There's almost a sense of festival around the launch of Bungie's
long-awaited Xbox 360 iteration of the Halo franchise. We won't see
official sales figures for the UK (or, indeed, most other territories)
until next week, but Microsoft's Shane Kim already seems on the verge
of exploding with joy over $170 million first day sales in the USA,
with various retailers also being rolled out to express how ecstatic
they are over the figures.
Suffice it to say, then, that Halo 3 has done really rather well -
critically, it has scored over 90% from almost every specialist
publication in the Western world, and commercially, it seems certain
that its launch day is the biggest ever recorded by a videogame.
Consequentially, it may well be the biggest launch day for any media
product in history - although the caveat here is that this applies only
to the dollar figure. Halo 3's comparisons with other videogame
products are eminently valid, but the success of the game in comparison
with products in other mediums is inflated by the high price-tag of
videogames.
Bring it back to actual unit sales, or the basic number of people who
engage with the product on day one, and the figures don't hold up. It's
wonderful that so many people are willing to go out and pay a large
amount of money for a great game - but while back-slapping is certainly
in order, let's not kid ourselves that this represents a "mass-market"
phenomenon on the same scale as a huge movie or music release.
This is where the Halo message gets slightly confused. The game sits
on a peculiar middle ground between Microsoft's two key ambitions for
the Xbox platform. On one hand, the game itself is quite clearly a
hardcore gamer's dream - wonderfully polished, crafted and presented it
may be, but at heart it is still a heavily multiplayer focused
first-person shooter where you play a space marine taking on an alien
invasion. For the core audience of Xbox 360 owners, there couldn't be a
finer product.
On the other hand, the "media event" status which Microsoft has
carefully crafted for Halo 3 speaks volumes about the firm's
desperation to break out to a more mainstream audience. Months of
forward planning by the company's PR and marketing divisions has seen
Halo 3 being widely reported upon in the mainstream press, with
television, radio and newspaper reports focusing on launch events
around the world.
In London and elsewhere, launch parties were arranged with a coterie
of "celebrities" for the tabloid papers to take pictures of. The queues
outside retailers were the subject of news reports, and major news
outlets cast the net far and wide to try and find anyone who could
explain something about the game on air. My own Halo 3 launch day
started at 5am with an interview on the BBC's World Business Report -
which ended with the rather bemused presenter asking earnestly (and,
frankly, somewhat hopefully) whether videogames were "just a fad".
That, in a nutshell, is where the cracks start to show in the Halo 3
phenomenon. This is not a game for the mass market; it's not the kind
of game that will encourage casual players or non-gamers to engage with
the Xbox 360 or even with gaming in general. In fact, fantastic though
it may be, it's not even really a game that will appeal to anyone who
doesn't specifically enjoy the first-person shooter genre.
It is annoying, certainly, the much of the mass media has approached
the launch of such an anticipated game with a "look at the crazy
gamers!" tone in its coverage. It is frustrating to see features on the
London launch which focus on the fact that Pharrell Williams looked
"bored" rather than on the excitement of the gamers who turned up,
referring to them only in condescending terms.
However, it's not surprising to see this reaction. Unlike last year's
media frenzy around the Wii, the Halo 3 launch isn't something that can
be easily expressed to the non-gamers who cover this subject for the
mass media. The Wii is a genuinely mass-appeal product, simply because
its appeal can be summed up in simple anecdotes that easily sell the
features of the system to a wide audience. Halo 3, however, is a
gamers' game; a refinement of a genre whose appeal is almost
exclusively to existing players.
We fully understand Microsoft's desire to push the Xbox 360 into the
mainstream - after all, this very column has been advocating for years
the idea that the firm needs to broaden its appeal if the 360 is to
break out of the market segment which the original Xbox carved.
However, Halo 3 is the wrong product for the job. It is a game which
will bring core gamers more firmly onto Microsoft's side than ever, but
whose vast public exposure risks painting the 360 further into the
"hardcore only need apply" corner.
What Microsoft needs is not more widespread exposure for an
established, core gamer franchise like Halo 3. It needs a wider range
of gaming experiences to engage with a wider audience - the kind of
breadth and depth of software library which ultimately drove the
PlayStation 2 to its immense sales in the last generation. On a
positive note, we're seeing mounting evidence that this kind of
software is on the way - but it remains to be seen how Microsoft plans
to inform the public of this fact. Much will hinge on its ability to
project a PR message effectively beyond its core audience.
In the meanwhile, none of this should detract from the undoubted
enjoyment that hundreds of thousands of gamers will be experiencing
this week from Halo 3. Whatever about the mixed media response or the
Xbox 360's place in the market, the game itself is a triumph for
Bungie, for Microsoft and for the core gaming public.
Anecdotally, we've never seen so many of our friends on Xbox Live at
the same time, and all playing the same game (bar the occasional weird
refusenik, of course). Gamers' enthusiasm for the franchise may leave
the mainstream media cold - but that won't stop us from taking great
pleasure in Finishing the Fight.
(Gamesindustry.biz)
Mstation Games Review
Sat, 29 Sep 2007
