In many competitive industries, your product launch is your golden opportunity to build hype and get people excited. When better? There’s a shiny new product coming out, with new rules, ideas, art and more. But in the games industry, your product launch faces a challenge that moviemakers and Harry Potter readers know well: the risk of having your launch spoiled ahead of schedule.
Let’s talk about spoilers in the games industry
Most games are self-contained: you buy a box, it contains little wooden sheep, plastic spaceships or an artistically designer board, and you play it as-is. In these games, little is gained by tightly controlling the flow of information, since all players come into the game with equal knowledge and equal access to all the parts. For example, in Settlers of Catan or Carcassone, there’s unlikely to be new parts.
Other games exist in a world of unequal knowledge and investment. Consider:
- Magic: the Gathering– the world’s most popular collectible card game. In Magic, the game continually releases new sets of cards, and players build decks from a subset of the most recent cards to compete with. When a new set comes in, older ones rotate out of the most popular competitive formats.
- Miniatures-based wargames – There are a wide range of these, such as Warhammer or Warmachine, where players collect an army of plastic or metal figures belonging to a particular faction, then play against players with their own separately collected armies from the same or other factions. For example, an army themed around Arthurian knights vs. an army themed around Tolkein-esque forest-dwelling elves. In these games, new models are released regularly, so the business model depends on – every so often – refreshing the core ruleset and rebalancing all the individual models’ rules.
What these games share is that players make a financial and emotional investment in a Magic deck or a Warmachine faction. It’s less playing “the game as a whole” than being “an Eldrazi deck player” or “an Elves faction player.” It creates passionate fans – which is fantastic! – but also poses challenges when planning the launch of a new Magic set or a new miniatures games edition.
On the one hand, players have made investments, and the cards or the models people they like to play may no longer be competitive. So they want to know – what will the new rules be? What new cards are coming out? Should I get excited or be disappointed? Players are eager for information, eager to be the first ones “in the know” so they can show off their information, eager to find out what’s going on. Controlling the flow of that information in the run up to the launch date is therefore critical so that new concepts, miniatures or rules can be revealed in context and in their best light.
When the news gets out
Just within the last year, Magic producer Wizards of the Coast suspended several of its most active players – volunteer judges – for sharing information on upcoming cards, and Warmachine manufacturer Privateer Press found that all of the rules for its new edition had gotten out early, likely as part of a localization/translation process where someone failed to follow a non-disclosure agreement.
In both cases, there was a backlash from the community. Wizards of the Coast’s crackdown was widely seen as unjustified – the judges had shared information, not stolen it themselves – and Privateer Press started to face harsher questions as people began to see the new edition all at once rather than rolled out with the planned discussion, inside insight, and framing. They called for people to not share unofficial spoilers but – at least publicly – did not appear to take action against those sharing them.
Not only that, but the releases were less well received, because they didn’t have the chance to be framed correctly. People argued about the reality of these spoilers, making their unveiling a contentious time rather than one where people could get excited together.
Four tactics for managing your product launch post-spoilers:
- Keep your big news in your back pocket.If a transformational change gets revealed earlier than you expected, there’s two ways things can go. In one, you have your preview piece all ready to go. You share it, people get excited about your news rather than the unofficial spoilers, and you move on. In another, you’re frantically starting to write that piece the day after your news is on social media – and you’re already behind the social news cycle.
- Investment sparks entitlement.You care a lot about keeping your intellectual product under your control, but your fans do not. They want to know, and they do not welcome after-the-fact efforts to punish leaks. Expect that information that needs to be kept private should be kept close to hand – attempting to pull it back off the internet or social media once it’s out there is generally not received well.
- Contextualize your choices.Spoilers are typically released insight-free, with no glimpse into your process or the broader vision of the product. Even after spoilers come out, you can still share a great story about “why,” “how” and “who” that can be really interesting to your audiences. You’re the designer and the producer – you have insights no one else does!
- Step up your rich content.So rules may have come out, or an image of a card or a model’s rules. You can add value to that by – say – showing the model in action on the battlefield in a battle report, or sharing some behind the scenes full-art images that show more than you’d get from a grainy spoiler. If you are the source for the best information, people will continue to look to you.
Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/15725991454/; not under copyright as a United States government work.
.jpg){kind=link}