Mass Effect 3 Marketing

Mass Effect was one of the early Xbox 360 games that started a wave of great western RPG's during a time where JRPG's ruled that genre. Mass Effect 2 was a great success getting numerous game of the year awards from various websites. Mass Effect 3 has not been the success that is predecessor was and a lot of that comes down to what Mass Effect 3's marketing goal was. Mass Effect 2 sold 2 millions copies in its first week while Mass Effect 3 sold 1.85 million in it's first week. Though those numbers are nothing to scoff at, the question lies in why an established brand like Mass Effect had worst sales in its finale than in the second act.

Was Mass Effect 3 Marketed The Way EA Wanted?

EA was clearly looking for Mass Effect 3 to be a home run and bring in the most money out of the entire series. Their approach to doing so was to market the game towards the "average Joe" gamer who is into shooters and action games. The achieved their goal through their marketing campaign. They were able to show off the parts of Mass Effect 3 that would appeal to those consumers and made sure to not scare them away with other elements of the game. EA accomplished their goal but did not get the results they wanted.

Was Mass Effect 3 Marketed In the Right Way?

Mass Effect 3 was marketed to the "average Joe" gamer. To do this, EA had to ignore the wants and needs of their previous consumers. Marketing is broken down into segments of consumers that the product is catering towards and with Mass Effect 3, EA wanted to go into a segment of consumers that seemed to have more potential customers which meant more potential profit. They decided that it would be a better decision to target that section of the market and ignore the segment that had made up a majority of the companies profit from previous games. EA's rational was that they people who were loyal to the game would stay no matter what and the amount of gamers they would lose would be easily covered by the amount of consumers they gained from the new target market. Needless to say the plan backfire. There was a fundamental flaw to EA's rational that caused their marketing to fail.

The 3 in Mass Effect 3

Numbers in the names of any product or service represents that it is either an upgrade to the current line of products or services or that it is a continuation of a product or service. In electronics and software, the number after the product represents an upgrade. The higher the number, the more likely a consumer will flock to those products because in the mind of the consumer, the latest and greatest product is the one that you want to get. This happens a lot with Apple products and video cards especially. When it comes to mediums like movies, comics, or video games, the higher the number associated with the product the less likely a consumer will go to that product because our brains have been trained to associate numbers in these mediums to a continuation of the product. The consumer believes that to see Movie 2, they need to have watched Movie 1 because they believe that knowledge of the previous product is needed to understand the current one. This was a major factor in why i believe Mass Effect 3 was not appealing to the "average Joe" gamer. Most people will not jump into the finale of a game without attempting to understand the games that lead to it and because games are so time consuming and especially the Mass Effect games, many of the potential customers just passed on the product.

Lessons For EA

EA needs to become less greedy and more careful with their marketing decisions. They assumed their marketing and the brand name were strong enough to cultivate a new segment of the market to adopt the product but failed to realize the mentality of that market. EA should have just let Bioware build their game and allow the game to speak as the marketing.