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I Heart Bees Again - Halo 3's Iris ARG
I Love Bees is regarded as one of the more successful alternate reality games (ARGs) ever run in the US. It should be no surprise, then, that the game's spiritual sequel entitled simply Iris , is causing quite a stir. It began on June 11th, with cryptic messages in the Bungie forums. Designed to take players through the history of the Halo world over the course of the summer, players have already uncovered some 'pre-game' information; for all intents and purposes the actual game hasn't started yet. Michael VanderZand probably wish it was already over, though: then he might have some peace and quiet. The climax is expected sometime on September 26th, the day after Halo 3 releases to stores.
Penny Arcade have already figured out the most important secret message! For this and ANY future ARGS. :)
This particular campaign seems even more questionable to me. Not only is it targeting the online hardcore who will already doubtless know about the product, it also seems to me that amongst the small subset of players worth targeting interest in ARGs wouldn't correlate all that well with interest in Halo 3.
Even worse, they probably have to sell an entire XBox 360 to any would-be customer as well, since it seems even less likely that someone would already own a 360, be playing the ARG, yet not know about Halo 3 (and already have a clear idea of whether or not it's for them).
I think the viral-marketing aspect of the push may be a bit over-rated. Bungie likes to tell big stories. Look at Marathon. Look at Myst. I think that they would have done I Love Bees (and will probably do Iris) for that reason alone. I Love Bees, for example, included hours of audio drama not in any way necessary to play or understand the ARG. It was a self-contained story that expanded the Halo universe. It provided great back story for Halo 2 (e.g. accounted for the arrival of the Covenant at Earth in the beginning of the game).
I'm not trying to portray Bungie (which I know MS owns) as some kind of artsy philanthropic venture, but I do believe that the culture at Bungie includes not only making games, but telling stories. They tell a pretty good story with Halo 1 and Halo 2, but they clearly enjoy telling that story through ARGs as well. So I'd see the ARG not only as marketing, but as just part of what Bungie does: tell stories.
As far as marketing goes, the point is not to get someone who wouldn't buy the game at all to suddenly buy the game. Whether or not someone picks up Halo 3 is dependent on a variety of factors and a lot of it is random chance. One huge variable will be the number of their friends who are excited about the release. Bungie clearly played to the multiplayer crowd with their multiplayer demo (which was also great for balancing, I suppose). Now they are going after those players who actually care about the story. I'm one. The result will be that the Halo fanbois will be super-excited, and that excitement will spill on down from Halo fanbois to Halo fans, to casual xbox 360 players, to those who don't even own an xbox. I doubt very many of the non-owners will invest in an entire console to play the game, but it should increase the propensity to buy the game all the way down the spectrum.
Whether or not it actually pays for itself, no one will ever know for sure(since it's impossible to tell who would have bought the game with no ARG campaign). But Halo 3 will make more headlines, fanbois will get psyched, Bungie will be yet more endeared to their fans (rep is important in this industry: look at Blizzard) and Bungie will also get to tell more of their story.
It's not like Halo 3 is going to barely break even or something. This one's a no-brainer.
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Are you in marketing?
No, but I am in the business of predicting human behavior for a living and I have designed large-scale, moderately complex simulations (e.g. of an emergency room in a trauma hospital for use in deciding staffing levels). And I know that looking at marketing as an attempt to take a distinct cohort of people from "won't buy" to "will buy" is the wrong way to look at it. First of all, the actual buy/not buy event should be seen as the result of random experiment. There are some inputs that can be influenced, but many that are random. Take Joe Schmoe. Halo comes out in September. What is the chance his car breaks down the same month and he's out of cash? What are the chances its his birthday and he gets a gift certificate to Best Buy? The point is that whether or not Joe Schmoe buys Halo 3 is *not* a deterministic function based on his desire to buy it, but a random function based only in part on his determination to buy it.
Other than random vs. determined, there's the problem of binary vs. continuous. It's not a question of Joe Schmoe either wanting to buy or not buy Halo. It's a spectrum. Units aren't obvious, so let's just invent a scale called "desire" that ranges from 0 (would just as soon eat brussel sprouts) to 100 (would camp out a week to get the first copy). If Joe Schmoe's car breaks down but he's at 100, he's going to say "damn the repairs, I must have Halo 3!" If Joe Schmoe gets a birth certificate and an xbox 360 but his desire is 0, he's going to opt for some other game, or maybe an HD-DVD attachment a few HD-DVDs instead.
So to talk about it in terms of people who will or won't buy Halo is to rule out the randomness. There is no group of people who will buy Halo, and no group that won't. There is only a population that has various levels of desire from 0 to 100 for Halo 3. The more you can ratchet that desire up, the more of those people who, with varying degrees of interest, will actually purchase Halo 3 when all is said and done.
Your own analysis leaves off both the random and the continuous nature of this system, and thus fails to adequately represent the reality.
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