Bravo EA Sports

Like many who play video games I have been keeping my eye on the E3 Conference currently going on in Los Angeles. Some great video games and technologies have been announced and I am excited by the products that are coming out in the future. Not only am I interested in E3 because I am a gamer but also because E3 is a huge marketing show to try to get new products out there and in the minds of gamers so they can’t wait till the product comes out.

I have seen a lot of marketing through demos and booths and conferences trying to get people to fall in love with their products. There was one marketing tactic I saw thought that I thought was incredible and it even suckered me in as well.
EA Sports is releasing NCAA Football 10 in July like it does every year. Like a lot of people I will wait around and not buy it when it first comes out because most sports games are like brand new cars, they lose their value VERY quickly. Many people will sell theirs a few months later for much less on Craigslist and if you don’t mind missing a few of the new features in 10, which year to year usually are not too awesome or necessary, NCAA Football 09 will cost about 30% of its original price the day NCAA Football 10 comes out. If you look in the $5 bin at most video game stores it is full of older versions of sports games.

I am sure this is a problem seeing a lot of people wait and just buy second hand copies of the games, but EA Sports did a great job addressing it this year. They announced during E3 that right now you can go online and create your own team to play in the game. It is incredible, everything from the jerseys, to location, to stadium and even the players are fair game. Some games have this option, but you have to wait till the game comes out and you get your hands on it to re-create your high school team.

The feature itself is pretty cool, but the smartest aspect of this is that they released it early on line so you can create your team now. Thousands of people (I heard as of today there are 20,000 teams currently created) are going online and creating teams, and can’t wait to play with them. Because of this the day NCAA Football 10 comes out thousands will rush to the store and buy the game that usually would not because they can’t wait to play with the team they created on line a month ago. This is genius. You give people something for free to mess with, and then sell them on the next necessary part of the final product that they need to complete it.

If EA Sports had just added this create a team feature in the game it would have been cool, but not something many would go out and buy the game for the first day. They probably would have been like me and just waited a few months for a second hand copy to show up on Craigslist and grab that, but now that thousands of people, including me, have these created teams sitting online just begging to be played with we are going to go out and buy the game the day it comes out because I have been waiting months to play with the Las Plumas Thunderbirds of Oroville, CA. Bravo EA Sports.