With big titles on the horizon, Nintendo UK is expected to increase marketing budgets for first-party games throughout the rest of the year to a level beyond any previous year in the subsidiary’s history. According to MCV, the marketing campaign for the recently released Mario Strikers Charged Football cost approximately £1 million in the UK alone. Both Mario Party 8 and Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree are expected to see campaigns surpassing this figure with pushes at both game launch and the holiday season, due to the larger target audience.
“We are looking at much longer sales curves on these titles that will hopefully sell at a high rate for many weeks. Therefore we need to prolong the campaigns over months rather than weeks, along with a second sustained period of media coverage around the Christmas season.
“This goes against the traditional way to market video games, but we aren’t going after the traditional audience – hence the large investment.†— Rob Lowe, Nintendo UK’s Wii Product Manager
Don’t forget the other big games for 2007 as well…everyone’s going to be all over Mario & Sonic at the Olympics.
MCV UK
