Irrational Games' creative director Ken Levine thinks that developers need to take a more high profile approach to promoting their games in the mainstream. He recounted a telling experience ahead of the public premiere of BioShock Infinite's E3 demo on Spike TV to Gamers with Jobs [thanks GI.biz].
"We had a room full of college students, in some fraternity in some state school somewhere – this is about a year ago – and they had never heard of BioShock. None of them. Not a single one," said Levine. "I think as an alpha gamer you assume that, 'whether you've played BioShock or not, you've heard of it, right?' These guys had never even heard of it."
Levine cited the marketing mantra that consumers have to be exposed to something three times before they absorb it. While TV and outdoor advertising are becoming more prevalent, he wants the industry to go beyond that.
"I mean, how many times have you seen images of Transformers?" he asked. "Whether you want to or not you've probably seen it 15 or 20 times... We're making products that cost however many millions of dollars and have the potential to have a large audience, but... to get people who aren't alpha gamers there's a whole different kind of activity that you have to undertake."
"That isn't just about buying ads. It's the places you can reach [new people]... We need to be on mainstream shows, we need to be on NPR, we need to be on The Daily Show, we need to be in those places talking about what we do,” mused Levine. "We're still ghettoized as game developers, and Spike TV is a great place in the middle, but we really need to think about how do we reach out and talk to people so you don't have a room full of college kids saying, 'I've never heard of that damn thing.'"
"You can't find a more impressive set of guys than Ray and Greg from BioWare - they're medical doctors, they're MBAs, they run this company, they're brilliant game developers, but I haven't seen them on The Daily Show,” noted Levine. "It's not their fault. It's our fault. As an industry we need to think of ourselves differently. We need to think of ourselves that way and present ourselves that way... We have a responsibility. People like me, like Cliff [Bleszinski], like Ray and Greg, have a responsibility to educate people who don't think of games. Like the people booking those shows."
"A lot of it is getting the guys that book those shows past their own lack of knowledge and their own discomfort about games,” he added. “There's no material reason why a Tim Schafer isn't going to be as good a guest as some guy who wrote a book that sells 15,000 copies. But there's a natural discomfort that the bookers must have, and part of our job is to get in front of those people and say, 'Hey, we're out here, we're doing cool stuff, and we want to speak to a broader audience as well.'"
Jimmy Fallon has openly sought out major games like Donkey Kong Country Returns, Uncharted 3 and Gears of War 3 for the Late Show, but he's definitely the exception. Do you think Ken Levine should appear on The Daily Show to promote BioShock Infinite?
