When you take on a sports license you’re buying a specific audience. MotoGP fans follow that sport. Many of them own consoles. Your primary goal is to create a game that appeals to that particular audience.

The principle applies whether you’re looking at football or ice hockey or Formula One.

But even though it’s televised in over 200 countries, MotoGP isn’t the world’s biggest sport and we’re looking towards audiences that might not consider themselves fans of the sport - we’re looking at racing fans, which is a much larger audience.

I worked on MotoGP titles at THQ since 2000 and now here at Capcom, so I’ve been following this for some time now. Winning over the racing fan has always been the toughest challenge.

Motorcycle sports are relatively niche in comparison with car racing games. And because bikes handle differently to cars, some people find the games difficult.  That provides an immediate challenge from a product point of view and from a marketing perspective.

We have to begin by looking at what’s unique about the bike and what’s unique about MotoGP and trying to differentiate that offering for racing fans, express these points of difference and make them relevant and meaningful.

Accessibility

People are looking for something they can get to grips with right away so both from a marketing and product point of view we’ve been shifting our focus to make MotoGP more accessible.

Previous titles have made it slightly difficult for people to just enjoy the racing experience. It’s been too focused on recreating what a bike ride is like and that’s put people off.

Now we’re allowing people to set the handling and the AI and scale them throughout the game and we’ve carried that through to the marketing and PR of the title.

At the same time we have a responsibility to make sure it’s accurate and faithful to the sport for the sim guys out there so there is a mode where you can select everything to make sure it follows the right physics, the right handling, and that the AI is ramped up to full to really offer that progressive challenge.

Challenges of Messaging



But getting that message across – that the game can appeal to more casual racing fans and simulation players alike – is extremely tough. You can’t explain that on the packaging.

Hands-on experience is the only way you can really deliver that message, which then stimulates word of mouth. For the first time in MotoGP game history, we took a truck around to all of the key Moto GP events. We allowed people to get hands-on with the game. The season starts in March and runs right away through until the end of October so we’ve had the game in people’s hands throughout that duration, really just getting people to believe that they can get around the track and have an enjoyable experience

So we focus the product and marketimg on what’s new. One of the key features for MotoGP 08 is the fact that you can race as yourself, which suggests that the game can be right for everyone; that it has a sense of personalization.

In previous games you’ve had to choose one of the riders. But the fact that you can race as yourself means you can race against your heroes [itals] as yourself.[end itals]

That’s allowed us to invest a little bit of personality into the advertising. So this year’s campaign is all about ‘you versus’ which is something everyone can understand, and which appeals to all kinds of racing fans.

It may be you versus the rider; it may be you versus the laws of physics because we’re talking about leaning the bike around the corners; it may be you versus your fear because you’re going from two hundred and eight miles an hour on the straight down to forty miles an hour and there are a pack of bikes right in front of you.

We’re really trying to personalize the message and make it relevant not only to MotoGP fans but also to the guys who play PGR. And it’s interesting that those games are starting to introduce motorbikes which is a welcome thing because it legitimizes racing on bikes as a different experience, and something new to enjoy.

Timing of Game Release

There is another challenge that is specific to MotoGP.  The game is being released at the end of the season. In many other sports, the peak time to release a game is at the beginning of the season.

The trouble is that, if we release the game in March, players will be using the stats and data from the previous season. Details such as licenses, riders, sponsors and even venues are sometimes still unconfirmed as the season begins, so it would be impossible for us to accurately create a 2008 season until after the 2008 season has begun.

There is a lot of interest in MotoGP right now because the season is coming to an end so it’s a good time to launch the game.

That said, our strategy for the future is to run some parallel development that enables us to bring the game more into the middle of the season.

We’re looking around the August time frame when a lot of the European and US GPs take place. It allows people to race the actual season while it’s still going on, using all the correct facts, and tracks.

The other option is downloading updated data similar to what FIFA are doing.

Each sport has its own challenges and, by working with the sports themselves and by listening to the fans, you try to find the correct balance. I think we’re beginning to achieve this with MotoGP.