Study Shows Word Of Mouth Makes, Breaks Videogames

Thanks to GameSpot for their analysis of a new Zelos Group study on videogaming, in which it's calculated that "...over 70 percent of respondents say conversations with friends are the primary means for securing information on games." The study co-ordinator elaborates further, reporting that "...face-to-face conversations with friends is the primary source for information about games, with websites coming in second. Instant messaging among friends is probably the second most influential kind of word of mouth communication, and then online forums." However, he has this dire caveat: "Forums offer publishers the most direct influence over word of mouth outside of guerilla marketing techniques, but online forums are inherently full of noise: 'fanboy' rants and antisocial behavior foremost."

Comments

Artificial forum members?

[G4from128k]

I wonder if any companies are fielding artificial forum participants. A bit of programming, a bit of AI, and you could create software that automatically writes short postings to a forum and masquerades as a person. An artificial forum member does not need to pass the Turing test because it does not need to respond coherently to any and all questions.

A business could then spawn multiple copies with different personality tweaks or language usage parameters and let them post freely to online forums. Over the years, such artificial agents would likely become respected and carry great weight with other participants. Of course, these pseudo-posters would have carefully tuned fanboy/troll behaviors that tend to tout the company and trash the competition. Constant presence on the forum and subtle messages would bias the forum's mood toward the company.

Hmmm....are all members of /. real? How do we know?

Re:Enter the Matrix

[gl4ss]

i dunno..

the last good review i saw in a game magazine was from 1989 or something.

the review said (in finnish): "sh*tty commando clone".

nothing else, i guess nothing else was needed really though. and this from a magazine that would have usually written several paragraphs about any shit game.