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I would like you to look at the movie box-office chart for just a moment. While it is quite easy to tell roughly what genre a movie falls into by its title – “Pearl Harbour” is pretty self-explanatory, “The Lion King” could only be a kid’s film and as for “Steamy Situations”…- but you can in many ways divine a lot more useful information about a film by studying how it made its money (no, this will not be as boring as it sounds). Let me highlight some interesting examples from this weeks chart (courtesy of www.variety .com):

· At number four we have Swordfish (WB / Village Roadshow). This movie dropped 30% in its third week on release, with a weekend taking of only $12,725,519. This suggests that this is a hyped / star-vehicle movie which, despite its initial success, will drop down the charts quickly when the more eagerly-awaited or good quality summer movies arrive. · Then at number 11 we have Memento (Newmarket). This dropped merely 1% and has been in the charts for much longer than Swordfish, suggesting a film (from a lesser-known company) which has slowly built up a following on the back of good review and word-of-mouth as opposed to, say, star power. · Last of all (and I promise I will get to games after this) at number 32 we have Cast Away (20th). One of the few true 800-pound gorillas, this film has been around seemingly forever, made a vast amount of money and still shows little sign of dying away as it rightfully should have done by now.

As you may have guessed by now the paths these movies have taken through the charts have been modelled to death by salesmen and advertisers so that they can maximise the revenue from each movie and the same is now becoming increasingly true with regard to games. As the industry becomes bigger and has to attract customers from outside of the traditional “gamer” demographic in order to make profit on increasingly complicated products, ad campaigns and sales strategies are advancing too. Nintendo are taking the “Pearl Harbour” approach – they are saturating absolutely every medium imaginable (print, online media etc.) with adverts for the GameBoy Advance and their new (and pretty uninspiring) “Games 24/7” brand. No doubt they will do the same when the GameCube is released in October and they know that they are pretty much guaranteed a hit. The same strategy was taken by Westwood Studios with the release of “Emperor” for PC. Adverts appeared on websites and many magazines in an attempt to stir up significant early sales of a product that was liable to get eaten up by other big releases at some point. Other companies have taken different routes for their games: Ion Storm employed an A.I.-like stealth campaign for Deus Ex with cryptic adverts being released prior to reviews of the game and then strange adverts inviting one to “decode” hidden words were printed after release. These, coupled with phenomenal word-of-mouth rightfully combined to make Deus Ex a hit.

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