Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Is social networking creating flashmobbed success?

This is a difficult concept to describe, or rather, a difficult one to describe without giving the wrong impression. I’m not attempting to criticise any content creators whatsoever here, just offering a perspective on how I see various marketplaces.
I think there is a relatively new (or to be more accurate, a suddenly hugely influential) phenomena of sudden, almost random, and fairly inexplicable popularity of individual pieces of media, which I’m going to try and call ‘flashmobbed success’.

I reckon there are basically three routes to success, and the flashmob version is the third one. Firstly, we have the traditional old school route to success. People who create something work hard, come up with a good product, put their name out there, and people like it. A combination of word-of-mouth, some movers-and-shakers putting in a good word, a little dash of luck, and some canny re-investing of profits from success into some decent marketing leads to a product that gradually builds up and sells well. Generally, there is critical acclaim for the product, and generally, people think it is a hit based on its merits.#If you’d like what I consider to be a gaming example of this, I’d say World of Goo, also Braid, also Elite, Age Of Empires, the majority of games… The film ‘Alien’ and for that matter ‘star wars’ (the original movie).

The second route is the money/hype/big cynical corporate route. This is where so much marketing muscle is thrown at a product that it becomes successful through inertia. The majority of big budget blockbuster movies go this route, also a fair chunk of the modern console games, which sell millions despite not being remotely polished or original in any way. The vast vast majority of movie-tie-in games follow this route too. Generally, these products are not considered to be critically good, and the assumption is often that the vast media budget is what enabled them to become such a hit. Sometimes, rarely, a huge marketing budget and hype does actually accompany something truly good which would have done well on it’s own merits such as Avatar, but I think that’s rare. I’d say the Godzilla movie, and most of the mission impossible movies and clones fit here. So does ‘Battleship’.

But now we have a new phenomena. The sudden rise to incredible popularity, stardom and sales/revenue which seems to happen for no discernible reason whatsoever. Like the gangnam style video, or a number of PC games. In these cases, nobodies motives seem sinister, but for whatever (probably very innocent reasons), a bunch of well-connected people with a lot of social connections all happen to like the same, slightly random thing. Very quickly, the popularity of it will spiral into self-fulfilling prophecy mode, where success breeds success which breeds success.


Why should we care?
The problem is that this phenomena is the absolute antithesis of the beneficial nature of the ‘long tail’. A system which encourages popularity amongst that which is already popular (and thus least in need of exposure) reduces consumer choice and narrows the range of entertainment available to all. If TV news covered my game ‘Democracy 2’ they could likely treble it’s sales overnight, but of course instead, they will cover the games people already know about, because they have already sold 10 million copies…

It’s frustrating from the POV of a small time creator of content because it both irritates and encourages despair. Realizing your product is not good enough to achieve market success is sad, but encourages you to work harder. Realizing that success is almost random encourages you to just throw more crap at the wall until some of it sticks.

So who is to blame? Maybe the media to some extent by perpetuating the virtuous circle of decent sales = free press coverage = more sales, but in their defense, the press wants to cover what people want to read, and generally, people don’t want to discover new things, they just want validation that what they already like is good.

Is it me that sees this as a new, and worrying phenomena? The extent to which social media connects the whole world so intimately seems to me to be making it worse. We have had annoying and inexplicably popular novelty songs before, but not ones from South Korea. How long before the whole world is truly one entirely homogenous marketplace, with no local variety and a single, all-knowing top-ten list for everything?
I truly hope not, but the signs are not encouraging. It looks to me like the long tail theory was dead wrong. People still gravitate to what everyone else is enjoying it’s just that a random selection of undiscovered media gets picked and thrown in there as the new blockbusters.


8 thoughts on Is social networking creating flashmobbed success?

  1. Heh, I agree 100%.
    Who’s to blame? the journalist/press. Nobody cares about the 10000000000000000000000000000000000th article about Minecraft. Tell me about that small indie doing weird games selling direct.

    /rant
    But no, is easier to write about the same thing over and over. Why try something new? why try to help the small indies? let’s make the millionaires even more rich and have an easy piece of article to write, because wow, already popular game Y added the insignificant feature Z, let’s write 10,000 words about that! :D

  2. @winterwolves
    Have to disagree a little. I edit a (very small) games journalism site, and don’t particularly want to cover minecraft news or Diablo patches. But give me something interesting to write about! You can moan about lack of coverage but take a step back and think about whether something is interesting to you because it’s interesting, or because of your proximity to it

  3. Entertainment generally trends to be lowbrow, we see this with movie’s and TV and it’s been hitting games since the original Xbox/PS2/Gamecube reached a certain level of graphical fidelity. Since that time game quality started to slide because it attracted larger audiences of people who aren’t really there for games but for aesthetics. Publishers/developers knew many people would just buy something because it’s shiny and it looks a certain way and not because of anything related to gameplay.

    I’ve had people talk about how “weird” games like Bayonetta are and how they ‘can’t get into them because of how silly it looks’. This is the kind of audience hardware horsepower has now attracted to gaming that never used to game at all during the 80’s and early 90’s (8-bit and 16-bit era’s). Bayonetta was made by traditional japanese game developers who made some of the greatest games during the 80’s and 90’s this is a huge audience shift as computers allowed for more fidelity and ‘realism’, it attracted the ‘jocks’ to gaming en masse and now they look down their snooty noses at japanese aesthetics and especially anime style games.

    This has been a slow trend eroding game quality that goes back decades, it’s not a new phenomena.

    I won’t be getting a Wii U, I’ve watched Nintendo botch their main franchises outside of perhaps mario and I’m not coming back. The real issue is generational turn-over, games that are old and long in the tooth are breathed new life by new generations of kids who can’t perceive the games flaws. So we get mediocrity because kids have no history of gaming under their belt they are a poor judge of good/bad games and tend to have their tastes set by the era in which they were born.

    Games have long since ditched being sold on gameplay, democracy 2 while you may think it’s a great game is not something most of the market really wants nor understands.

    Most videogames have become about experiences more then raw mechanics. Think of all the gameplay mechanics from the 80’s and early 90’s that have been broken and completely chucked for in game cheating. Better known as REGENERATING HEALTH in first person shooters, they added this as to not to frustrate the ‘customer’ and ‘take people out of the experience’. Reality is that many modern gamers are just shit at videogames, they don’t experience them as GAMES where challenge, problem solving, frustration, learning is part of the experience. They want more passive movie like illusion of a videogame and that is why gaming industry is a modern chimeric freakshow.

    About aesthetics… Let’s also be honest, how many of us have looked at a screenshot of a game and knew instantly we wouldn’t be interested in said game? We do this a heck of a lot. We’re looking for games that cater to our aesthetic tastes and aesthetics and art matters, it is the hook that gets us to even try a game.

    For instance I dig the art style of warcraft and darksiders so I knew instantly that they were games for me. This is how we made decisions about games as kids, as adults we tend to over-analyze how simple people really are about entertainment.

    Take the art style of Space battles or tank battles, the art is actually what attracts most people to initially try out your game because it looks like something they’d like to experience.

    If space battles had triangles and squares instead of the great artwork they have no one would pay attention to it and rightly so.

    Aesthetics is a part of gameplay the problem now is that it now dominates everything else and hence you can get away selling crappy games relying totally on aesthetics.

  4. Cliff – have you read “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell? This seems to be a bit of what you’re getting at with how the “random” theory actually works.

    Mavens to Connectors, connecting to Salesmen, who, in turn, pass along the word to more Connectors – and so an news epidemic spreads.

  5. yes indeed, although now the growth of social media has led to the connectors role becoming hyper-effective. There are people now who have 100,000 or even a million twitter or youtube or facebook followers/friends, and their merest interest or passing mention of a product they encounter will make or break careers.
    That is leading to a casino style environment for content creators, just witness rovios many flops before inexplicably a fairly pedestrian arcade game about birds became a smash hit.
    I don’t see this as a good thing.

  6. As a book I’d suggest the excellent Everything is Obvious (Once you know the Answer)

    http://everythingisobvious.com/

    Backs up the ‘random’ theory with actual experiments (hit-driven success is random, but quality gives you a bonus modifier).

    I guess the rational strategy is to to produce several, high-quality games in the hope that one becomes a big hit. Shit, in this case, doesn’t stick no matter how much you fling.

    It also skewers a lot of the post-hoc reasoning about why something is successful (we like to make up stories that seem to explain the world). It even supports the “world getting smaller means fewer, but bigger succeses” idea.

    The flashmobbed success really highlights just how random hits are, and exaggerates even more the success of the very few winners.

    Oh, and yes, it is depressing. (The chances of having a hit, not the book)

  7. You write a lot of deep stuff. Makes me really think about what your saying. In fact I’m still thinking about it. Not sure there is really a good solution to this. Initially I thought you can just more forcibly advertise to get the products name out there. Then I realized that is not very piratical for most Indy teams. I guess you just got to get you name out there in the places people are looking for Indy games and hope people spread it word of mouth and hope it really takes off.

  8. I don’t think that people do not want to learn about new things all the time, but that in their limited free time they want to enjoy a known quantity most of the time. Most people have social groups and organizing schedules and picking a shared-enjoyable activity (e.g. the group all agrees to it) can be a challenge. For gaming groups, that means finding games which everyone will play, can afford and is willing to buy, can run on their machines (what OS? what console? how many players/controllers?), etc. Once the effort has been expended to find one of these games, it is much easier for the group to stick with the same choice as last time until that choice is sufficiently boring that people start searching again for the next game.

    The social media-powered flashmobbed success (great term by the way) is new, but I do not find it worrying. Much of culture (fiction books, music, games, etc.) is fairly short in duration and, with a larger marketplace, very cheap per-person. I can afford both financially and by-time to enjoy Gagnam Style *and* F-777, Envy, and other lesser-known artists. Games are a different matter because the amount of time they consume and the likelihood that they are a group event is much greater. How many “serious” World of Warcraft players still also buy and try another game each month (even if they go back to WoW)? In fact, I would argue that the fact that we even *can* get a Korean pop song popular here in America is evidence of an opening up such that the consumer has more choices and is better off.

    Caveat: the search engines really need to keep up with the amount of content being created so we can still find what we’re looking for.

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