Posts Tagged ‘marketing conference’

The challenges of BioShock2

Recently the MI6 game marketing conference was held in San Francisco. The executives from the 2K Games’ marketing team was also presented in the conference. The made a small presentation upon the plan to sell BioShock 2.

Tom Bass, the marketing director, and Matt Gorman, the marketing VP, had given the presentation. They started it with a frank admission. Gorman said that the fans were not looking forward to BioShock 2, but “they held it as a very special experience, and a lot of the focus test research we did afterward, people said they didn’t want any more BioShock.”

The team also identified 3 groups who they wanted to market the game. Those are, the fans of the original, hardcore gamers who skipped it, and also the casual console gamers who might wait for the God of War III or the Mass Effect 2 instead of buying BioShock 2.

Gorman said, “The first thing that came to our mind was, everything we did with BioShock we had to throw away” when it came to the marketing plan.”

He added further, “We didn’t even open the marketing plan,” said Bass. The plan for BioShock 2 was to “focus on the newness, focus on the Big Sister.” The problem was that after the initial push, gamers said, “That’s great. What’s next?”