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Infinium to Infiltrate Gamer Forums
Opposable Thumbs, over at Ars Technica, points out something we have have overlooked last week when Infinium Labs opened its books. Besides dropping the Phantom in favour of getting the keyboard to market, one of their business plans calls for the company to "infiltrate best-in-class video game communities with simple, easy to understand message and seeding on tech blogs, gaming sites and on-line player forums with compelling imagery and links to lapboard eye candy." Because that's sure to net them some goodwill and customer loyalty.
I frequent one of these "best-in-class" forums (BeyondUnreal), and we get the "HAY CHEK OUT MY SITE" posts all of the time. They usually get banned and culled within five minutes as the community mocks them mercilessly.
Their lap board sure is amazing! Here are some pictures! I'm going to buy twelve! How about you!
Seriously though, havn't people been accusing companies of this for awhile now?
This won't end well.
Forum administrators hate it when people go into their forum and start shilling for some company.
For their ad campaign to work, they're going to have to subvert members of the forum who have some credibility. A new account full of "this is teh c00l" posts is going to be ignored.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Way to shoot yourself in the foot...
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
They should start by campaigning on the Duke Nukem Forever forums.
Some companies might have second thoughts about sending virtual spambots to represent a poorly-marketed, largely-discredited, and a general laughingstock of a product.
But not Infinium Labs.
Well, gotta go. Time to go get ready to be influenced positively by the image-bombardment of 1-post members on my favorite gaming communities' forums!
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
Their record of reliable product releases, best in breed hardware and software and justifiable market saturation speaks for itself.
Slashdot is just biased against Infinium. This is a standard business practice, but do I see slashdot articles tirading against all the other companies engaging in this kind of advertising? No, only Infinium gets blamed by Slashdot. It is clear that the Slashdot editors have an agenda.
Why all the big deal, anyway? If this is how Infinium wishes to spend their advertising budget, they have the right to do so in a free market. Why not just calm down, stop panicking over nothing, and preorder an Infinium® Phantom® Lapboard® today, coming soon to PCs!
Don't be so hopelessly naive. Online astroturfing (typically through paid marketing firms) is standard practice in the computer and consumer electronics markets. It works, too, because those are product categories where people go online to community and review sites to do their research.
It's also done to a lesser extent in other product categories - travel is another big one (think hotel reviews).
Given its track record, when will we see the infiltration happening?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Do they really think this will be effective?
Honestly, a simple post in a forum isn't gonna change my decision of what to buy, and frankly, anyone who is affected this way should just shoot themselves.
I actually got a chance to try a prototype Phantom Lapboard and based in my experience it is not hyperbole to say it will revolutionize gaming, inputting and the entirety of society in general.
Those kind of astroturfers are easy to spot. This is a bad idea.
They won't be a bother for me though. I'll be too busy enjoying my Phantom Lapboard Wireless Keyboard+Mouse. Its teh super aw3some!!1!
Seems like coming up with enough posts that won't get nuked by moderators (which forums allow blatant ads?) but somehow compel people to look might be tough. But hey, Anyone that can blow 62 million bucks with nothing to show for it can do anything i am sure :O
;p
Oh well guess those employees finally have to DO something after all this time....
Funny thing is after all this, they have enough name recognition that it would probably sell itself if it's half as good as they think
that's only part of the story because from your end you aren't able to authoritatively identify who and who isn't an industry shill
by definition, any skillful and artful attempts will go unnoticed, while the crass and inept ones will be quickly identified (that is, a shill is only skillful and artful *if* he/she goes undetected)
have you been influenced by shills? the only way to answer that question with any finality would be to have a list of all the shills out there, something only the companies could provide
not unlike the border patrol, did they get them all? no, just the unlucky and the unskillful
I mean, Penny Arcade covered this kind of "shill-age" being performed by major companies days ago. They even made a comic about it. Really though, anyone surprised by this news story is woefully naive... speaking of which, anyone want to buy this golden bridge in San Fransico? Real cheap.
Murphy's Paradox... the more you plan for success, the more avenues there are for failure.
mmmmmm....a tall glass of cold Hershey's Chocolate Milk. Doesn't that sound good? It comes in strawberry too. I have to say Hershey's milk flavoring products are really the best in the country if not the world. In fact, I think I am going to have another glass right now.
I think you are not giving Infinium Labs(TM) a fair chance. The company, founded in 2002 by Tim Roberts, is a shining example of what a gaming company should be. Take a few examples: When the company first announced a gaming console the entire community took notice gaining mention by many such luminaries as www.penny-arcade.com and www.hardocp.com They later developed a keyboard which is currently poised to change the way in which all people interact with computers; namely by allowing them to keep their mouse UNDER their keyboard. Sirs, we are living in a new century. An Infinium Labs(TM) century. Also, check out some of the sweet shots of both the lapboard AND the upcoming phantom at: http://www.infiniumlabs.com/
Because that's sure to net them some goodwill and customer loyalty.
I was thinking maybe they could do the same thing by announcing a cool product and then selling it sometime shortly after that.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
My greatest fear in reviews begins to come into fruition... I've always loved customer reviews of stuff (like newegg, amazon, and even ePinions), since it can give a more joe schmoe look at the product, and it is not of a sample of the product that a manufacturer may have hand-picked and inspected for a reviewer to review because it will not have problems (it isn't always that way, but I'm sure sometimes it is). This ploy sounds border-line on this type of situation, and the only next step they could take would be planting reviews, leaving the customer review community as a useless resource.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
by definition, any skillful and artful attempts will go unnoticed, while the crass and inept ones will be quickly identified (that is, a shill is only skillful and artful *if* he/she goes undetected)
I also think that the crass ones decrease the visibility of the sneaky shills/infiltraters...especially if the skilled ones themselves denounce the inept spammers.It seems to have gotten them on the front page of /. just fine.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Okay, so remember the old saying...no such thing as bad advertising? All these articles about the lapboard only makes it that much more popular and known. Maybe Slashdot should stop posting any articles for Infinium? Otherwise they'll never die!
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
lots of incomplete sentences?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I got one that was a little too obvious, but I'm guessing there are a few more who play the game better (and I'm sure there are a few who post on Slashdot).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
I frequent one of these "best-in-class" forums (BeyondUnreal), and we get the "HAY CHEK OUT MY SITE" posts all of the time. They usually get banned and culled within five minutes as the community mocks them mercilessly.
Thing is, these are probably not the paid shills. The real shills, you don't even know about.
It is true that companies occasionally get caught for this - it happened to Midway pretty publicly on Usenet about 5-6 years ago, for example. But take it from someone who used to both do it and recruit others to do it as part of my job; you don't know who's shilling and who isn't. Good shills are undetectable, and *every* game developer with a half-decent understanding of the internet and viral marketing does it.
I've been posting stuff on BBS's, blogs, usenet newsgroups and web forums for probably 20 years. So I know the etiquette. And I post on a whole bunch of different topics. When I was tasked with promoting games through forums for the company I worked for, it was with the stipulation that I would continue posting (both positively and negatively) about other subjects - including other games - just as I always did. I might write a post just like this as part of my job. (I could be shilling right now for all you know.) Then five minutes later I'd write another reply somewhere else that subtlely promotes my company's game. If you went back and looked at my posting history, you'd have no idea that I was a company plant.
I have zero doubt that a not insignificant percentage of the top posters on all of the most popular gaming-related web forums are "online street team" members. Sometimes they're obvious, although they don't usually get called out as company shills, just as fanboys. It's very hard to really unmask even the most blatant shill; it's not like you get to see anyone's paychecks. But those who are the best at it aren't even obvious fanboys; their job is simply to plant ideas, not to constantly hawk their company's games. My company kept a really careful watch on street team members, because if the company got caught, they knew it'd be a PR nightmare. It was way more important for street team members to stay anonymous than it was for them to constantly be hawking the company's wares.
And I guarantee that this happens all the time and you don't even know it. Because I used to be one of the people doing it, and I never got called out for it.
Still, even without this news, it would be easy to spot the pro-Infinium shills, anyone promoting their stuff as if it was cool gets a strike against them.
...like this?
...I got nothing.
Just curious, how well did it pay?
Because honestly, no offense, but if you get paid a decent amount for it, the companies should be spending that money on better developers to improve their (largely shitty, nowadays) games.
I regularly frequent the official Atari Rollercoaster Tycoon forums and there seems to be a bit of wallpapering/shills going on there. For example, there are always people who say "most people dont care about making this ride better" or "casual gamers dont want scenery importing" or otherwise come up with an excuse as to why xyz bug doesnt in fact need to be fixed or why xyz feature suggestion shouldnt be implemented. (to be honest, I actually do think that some of the feature suggestions shouldnt be implemented)
Generally, these people seem to do their best to make RCT look good and make it seem like the problems with it are in fact not problems. Its not known for sure but its suspected (by some top community members) that some of these people are in fact shills for Atari and Frontier.
A skilled manipulator can make you desire a feature(set) without mentioning any products by name or company. I can mention my desire for an on-demand on-line game distribution service because it would free me from physical game media, without saying that such a product is a good thing, nor mentioning that any particular console product claims to be able to give me that benefit.
Did you assume that I was talking about Infinium?
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Aforementioned messages are rumored to be REALLY COOL sparking a revolution in video game forum messaging. Each post will, however, take the company 20 years to write, will cost millions in venture capital dollars and will turn out to be less interesting than other messages about the company posted when the original messages were announced.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Astroturfing is getting way too pervasive, take a look at the comments of people who LOVED "Date Movie" on IMDB:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0466342/usercomments?f ilter=love
If you look at most of the users who gave it 10, that's the only comment they made... so you'd have to believe that coming out of that movie, they were so overwhelmed that they ran home, and joined IMDB to rave about only that movie.
The next step of course, is to make your astroturfing seem more realistic... over time give your company's movies 10s and the competitors 2s or 3s, making it seem like you just prefer every 20th Century Fox film to every other film....
That'll be really annoying, I'm worried it'll destroy every credible review site.
My list of multiplayer
Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works. If you have the best game in the world but nobody knows about it, you just have a good game you've probably invested a lot into. (For an indie, that's probably a lot of time in addition to some of what should have been your retirement fund.) Once people know about it, then you have a profitable business that lets you make other games.
;) (For the record, it isn't because most people interested in the game would probably have stumbled across it by now given my postings here on Slashdot. This is just a situation I'm rather familiar with for obvious reasons. Of course, many people probably don't believe me because I have an interest in people playing my own game.) See, I know how to do the sleazy marketing techniques, I just find it all too distasteful. On the other hand, people aren't exactly rushing out to reward my scruples. :P
The main purpose of marketing is to let you know about a product and drive demand. Of course, many times marketers use marketing to drive demand of sub-par products. Because of this, people become suspect when a company mentions its own product because it is not an unbiased source of information. However, if someone that doesn't appear related to the product or company endorses it, people are much more likely to give the product a chance. Especially if that person is on a forum you already participate on and you can look at their posting history and see that they hold some of the same opinions you do, too. This is why you have "online street teams" as described by the person in the grandparent post.
Many people think that spending more money to make a better game would be better in the long run. Unfortunately, this is simply not true. Marketing is vital to selling a good game, because if you don't sell your game you probably won't be able to make your next game. The whole myth of "if you build it they will come" is just that, a myth. It sometimes happens, but you can't rely on it as a business plan.
For example, I could mention my own game, Meridian 59, and tell you about how great the character development and PvP combat is. However, most people won't be interested in clicking on the link because they know I develop the game; I am obviously a biased source and I would tell you my game is great even if it were objectively one of the worst games ever (it's not, but most people still won't believe me). Even if you did visit the site, you might not find the game's screenshots to be that attractive because we don't doctor and/or misrepresent the screenshots; the game is about 10 years old by this point and our tiny company doesn't have the funds to revamp all the graphics and update the 2.5D engine to full 3D (and get 3D models of all the 2D art we'd have to replace, etc). However, if you had read several different people (shills or not) talking about how fun the game was despite the graphics, you might be more willing to try the game out. Even after you logged in you might be more willing to stick with the game a bit longer than you might otherwise, because other people found it fun and many people want to "fit in" with the "norm". (Of course, the person reading this is the exception to that rule, and you want to play the game because it's something only an intelligent individual would enjoy.)
And, if you really want to get meta, you might wonder to yourself if this discussion isn't just a way for me to get you intrigued about my own game without being obnoxious about it. Well, less obnoxious, maybe.
The truth is that you really need something to get the audience's attention. Having a good game is only the first step. The next steps are getting people aware of your game, and then getting them to want it. So, all this is just a long winded way of saying that the game wouldn't have necessarily been any better overall if they put their marketing bu
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
Well, Infinium's posts will be impossible to detect. Just like their product.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
I liked your post, but the other side can be argued too. An example would be hotmail, that grew originally at a fast pace with no marketing (pre-MS). The product was in itself viral and required no outside marketing. Google and Firefox were spread with groundswell from the lowly man on the street - no paid shills required, all geeks become the shills. An insanely good product will sell itself, and begs the question - if the effort to market a product is inversely proportional to quality of product? I know this is an obviously incorrect theory, but nonetheless often true.
Stay tuned for new sig...
Unfortunately, this happens every day even in major newspapers, not only on a community bulletin board. In fact, we're at the point where at least half the news you read are actually PR. In some cases, more.
PR is a very insidious thing. They don't release outright ads, which people are already deveolopping a resistance too. They release stuff looking like genuine news, or like genuine buyer reviews.
E.g., one such PR hack discussed on Slashdot was the _flood_ of news pieces saying that the suit is back, that all the cool companies require people to wear suit, and the IT cable-puller in jeans is sooo last century. (Yeah, pulling cables in a suit is soo much better.) Complete with interviews of hand-picked PHBs testifying about how their company is soo much more professional with everyone wearing a suit, and how they always look for a nice suit (as opposed to actual professional knowledge, which supposedly is aplenty nowadays and unnecessary for the job anyway) when interviewing someone.
It looked like news, and it had the insidious effect of actually _creating_ that fashion. It both offered every single SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim) among PHBs a new fashion to be a victim of (hey, it says all the cool guys are requiring suits, and I want to be cool like them too), _and_ told you to go buy a suit already if you're looking for a job. You know, just to be on the safe side, if you're interviewed by a PHB.
The most insidious part was that _none_ of these releases even directly pointed at the company paying for the pollution campaign. The only subliminal link was the phrase "The suit is back", which was also the company's slogan in proper ads.
And, BTW, at this point I'm not discussing the merits of wearing or not wearing a suit, just explaining how PR works.
Or look at the recent attacks on Wikipedia. Regardless of what merits or faults Wikipedia has, I'll bet my soul it was a PR campaign. The attack errupted too suddenly all over the place, and spread way too fast, and died way too fast when the PR campaign stopped fuelling the flames. But more telltale is that it was followed immediately by news all over the place that someone is now making a better wikipedia, with proper reviews by experts, and just recently got the funding from interested parties. (Ah-ha. So around the time the attacks on Wikipedia started, perchance?) The whole attack and outrage and defacements were just to lead to that punchline: come to our commercial product instead, we need to show the VCs that we have page hits.
And make no mistake, a _lot_ of people fell for that campaign, including TV/radio hosts conducting Wikipedia defacements live just to show how unreliable the info there can be made by anyone. And even Penny Arcade, otherwise pretty impartial guys, just had to sport a strip attacking Wikipedia. That's the kind of effect and reach a PR campaign can have.
So to get back to Infinium, don't expect their PR pollution to be like "hey, click here and buy infinium stock, goddammit". It'll be far more subtle and more damaging. It'll be stuff like seemingly normal gamers like you ranting about how stupid it is to buy a game on DVD and get it scratched, and how it's about damn time someone started offering everything as downloaded rentals. (Which incidentally is what Infinium promissed to offer.) Or various other subtle stuff.
Chances are it won't even mention Infinium, other than rarely and only in some side-note or tangent. They won't give you an "Infinium is the best" answer to a question you didn't even ask. They'll challenge the very foundation and premises of your judgment of who's best and who sucks, then let you get to that conclusion yourself. (Note how in the other two examples they never explicitly told you "go buy a suit" or "use that site instead of wikipedia". They just gave you plenty of reasons, fake or not, for you to reach that conclusion on your own.)
So don't fool yourself: it _will_ slip through the forum admins with no problems.
And unrelated, yes, I consid
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No I assumed you were talking about Comcast's $20 month service that offers just that :) And (I use SBC DSL)
Just go and check out the producers
http://www.producersonbroadway.com/
Replace the crappy play with the Phantom console and there you go
"Based on real events" is in the titles now.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
Penny Arcade had a rather interesting blog post about this a couple of weeks ago. I'm starting to look suspeciously upon any uncritical announcement of a gigantic, mass-market piece of media culture as potential astroturfing. They tend to be easy to mock, at least.
Unfortunately, that also makes it difficult to get past people's internal turf-filters in order to express honest appreciation for stuff. There are certainly people here who look askance at the prevalence of Nintendo support here, but I consider that fairly unlikely, for the main reason that I don't think they're web-savvy enough to consider it.
OMG Infinium Labs, previously home to all manner of Vapourware, has just invented Vapourhype!
I'm sure this new business will start right after the Phantom comes out.
I certainly didn't mean to make it sound like "online street teams" are the only way to market, but you do need a good marketing plan. A "viral" product becomes so because of a marketing plan. Hotmail had a hook in being one of the first and better webmail applications, and they were advertised every time someone sent an email: "Hotmail.com, what ISP is that you're sending from?" Firefox definitely had a very strong marketing angle, they were just lucky enough to have enthusiastic supporters. And, they definitely did have a superior product with great features like tabbed browsing. But, notice how much better Firefox did than Mozilla.
And, Google is interesting, too. The original search engine did pretty good, but many of their more recent offerings have worked with the "exclusivity" angle if they're trying to break into an already established area. Orkut and Gmail both had a field full of competitors, but they managed to drum up a lot of interest in people by making them "invite only" to start.
Games are a different beast than the things you've mentioned. Portable email, a great browser, and a fast search engine are things that affect the way you work on the internet. I'm firmly in the camp that the internet is important for daily life, so having something that improves your internet experience is pretty much vital. Games, on the other hand, are luxuries so you can't use exactly the same marketing techniques. Having people say good things about the game helps, but playing a game isn't going to make your life easier like switching to Firefox from IE does.
In the end, "online street teams" are very effective for game marketing. Luxuries that are perceived as popular and cool are more desirable, in general.
Have fun,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
I actually played Meridian 59 when it first came out. No offense, but I wasn't that impressed. Then again, I'm not really a MMO-gamer, so I'm probably not a target demographic (it all went downhill after the original Neverwinter Nights :)
I was looking at someone like stardock, in particular the fact that they have basically built a game based on what they would want (from the beginning with GalCiv for OS/2)
Obviously, they've supported themselves with other projects in the meantime, but it looks very likely that they're going to get some darn good sales from GalCiv2, all based on a game that was essentially only publicized by the fact that it was in the store along with their other OS/2 products.
I'm not saying marketing isn't important, but rather, a better game will have strong success and fanbase beyond the initial sales (much as I imagine Meridian 59 has had, given that people presumably still play it...)
I actually played Meridian 59 when it first came out. No offense, but I wasn't that impressed.
Of course, things have changed in the past 10 years since M59 came out. This is another aspect of marketing, to let people know that the product is "New and Improved!" We've poured a lot of new content into the game, rebalanced things, even got a new rendering engine as an alternative to the old software renderer. Of course, it's still the same game that focuses on character advancement and PvP combat, but even those have changed over the years.
As for GalCiv2, a quick Google search shows that the game will enjoy some print marketing. Print advertising isn't cheap, and they would likely get much better results by having an "online street team" that probably costs about the same.
[A] better game will have strong success and fanbase beyond the initial sales....
True, but many games are like other entertainment media in that most of the sales happen at launch. Game players, in general, enjoy new things. Older games are generally seen as inferior, so encouraging people to buy the game at launch will boost sales. Recurring sales are not as valued, particularly by games in retail because shelf space is limited. A game that sells a steady trickle will make less money over a short period of time than a newly released game that's been hyped excessively and expects big sales.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog