Great Strides in Marketing

The status of the arcade in the United States is debatable – on one hand there are some who believe arcades have been dead since the turn of the decade and we are starting to berth generations of young gamers that have never been to an arcade and can’t understand the concept behind them; over on the other hand, you have folks that acknowledge the business is still huge worldwide due to new arcades and machines popping up all over the Eastern hemisphere, strong U.S. arcades that feature new cabinets from Japan and classic arcades still garnering much interest from trade shows, events and collector groups. No matter what your stance is, one thing is painfully evident – arcades in the present day sure aren’t what they were 20years ago, 10 years ago or, hell, even five years ago.

Just in the past five years I can’t even count on my fingers and toes how many arcades have folded in my region and up until 2006, arcades were almost a daily routine for me. Today, I have to travel an hour and a half just to visit an arcade and that travel turns into four to five hours if I want to visit a serious, up-to-date or well-kept classic arcade. Amid the GameWorks and Dave & Buster crowd, there is still the flame of entrepreneurship and you see it in the eyes of those who lost their local arcade and have the passion to create their own location and this is seemingly becoming the next evolution of arcades in the United States. In the past couple of years, perhaps these gamers finally realized since the industry wasn’t evolving, it was up to the arcade operators to do so. In this time, arcades have almost become a “grassroots campaign” in gaming – the majority won’t be bothered to take notice when they have Call of Duty 4 to play 20 hours a day, but those of us who were there when arcades were a staple of gaming have come together to make people notice the heart of arcades are still ticking and within the past year, I would say I’ve seen more arcade news online and in print than I have in any year since 2005, probably longer.

With that being said, it was brought to my attention yesterday Stride Gum is trying to appeal to gamers once again by launching a “Save the Arcades” campaign. In a simple concept, four U.S. private arcades of notable stature were selected to take part in a contest – anyone with the Internet can visit the site and play a painfully generic sh’mup title and donate the points earned in the game to the arcade of their choice. Whichever arcade has the highest point total by the end of the contest will be given $25,000. It’s a noble gesture, for sure, but when I look past the initial award, all I see is a marketing scheme that is trying to once again muscle into minds of gamers by jumping onto the “It’s the cool thing to do” bandwagon.

If you’ll recall in May 2008, Stride attempted to win the hearts of gamers by offering a free pack of gum to anyone that would sign the online petition to stray Uwe Boll from producing video game-based movies. Fortunately, I learned back in 1997 that online petitions have a one percent chance of accomplishing anything, so it was no surprise when the petition failed to accomplish anything (if you believe the petition stopped his line of video game-based movies, sorry, it was actually Germany closing the tax loophole Boll was using for years). Also, through the benefit of actually being relatively instructed in journalism before I, you know, became a gaming journalist, I understand the basics of public relations – the only facets that came out of the whole ordeal was publicity for both Stride and Uwe Boll. People had one week to fill the petition to the suggested one million signature mark and after nine days, there were barely one-quarter of that amount on register, meaning no gum was distributed and the company received recognition to what amounted as free advertising on an epic scale and the gamer demographic was successfully tapped. If you’re familiar with anything P.T. Barnum accomplished in his career, I shouldn’t have to explain how this helped Uwe Boll, who interestingly enough had almost 10,000 signatures on a support petition at that same time, making the whole gum campaign a bit counterproductive. Then again, this further shows Stride wholly succeeded where its supposed premise failed.

Moving back to the current scenario, Stride just seems to be showing off a mixed message with its Save the Arcades campaign – the cause is noble, but the way it is execute is so contrived, it seems to be doing little to actually save arcades all the while, the marketing aspect of the campaign makes Stride look like a million bucks. Let’s look at the setup here: U.S. arcades are “on their deathbed” and only four arcades stem to benefit from this campaign; only one of these arcades in the end will benefit from Stride’s campaign (unless the recognition really brings more customers into the arcades, which is a gamble we can’t really bank on); these arcades are in such dire need, yet the winner will have to wait until “early 2010” to receive the money; and the whole campaign revolves around herding gamers to a Stride-owned site where players’ information is recorded for marketing purposes. I won’t even go into the financial aspects of the campaign, but this all sounds like a win-win situation for Stride. I actually give this company kudos as they seem to have a damn good PR and marketing team … as if that weren’t evident in the company’s commercials.

It’s awesome that an arcade is going to receive $25,000, but my point is, this is hardly going to save arcades - it’s a well-done marketing campaign that taps a very lucrative demographic. It would be nice if the campaign ran repeatedly, but, most likely, once this initial run is through, we’ll most likely never see another Save the Arcades campaign from Stride seeing as we haven’t heard a peep from the company in regard to Uwe Boll since early May 2008. I am one million percent behind saving and supporting arcades, but there is just better ways of doing it. Imagine this scenario: A company states there are children all across the United States that do not have food to eat and decide to run a contest where four children are detailed and the company will give food to only the one child who Internet users choose. It’s a little more extreme, yes, but does that make any sense to you? Does that really solve the problem of children not having enough nourishment? This is the logic I am applying to this arcade campaign – I’m not trying knock the purpose, I’m questioning its execution.

Not only this, we see another matter of counter-productivity in this Stride marketing: Instead of supporting arcades by, you know, getting off your ass and dropping quarters into their machines, people are glued to a computer at home, mashing away for points that will grant an arcade potentially 2,500 miles away from me enough money to maybe pay its bills for a year. As of this moment, Arcade UFO is smoking the competition, leaving the other three arcades with a glimmer of hope for financial breathing room and that just downright depresses me. If anything, I’m hoping this does ignite a little more interest in arcades and perhaps give arcade owners a little more faith that there are people out there that do support arcades, it’s just a shame the only time we hear about arcades anymore is in a doom and gloom situation. If you really want to support arcades, the process is really easy: If you don’t know where your closest arcade is, use a service such as Aurcade.com; go to your local arcade; play the games. It doesn’t matter that new games aren’t trickling in left and right to U.S. arcades – you can’t tell me that after playing Final Fantasy, Halo, etc., for the millionth time that you wouldn’t be able to give Asteroids, Final Fight or Street Fighter an occasional go in the arcades. I pump a quarter into Killer Instinct every day I’m at work. Trust me; it won’t kill you.

Good luck to the arcades involved in the contest and I hope this sparks some more interest in genuine efforts to salvage our arcade system. Let's just not forget to save the arcades after this marketing ends in October.