Cross-media strategy and MMOs

Developed in Spain and presented as an MMO for kids, there hasn’t been much noise around Planet 51 Online. The wikipedia page of the movie doesn’t mention it, there has been one article on it in the media in the past month (and it is the announcement about the fact they use the Trinigy Vision Engine), and the launch of the game was pretty low key, but since yesterday, the game is “live”. While the website is definitely presenting the game as fully developed and ready to go for mass consumption, the client is bearing a Beta flag.

The game is accessible and playable. The team behind it is composed of ex-Pyro developers with experience of game development processes; the stability of the online components remains to be proven, but they have some game background. The very concept of building an MMO on the basis of totally fresh film IP, though, is quite brave. Movie IPs are fickle by nature and have short life spans (compared to online games), with the rare exceptions coming largely as a result of sequels. A Shrek MMO, for example, would seem like a safer bet compared to something brand new.

Additionally, film IPs also tend to be built around their plot rather than around their world, which is quite different (although not necessarily incompatible) to what a MMO/virtual world requires. With Planet 51, there is a suite of offline games built around the IP, all fully promoted as the US release on 20th November draws nearer, however the MMO has hardly been promoted at all, and that’s strange. It seems to undermine all the work they have done to set up the distribution of pre-paid cards in retail outlets (in the UK, they could be found in major supermarket chains before the game was available). Maybe this stems from the fact that long-tail MMOs require different timings than one-shot, launch driven promotions for films (and traditional, offline games) – making cross promotion really tricky to properly set up. Even considering that though, it’s still hard to believe that an MMO project would be left to pick up speed entirely on its own.

We wonder how much the producers simply succumbed to the lure of the MMO space, thinking that this is now a mandatory sub-genre or a platform and the same way that you need a DS game, you also need an MMO nowadays to be taken seriously. That’s erroneous and potentially very costly thinking. MMOs make their revenue in the long-term, and require regular maintenance and updates over a span of years. They require a high degree of commitment in terms of development and marketing, especially kids’ MMOs (an overcrowded space serving an audience of players with short attention spans).

Cross-media projects are great, but to integrate an MMO component, they need to be very well thought out and built with a sound concept from the beginning. As such, TV-shows are much better suited to support a virtual world, as are book series and comic books. Feature films have potential as MMO fodder, but as single entities they can only provide so much material. Without a Big Plan to support the franchise, or to further develop the MMO independently, film IPs would probably be better served by building partnerships with existing virtual worlds, rather than building new ones from scratch.

All this being said, no doubt the Planet 51 Online team have plans beyond what can be seen at the moment, and we wish them success.

Tags: Cross-media, kids, MMO, Planet 51

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