Zynga is far from being a small outfit, and for all that marketing power, they got the least coverage. Below is a comparison of five high profile titles and the media coverage of their launch announcement:
Considering how huge the Angry Birds brand is (it’s in the top 3 of mobile gaming), that says a lot on the challenges of PR for mobile titles but also on how much easier it is to get media attention on PC title going to mobile. To give a sense of scale, Angry Bird Stella, which is the most recent Angry Birds title I have data for, had 209 articles covering its launch.
I was talking about the challenge of PR for mobile projects in my GDC talk this year, and the excellent coverage of the iOS/Android launch for Goat Simulator is one of the trends we observed: it is far easier to get media coverage for the mobile port of a PC title than to get coverage for a regular mobile game. Some launches are stronger than others, obviously. Some important takeaways from the above: Launches are strong beats. The following graphs look at each individual news beat. I looked at news coverage on the day, and the following day (the news cycle works in a way that this is the only way to properly measure the initial announcement coverage across Europe and North America): They happened on the same week, increasing the likelihood that some outlets bundled both stories together into one post. This is particularly true for the Xbox release date announcement and the DOTA 2 Goat video. There are occasions where particular news beats overlap each other, meaning the coverage wasn’t necessarily 100% related to the announcement of that day. Clearly, the media presence for the game outside of these beats is very limited, but this is quite normal for this type of game. This timeline provides us with an excellent visualisation of each PR beat put out and its coverage. We start from its Dead Island-inspired trailer through to the most recent announcements. I prepared this article just before GoatZ was revealed, so it isn’t in the below set of data. With Goat Simulator having recently announced its zombie DLC, this is a great opportunity to look at how the game has done in terms of media presence. Second, this is a great exercise to look at what kind of beats gain traction and how other games organise their communication campaigns.
These titles are better benchmarks for looking at the broader media landscape in games. These are titles that have been successful in their media outreach, they are on the high end of the benchmark, but provide a more “typical” example of coverage. There are a lot of very interesting games that have done very well in their PR endeavours, yet don’t necessarily come up in the monthly “top 15” I put together. First, I want to provide a sense of scale, by looking beyond the very top titles covered every month. As promised, here is the first in a series of case studies on specific games and their media presence. I have a couple of objectives with these case studies.