product and the other does. Mainstream game sites pop up for dozens of reasons, but they are generally under no pressure to sell the game. Official game sites are.
Quite, sir, quite. I certainly find myself shunning official sites. They just don't give me the information I'm looking for. In fact, as you rightly state, they have very little information at all behind the looping flash animations. They're a dime a dozen, these sites.
I'd never thought much about it. I'm pleased to see someone has, and has actually made mention of it in a well composed article.
A problem we won't be having when we release the DS version of our http://www.globulos.com/ game!
This is a good article around the challenges of designing such sites, but I think it would have been stronger if you'd revealed the sites you reviewed.
I think it would be interesting to see, for instance, how many different publishers, the span of the games (sports, RTS, FPS) etc... still, nice piece.
So true! I can't even remember how many times i followed this pattern:
* me looking for: info on "some game" (eg feature list) or support, trailer, demo, patch, etc.
* me thinking: i guess www.somegameiheardabout.com (not an actual website) should be the best place to get that information
* me confused, lost, frustrated ... site is slow, has errors, clickable items are not clickable, others seem unclickable but can be clicked, links can not be copied for later use, media can only be viewed, not downloaded etc pp
* me giving up and using google instead, sifting through dozens of mildly related links, trying to figure out which of the demo versions, trailers or patches is the most current or which of them i have to use and which i can ignore, and finding a site from which i can download that stuff, nag-free, no premium use accounts required for > 8 KB/s or 20 minute download queues etc. pp.
.... so you really want me to fracking buy your game???? Forget it!!! :)
A good article that needed to be said - I rarely if ever visit product sites unless I've already scoured everything there is to find on mainstream ones. One omission was flash-based galleries, which take an age to scroll through screenshots where a simple spread of thumbs would be preferred, with another being videos to be watched in the site's embedded flash player only and cannot be downloaded, while being available for download at a higher resolution elsewhere.
I think the problem lies mostly with publisher-made over developer-made sites as there are added steps between the devs creating the assets and the marketing team building the site at the end of the chain. Perhaps a better approach would be to simply point to each and every news and content article from external sites, linked on the product site, therefore making it the central hub for every piece of information online.
Good article, and very true. I frequently leave official sites because of their Flashy design which is hard to navigate ("mystery meat navigation") and lack of content - or even community.