Videogame marketing fail of the year: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

These are certainly exciting times for Videogame developers. While the videogame business keeps expanding and videogaming has become more than ever a social experience, marketing isn’t considered to be very important nowadays. One of the most anticipated titles in gaming history ever “Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ is about to hit the shelves on wednesday. Now, what did they do to mess up the launch of the game?

The people at Activision sure did mess up their marketing for the pc version of the game. A few weeks before the launch of the game they communicated to the target audience of the videogame that there wasn’t going to be any support for dedicated game servers. The whole reason why people buy a computer videogame is mainly because of the customization. You can run your own servers and customize the hell out of the game using the developers console. You even get better graphics because a graphics card in a computer is able to generate way better imagery than the ‘obsolete’ graphics card in a console that’s already 2 years/or more old. Now, what did they do to ’sell’ their target audience on the fact that there wasn’t going to be any customization… they made clear to the target group that you can – I quote: “Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.”

This isn’t the worst that can be said about the game developers though. Infinity Ward launched their own system of online play called IW.net. People who play videogames know that there is a gaming latency when you play online games and that a latency should never really exceed a 100 or even more miliseconds. The wonderful people at Infinity Ward said this in a Q&A: “Mackey-IW: I’ve been playing mainly with around 100ms ping and it was great.”

There are even more reasons why this game is giving gamers the notion that it will suck on the computer, but I’ll stick to this minimum of reasons as to why it won’t give as good a gaming experience than any other FPS out there on the market. I’m just trying to point out that this has to be the worst case of videogame marketing in the short lifetime videogames have been enticing us.

Something different:

A few weeks prior to the launch of the videogame… a youtube video had leaked onto the internet showing imagery of a “call of duty” character being part of a terrorist group killing innocent people at an airport site. This footage was shown across the world and was regarded to be very offensive. Activision made a youtube copyright claim to get the video removed from youtube. The people at Infinity Ward even made a statement about the videogame saying that you as a videogamer will have the possibility to skip this mission.. this was certainly not the best PR either. The video footage can be seen here

In conclusion:

Graphical depictions of violence have always put quite a stir on how the media links them to mass killing of people, like the Virginia Tech incident and lots of others around the globe. Games like GTA and Manhunt (banned in the UK) have been proven to have a link to mass killings, so there is a ground of truth in these statements. Nothing can however be attributed to them directly.

I myself, have been anticipating call of duty’s release and was pondering about buying it before the launch of the videogame. Now I am postponing my purchase before I read something about how it plays out to be. Maybe the videogame makers and the marketing people at Activision will see the error of their ways. It’s rather their own fault to do multi-launches on various platforms, because therefore they cannot give the best service for each platform on which they launch. In short, the worst pc game launch ever.