Controversy Has It's Price: Postal's Cautionary Tale

Electronic Gaming Business, Feb 25, 2004

When your action game series depicts a crazed postal worker gleefully savaging innocent passersby, priests, homosexuals, cops, and anyone else he can get in his sights, you have to expect a wee bit of infamy. Despite conventional wisdom that controversy breeds sales, Running With Scissors' Postal franchise is more of a cautionary tale about how negative press can raise name recognition but undermine distribution. "The problem with the Postal brand is that we have greater awareness than we have access to customers," says Vince Desi, CEO, RWS, which only now is seeing promising sales from his recent release of Postal 2 add-on, Share the Pain. "It's been an uphill battle, believe me," he says.

The original Postal was released in November 1997 and published by Panasonic Interactive in a bid to erect Rip Cord games as its edgy label. "This was first game that really involved killing innocent people," says Desi, but it was always intended as farce. He claims that controversy was thrust upon the brand rather than sought. Soon after the game announcement, the Postmaster General's office filed trademark suit against RWS's use of "Postal" (a suit RWS finally won last year), and Senator Joe Lieberman named the title one of America's most harmful media products. "That doesn't give you much choice," says Desi. "There isn't much room for cover."

Controversy gained brand awareness but back fired at retail, with merchants and Panasonic itself retreating from Postal and pulling it off most shelves in two weeks. Panasonic produced and duped a later add-on, but Desi doesn't think it even made it to stores. Over the past seven years, and with the license passing to Take Two and then back to RWS, he estimates the Postal games sold about 250,000 copies worldwide. "I never got a royalty statement," he says.

Marketing Gone Postal

In creating Postal 2, RWS learned some lessons from the first game but came close to reliving its checkered past. RWS kept the brand alive at the everpopular GoPostal.com site (150,000 unique visitors a month), and persistent fan requests finally compelled the company to develop a sequel. "It's like the Rocky Horror Picture Show of gaming," says Desi.

RWS talked with several mainstream publishers about Postal 2, and again the controversy was a double-edged sword. After Grand Theft Auto's success, big companies sniffed around, but in the end "there was a lot of fear and reservation," says Desi. Self-publishing the sequel and distributing through Whiptail Interactive in April 2003, they only penetrated EB and GameStop, where it sold very well, but to a fraction of the game's potential audience. "The problem was the same for the first Postals."

This time, however, RWS embraced the inevitable controversy with a savvier marketing plan based entirely on press and promotion rather than advertising. "You make news by being outrageous," says Desi. In addition to press releases that paraded the game's bad taste and negative press (even bad reviews), RWS had former celebrity Gary Coleman appear in the game and promotional events. "He's the symbol of everything that has gone wrong with America," he says.

Like the idea for the sequel itself, the Postal 2 fan base provided RWS with one of its most effective marketing tools, the "Postal Babe" models. Players started emailing unsolicited images of wives and girlfriends posing with the Postal box in all stages of undress. "I had to share this with the fans," says Desi, so he put the images online and hired models for promo events. Flanked by two "Postal Babes" tossing branded thongs as they walked through the E3 crowd last May, Coleman helped Postal 2 get noticed even though RWS couldn't afford a booth. "You've got to be creative," he says.

Nevertheless, Postal 2 may get by on cheap and unorthodox promotion but it still needs traditional retail, because alternative distribution channels like fee-based downloads never made sense for this 600MB title. Even with a popular Web site, RWS can only sell about a thousand boxes direct from online. By switching distribution last year to Trisynergy, Postal 2: Share the Pain (an upgrade of P2) finally occupied more shelves, including Best Buy. Mass exposure is key to Postal 2, because it does not appeal to hard core gamers so much as adult males who like the politically incorrect humor. Even so, it sold only 30,000 copies thus far and "is not a breadwinner for us," admits Desi.

Desi is hoping the payoff comes with PS2 and Xbox versions planned for a Q4 release. "I always knew we would do a hell of a lot better on console," he says, but getting into living rooms probably requires some content modification, he admits. "We don't believe the game is fun because it has violence. There's so much going on in this game. We wouldn't modify the key elements. It's not going to ruin the game at all." RWS also thinks that the audience has changed and matured, as more people see the farcical elements in the game.

"From the first game, it was never our intention to be controversial but we found ourselves in that position," he says.