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Why We Shouldn’t Dismiss Barbie’s Success
By Corvus | July 19, 2007
Last night at the Digital Life preview a Mattel rep–who, just to make the conversation extra surreal, actually looked sort of like Barbie–told me that in the first 60 days of its existence, the new online virtual world Barbie Girls has signed up three million members, and they’re adding new ones at the rate of 50,000 a day.*
von ScientificAmerican.com (link)
I’ve heard this reaction to that news from more than one source:
You really can’t compare a free MMO to a subscription MMO like World of Warcraft. It’s apples and oranges.
Fair enough. However, it’s often been proven that giving something away for free isn’t the best means to attract a huge audience. Something in our consumerist mentality makes us suspicious of free things–we don’t trust their quality and wonder what they’re really selling. In the case of Barbie Girls, we know exactly what they’re selling–fashion dolls and accessories, not to mention an unhealthy and impossible body image to little girls and certain lies about physics.
So let’s compare the success of Barbie Girls to other free Communal Digital Spaces (CDS, there’s an acronym that won’t stick). According to the SciAm article, Second Life took three years to reach 1 million users. WebKinz, from what I can find took two years to hit a million and it’s considered a hot property. Club Penguin took two years to hit 1.9 million users.** Maid Marion, my new MMO hero, boasts 1.3 million unique visitors a month, but I can’t find how long it took them to get there.
So, even when you stack Mattel’s CDS against other free offerings, it’s making an impressive showing. That’s what happens when you spend decades brainwashing a culture building a brand before launching its MMO…
The question remains, how does this apply to us, the game developers?! Why is it pertinent and why should we be considering this an apples to apples (or oranges to oranges if you prefer) comparison? Well, to be completely honest, if we look at this from a strictly business standpoint, Barbie Girls is not just wiping the floor with World of Warcraft from a numbers perspective, but each subscriber represents much larger potential income over their lifetime. Barbie Girls is not just a user experience. It’s a dedicated marketing channel.
Look at how much money companies are willing to spend on advertising during the Super Bowl. Over the years, that dedicated channel has actually grown. Not because there are more football fans, but because there are people who just want to watch the ads. This is not at all unlike creating a branded world where kids can come to have fun and find out all the cool stuff their friends got because they went to the store and bought a Barbie doll. Marketing efforts like this have vast coffers of money to spend and for good reason– constant repetition of a brand name dramatically increases the amount of money coming in.
World of Warcraft represents at most $240 a year per subscriber account. There will be swells in subscriber numbers with every add on release, but I predict that the user base will slowly shrink over time as people grow bored, move on to the next game or decide to focus more on their non-WoW lives.
Barbie dolls average $15 per doll, with clothes, houses, horses, DVDs, fashion heads, Halloween costumes and etc, range from a few dollars to $100. I’ve worked at toy stores for a number of years and watched parents’ and kids’ spending habits. I honestly believe that your average Barbie household probably spends at least $300 to $400 a year, without realizing how much their spending. That’s without a virtual world to go home to and double your consumer satisfaction by typing in a code and receiving virtual goods. That’s without the new pressure of virtual world possession envy. That’s without a direct and undiluted marketing line into the child’s PC.
I don’t know if Mattel is going to share the marketing data they collect from Barbie Girls–crowing about subscriber rates is just their way of grabbing the attention of more potential subscribers. I doubt we’ll ever know how successful a marketing effort Barbie Girls really is, as that sort of data is typically highly guarded. But consider that not only will Mattel be able to push marketing efforts via this channel, but they will also be able to pull data. Every code that gets entered is attached to an account… with a birth date and geographic location attached to it. This is going to allow them unprecedented data with which to develop new product lines and new sales opportunities.
It would be a mistake to think that these are johnny-come-lately game developers we’re dealing with here. These are cunning, experienced marketing experts. These are sharks and our disposable income is their chum. If we dismiss these and other product-driven efforts out of and, we’re dooming ourselves to serving the tiny little market of people who don’t like Toys ‘n’ Stuph… a market I, for one, do not belong in. Every trip to a general store (general store? heh, I’m such an ol’ timer) finds me window-shopping the toy aisles almost as eagerly as the game aisles.
I mean, c’mon–a free GI Joe MMO where I can stock up my COBRA affiliated base by buying more Zartan and Dreadnok figures? Even I, with my anti-consumerist mentality would be hard pressed to resist that allure… providing they had a Linux client, of course. *kniw*
The upshot is that if we look at the business side of things and make this an oranges to oranges (since you insisted) comparison, the competition stands to mop the floor with us. User for user and dollar for dollar.
Am I advocating we all find a toy line to associate ourselves with? Absolutely not. My enthusiasm for one product line of GI Joes notwithstanding, I can’t imagine a dimmer future than that. Am I suggesting we find a means of creating purchasable goods and incentivizing their purchase… no, probably not. We have enough disposable goods in the world as it is.
I do believe that in the near future, it will not be enough to take a “if I build it they will come” approach to MMO design. The community we serve is becoming more vocal and more informed. Opening a one-way channel may work if, like Warcraft, like Barbie, like Star Wars, you’ve spent years building your brand. But even that isn’t fail safe anymore. Star Wars Galaxies has undergone considerable upheaval because it’s audience felt a certain ownership over their experience.
No, what we must absolutely be doing if we wish to remain relevant is to look at our MMO’s, not as the end of our means, but as an opportunity–an opportunity to reach an audience. An opportunity to establish relationships, a community. An opportunity to begin start an open conversation.
What you use that channel for is up to you. If you use it to make even more money… well, you won’t be alone. If you use it to sell your ideology you won’t be alone there either. You might also use it to give your community an opportunity to express themselves… and to listen and respond.
That may sound corny, but it could even be something as shallow as an RSS feed that tracks your Guild Mates and friends as they level up on their days off, or allowing a player to send an SMS message to and from the in-game mail system. By allowing the game to touch more aspects of the player’s lives, we invite the player to bring more of their life to the game. I’m not talking just time, but life experience, goals, dreams, and concerns. I do not believe that this will serve to destabilize the game world, but strengthen it.
*Some numbers clarification from Mattel:
I had referenced that we were rapidly *nearing* 3 million with 2.75 million registered users to-date and a growth averaging between 40,OOO – 50,000 new registered users per day. Now, since you mentioned I looked like a Barbie doll myself, tell me… what color are my eyes you jerk?
(In all fairness, I added that last sentence myself)
**My source for the numbers in this paragraph is CNN (link).
Tagged:Games, Industry. | 3 Comments »
July 19th, 2007 at 9:47 am
I’m not very surprised by those numbers, but I do think they should be taken with a grain of salt. Free MMOs are well known for inflating their numbers by counting the number of sign-ups. You mentioned Second Life and they are well-known for duping investors by quoting that million subscriber number, which more than likely represents the number of sign-ups. They can count the people who have never logged on, the people who have logged on once or twice and never come back (e.g., me), along with their regular users. Regular users tend to fluctuate between 20,000-100,000, depending on fluctuating interest.
Which is why WoW’s numbers impress so much. Even they, however, are prone to inflation because they can easily count the active buddy trials as subscribers (which come in every box). So any one day sample probably includes a decent number of one-time users.
It’s also worth pointing out that marketing channels like Second Life have a vested interest in pushing numbers because that will justify their advertising rates. Telling a company you can deliver a million users to their ads is better than telling them that maybe 30,000 people will log on and explore enough to actually see their ads.
Now you’ve got me all eager to see a GI Joe MMO.
July 19th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
What is the difference between a free CDS with cross marketing options, a marketing developed CDS based around a product line, and a pay/fee CDS? And what are the differences that apply to each when it comes to established brands?
Barbie Girls appears to be a Free CDS (no cost to sign up) that leverages a brand and an existing marketing machine. It is free to sign up/play but is designed to promote the product line through tie-ins and exclusives.
How does that compare to something like WebKinz? WebKinz requires the purchase of a cute stuffed animal to gain a 1-year subscription to the CDS. The only cross promotional material within the site is for the other available pets, each of which you buy gains you an additional year of playtime. The site then provides entertainment value for the cost of the stuffed animal subscription fee.
And how do those compare to an MMO like WoW, where the subscription (and expected entertainment value) is much higher. Their marketing is geared to keeping you playing and purchasing additional content releases. Really, they are trying to sell you continued entertainment value.
What about Free to Play, micropayment MMOs? Where do they fit.
The idea that subscription numbers mean anything is a bizarre concept. It is much more about providing a value-income stream and a base clientèle. The industry really can’t learn anything if the marketers continue to produce erroneous and meaningless numbers. I don’t think they will until we figure out what numbers might be useful and start demanding them.
To answer the above questions: what are the differences? Each type of CDS/MMO is separated by the intent of the content. These intentions change what data is relevant to each of them. Barbie Girls goal is to produce real world sales, so a figure indicating the number of redeemed product codes, product codes per user, and number of active non-product code users would be useful in determining the effectiveness and popularity of the CDS.
WebKinz would need to show the number of Kinz per User, numbers about active users, and numbers of Redeemed Kinz Codes and Kinz Sold. Second Life: Active users, repeat users, average play time, Linden Dollar purchase/sale figures, and information about the economy they are building. WoW: average subscription length before cancellation, reactivation numbers, average play time, and level-dropout numbers would be more interesting.
In every case I can think of, the number of sign-ups is a meaningless number unless qualified by something else that represents the intention and success/failure of that goal. What I don’t understand is how the publishers and developers think we can further the industry without information about what works and what doesn’t. Real information, not made up marketing speak.
July 19th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Excellent comments, both. They accentuate the point underlying my rant, which is don’t scoff at the numbers of an MMO and dismiss it. Look at the intent, the purpose, figure out why it’s successful and see if it’s something that would benefit you. In the end, it’s not about number of users, it’s about how you’re interfacing with your audience.
Even “real data” would ultimately be meaningless, I think. Each world/company’s goals are going to be different. If a company had more users than their hardware could support and they weren’t making enough to buy more hardware, they’re going to fail as their users become discouraged at dropped connections, server crashes, long queues or what-have-you. Small and sustainable may be goal for such a company, not huge and vastly profitable.
In other words, every CDS/VSF(virtual sales floor)/MMO is (or should be) measured with a different yard stick.
In the spirit of comparison… The purpose of a Mattel branded VSF and a Webkinz VSF are really only different in implementation or degree. Likewise, micropayments in Puzzle Pirates are really just another level of the same approach. The primary difference being that Puzzle Pirates doesn’t tie into other aspects of their audience’s life. Think of it, if buying Playmobile pirate sets scored in game currency or unique costume pieces, you can bet more people would a) be buying more Playmobile and b) playing more Puzzle Pirates.