Hypocrisy Hunter

The numbers are in, and Monster Hunter Tri has been a sales disaster here in the US, selling a meager .2 million copies (that’s even less than WWDIY sold in Japan alone!). Following the well-worn logic of industry critic and “friend of the blog” Sean Malstrom, MH3’s low sales must mean it was a poor quality game. After all, there’s no way Sean would backpedal and contradict himself, would he? Or is today a day of the week that ends in “y”?

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Monster Hunter Tri is not a Wii game, it is a PSP game that is on the Wii. The game isn’t even the standard resolution of 480. The game uses none of the controls for the Wii. And the marketing team really screwed it up. I’ve been quiet about MH3, but the ads, while amusing, struck me as totally off. It is as if the marketing team looked at Monster Hunter and said, “Durr, it is about hunting monsters. Let us do commercials about that.” But that is not what people value of the game. If you ask any MH fan, they will say proudly how many hours they have sunk into the game almost as if the game was a single player MMO content-wise. This value was never marketed. Fans who said they could sink 500 hours into it caught my attention. Only the style of MH was marketed, not the substance.

Oh no, bad graphics! But isn’t that a hardcore excuse for bad sales? It’s a PSP port! But wait, that’s as true as the hardcore calling NSMBWII a DS port (i.e. not true at all, having been originally planned as a PS3 game). Poor advertising! But aren’t the hardcore supposed to be the ones who claim that poor sales are due to poor marketing? See here Sean’s response to the producer for Halo ODST complaining about his game’s marketing:

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Yes, the discontent is due to the ‘marketing’. Give me a break! These are the same type of people who would blame discontent over a politician’s actions to be about the “narrative” or “story”. The relationship of marketing to customers is not the relationship between the potter and the clay. All marketing does is point the consumer to the product. If the product is unsatisfactory to the consumer, no amount of marketing is going to save it.

But Sean’s contradictory stance doesn’t stop here. Not only has Sean changed his mind about the possibility of advertising affecting game sales, he has also changed his mind on what qualifies as bad advertising! Malstrom didn’t always dislike these MH3 commercials. He even dedicated a whole blog post to praising them!

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But these [Monster Hunter Tri] commercials are great. I love the ‘testosterone’ commercials (which is something gamers need more of). They remind me of the Caveman commercials which were a big hit.

You know why these commercials feel so fresh? They are not politically correct. I guarantee some interest group somewhere is going to whine that the Monster Hunter guy said if they do not hunt monsters then they are being a girly man.

The Wii definitely needs some more testosterone enriched gaming.

Testosterone commercials for Testosterone gaming? I would hazard a guess that a testosterone commercial is “loud, annoying, and aimed at teenagers”. And that’s exactly what Final Fantasy III got, which according to Sean, was why it bombed in the US of A!

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Horrible marketing. Such a commercial doesn’t at all represent the value of a game like Final Fantasy VI. But this was common during the ’16-bit’ War where marketing was loud, annoying, and all aimed at teenagers.

I’ve said before that Testosterone Entertainment is by definition disposable entertainment. But Sean has yet to realize where the problem truly lies. Check again what Malstrom says about the game:

If you ask any MH fan, they will say proudly how many hours they have sunk into the game…

MH3 is a time-sink game on a console designed for players with constraints on their time. Interesting progress doesn’t occur in a single play session. It is a game of grinding and long-term stat increases. These are anathema to success on the Wii. This “borecore” game design may fascinate dullards like Malstrom, but the real expanded audience seeks an interesting experience every time they sit down to play. Repetitive and unimaginative “arcade simulation action” is not the key to the expanded market. Meaningful choices (good gameplay) in interesting situations (intriguing subject matter) are what grab their attention best. Keep your eyes open for “Guilty Party“, an upcoming multiplayer mystery game for the Wii. If they can get past the hurdles of marketing such an unusual title, I do believe they will find a more-than-receptive audience just waiting to experience a good mystery adventure together.