Some of the most innovative games over the past two years have been concepts so powerful there is no way they could have made it into a box. Innovation is a difficult thing to commit to when the
life or death of a company hangs in the balance. With the rising costs in game production, the market is becoming less amenable to taking risks. Because of this, more and more of the
innovation in the industry seems to be leaving the retail box.
In the top 30 critically acclaimed Xbox 360 games, seven weren't
shipped on disk. In other cases, such as "Portal," the game was included as a small offering in a larger package. "Braid" presented a Celtic take on Mario and a world
in which death did not exist. "Shadow Complex" is a graphically stunning revival of classic Metroid games. "Flower" presented a beautiful and soothing gameplay about a
flower dreaming of a life as the wind. Each of these games would be a hard sell to a publisher, to retail chains, and to a gaming audience. But by existing only thorough digital delivery,
they can succeed without a large marketing budget or upfront costs, purely by word of mouth.
In the case of these games, a small studio with a handful of employees can create a game that
receives press and reviews on par with games that had a thousand bodies working on them. Sales won't always match up due to the nature of the audiences and distribution pathways, but the ROI
can be in the favor of independent games.
*******************
Looking at the rise of Xbox LIVE and PSN games, I think it's time marketers reevaluate the proposal of
advergaming. Doritos is still doing some work in this space, but I think a more organized and produced
approach could see success as well. UGC is a great tactic when the market is still maturing, but based on the titles I've seen recently from digitally based game markets, this space is
ripe.
By this time next year, I'd love to have seen a CPG brand launch an advergame in Xbox LIVE or the PSN which gets a metacritic score of 80 or above and uses retail distributed codes
for DLC. This could just be a pipe dream, but if a brand was willing to step up to the plate, I believe it'd be a home run.