Digital Communications

The real interesting aspect of gaming is that technology drives it to do one step better every time. There are two programs that are currently in use which are free and wildly popular among PC gamers for Massive Multi-Player Online (Role Playing) Games. Teamspeak and Ventrillo both use a person's personal server set up by them for people to connect to. The quality of audio is solely dependant upon the quality of the server, however, Ventrillo is known to have slightly better quality. The reason this is so important, is because the way you communicate through it can vary wildly. You can set it so you push a button to talk, or set it to send audio at a certain decibel level. If you can't tell already that has serious business potential and applications. You can make it so you can talk and discuss while the other person is talking, and not have them hear you. The only thing that generates lag for these types of programs is the server and internet connection, which a company almost always has superior forms of as compared to consumers. It allows nearly limitless connections and is 100% free. The only thing you need for your company to make a conference call to every single board room in their corporation is 1) an Internet connected laptop or PC 2) a microphone 3) the program 4) a board room. Now because it's a laptop you can plug it into the room's built in audio via the headphone port so everyone can hear it. Not only that, but you can set it to personal preferences for volume input and output. Meaning you can put it in the middle of a 100 person board room and everyone who wants to speak could be heard, and if it's too quiet, you can make it so you pick up more volume, and vise verse. These programs are a lot like skype, only you don't even need a phone number to talk to each computer. You can set up 1 globally used server and every branch can use it and be in separate password protected rooms to speak teach other in, or one common room to speak to everyone in. It has many benifits over skype but the only single disadvantage it has compared to skype, is it can not call phone numbers and its quality is slightly inferior. But if the gains outweigh the cost to use skype, then a company would welcome this easily.

The Marketing King

Burger King recently came out with a new marketing plan involving Xbox and Xbox 360. With the purchase of any value meal at participating Burger King’s you can buy an Xbox/Xbox 360 game made by Burger King for $3.99. There are three games to choose from, Sneak King, Big Bumpin’, and Burger King: Pocketbike Racer. This marketing technique is obviously aimed at a younger generation that will want to play Xbox games. We feel that these games will bring business to Burger Kings because kids will employ the “I want it, I want it” tantrum until the parents give into buying the games. In order to get the game, however, you have to buy a value meal. Thus, increasing sales for the King.

Gaming Product Placements

while visiting gamespot we came across an article depicting the ever popular product placement and company alliances within using video games. www.gamespot.com/pc/action/darkenedskye/news_6091835.html
In reading the article it unvailed several key issues involving internet marketing using games. One of the more specific things i focused in on was the ubisoft fiasco that took place in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3. The company linked a url in the game but never registered the domain. And some one found it unregistered and made a porn site with it. This was clearly a disaster in the eyes of the marketers who meant to use the website for promotional purposes. The whole point is you almost never see TV advertising for most games that aren't dynesty games, such as madden or halo. And you almost never see a commercial for a PC game that doesn't have a company history of excellence. Almost all games for PC's, from my experience, are marketed through the internet using website gamers frequent, i.e. gamespot or ign. And almost all games are judged and weighted by gamers themselves, much like Amazon's system of comments by consumers is also conducted. So what this article is telling me is that large companies are going to unite with large games to form both subtle and overt product alliances within them. What strikes me as brilliant about this is the fact that most people in my age group have the ability to ignore advertisements and banners on websites, from the book, and the one thing i've never been able not to notice is a big billboard in a game with a company's logo on it. Two examples of games like that are VTM: Bloodlines, where the company's who made the game had huge billboards in the game with logos on them, and C&C red alert 2, where westwood studios advertised an upcoming game on billboards within the game.