Q+A: GameRiot's Matt Ringel: Diversifying Marketing Silos

Electronic Gaming Business, June 30, 2004

Premiere video game event programmer Games Media Properties brings its GameRiot traveling show of game demos and competitions to over 18 cities this year. Sponsored by nine key media, publishing and consumer brands, "SpikeTV presents GameRiot powered by Xbox" is aiming to double attendance over last year and reach at least 200,000 gamers. GameRiot was going to be part of the Lollapalooza music series as well again this year, but that tour was unexpectedly canceled in late June. We caught up with GMP's president Matt Ringel to discuss the lessons learned about game events promotion.

EGB: How is the cancellation of Lollapalooza going to affect GameRiot's summer plans?

Ringel: It certainly is disappointing. However, it was only something like 15 out of our 85 dates for the summer and fall. We would like to replace them later in August.

EGB: How has GameRiot evolved this year?

Ringel: An even heavier focus on unreleased titles. We do a great job of going to E3 and making sure we have the best titles. We're expanding our competition and tournaments formats. Blockbuster is sponsoring a big Halo tournament. The winner in each market gets $500 and six months of free gaming and that's turning out to be very popular. We're putting a lot more promotion and media behind it.

EGB: How do the number of sponsors compare to last year?

Ringel: We chose to have fewer this year and go deeper with them. We do a lot more with each one. An example would be a Blockbuster where we have programs running at retail and then doing a lot more in venue. We're really pleased that a number of non-endemic companies are really starting to see the benefit of associating with gaming events.

EGB: Have sponsorship costs gone up?

Ringel: Actually no. We changed the structure this year because we tripled the number of events. We're looking for partners who were willing to go deep and stick with us for the year-long programs. So on a per-event basis, we're actually maybe a quarter of the price we were last year but we're delivering a lot more value.

EGB: Tell me about the publishers who are not involved. Why no EA?

Ringel: To clarify, there are certain EA titles. For instance, NVIDIA who co-runs the PC area with us, has Battlefield Vietnam. But we selected to go deep with a handful of publishers, just four - ESPN, Vivendi, Activision and LucasArts. We have relationships with all the publishers naturally, but we can't be everything to everybody.

EGB: Why would some publishers not want to participate?

Ringel: Every company is different. Some believe in the power of grassroots and event marketing and the power of trial for driving game sales. Others really like to maximize their television dollars and they only spend on television and print. We try to combine both in our program. There is a trend we have seen over the last year and a half -- publishers looking to diversify their marketing silos because if you look at television and print, a lot of these advertisements are very similar. There is a lot of game advertising clutter. In a year like this one where you have maybe nine AAA racing titles coming out and ditto for first-person shooters. Not all will be multi-platinum sellers.

EGB: Why only Xbox?

Ringel: One of the forces an event organizer must always navigate is platform exclusivity. We have found Xbox to be an exceptionally effective partner for us, most notably because of their enthusiasm for generating prerelease buzz for first party titles, and the stability of their debug units for featuring their own and third party pre-releases. Some years ago, at the outset, we considered a cross-platform event. However, we would lose the deep support of the platform, which would affect both the economics (i.e. more burden on the consumer) and the ability to feature pre-releases. We do not wish to do either of those things.

EGB: What have we learned about staged gaming events and tournaments in front of audiences?

Ringel: You don't go into an environment like a Lollapalooza and try to do something like a gaming final before or after [a concert]. It can't work. There is a level of performance and adrenaline and artistry that watching people playing a video game can never approximate. However, we do find that competitions for smaller audiences, a couple of hundred at a time, can be very effective. You just have to immerse them into the game and put some showmanship around that. You get the audience directly engaged by calling out game play or by trivia questions or having them pick winners. On a massive scale for 10,000 people at a time, it doesn't work.

EGB: Marketers want metrics showing results. What kind of research do we have to back up or explain the way this kind of promotion works within games community to push sales?

Ringel: It's one of the things we built in last year and even more this year. The types of things we measured through exit sampling and some random sampling was demographics and psychographics, the number of bodies, time engaged, utilization of their machines relative to an average -- those are important. The real lodestar for me, however, is to what degree does trial drive sales? People do these types of events for awareness, building buzz and preorders, but can someone go and play this game and then immediately go and put in a pre-order for that game? One thing we may test at Blockbuster later this year is actually putting a pre-order program right there at the venue so people can play Red Ninja or Mech Assault 2 and then put down their $5 to order a copy. Second thing is try to be a facility for trade-ins. I don't see why we can't let somebody bring in a pre-played game to get into GameRiot free and check out all the free games.