Hello everyone,
in the following article on Russian Wargaming portal (gone are the times when Wargaming’s main portal was the World of Tanks one) an interesting article came up regarding the Wargaming brand and the cooperation with other companies, specifically Razer and Burger King.
The article is just Wargaming PR, but some elements are pretty interesting. Basically, it says that Wargaming sees the key to good sales in cooperation with other brands and in 2014 alone in CIS countries, WG ran around 30 license programs and 100 co-promotion events. WG doesn’t cooperate with “just anyone”, but surprisingly enough, some cooperation proposals come from players themselves, who write them to support service (for some reason) and from there, they are passed on to the “Business Development” department (pretty strange, why support?). Otherwise, there are companies WG contacted by their own initiative (with a remark that some other companies would do “anything” to become a partner of the creator of “tanks”). WG analyses and calculates each cases and if it’s looking good, negotiations begin.
As you can see, WG grew from “oversized garage company” to a syndicate, that’s obviously about profit – not that it’s something bad of course, every company needs profit. It just really disrupts the “your unfriendly neighborhood developer Storm” image. It’s not neighborhood anymore. One of the people responsible for this kind of stuff is Natalia Osipovich, “Senior Business Development Manager”, who I mention only because she’s pretty and the article has her picture. Oh and apparently she worked on the Burger King deal, not that it’s really important, because that went on only in Russia or something.
According to her, the main goal of working with Burger King (Wargaming ran/runs a campaign of adding codes to some sort of special “tank burger”, wrote about that here) was to “enter the family of World of Tanks player”, which doesn’t sound creepy at all. Apparently, it was also the first time a gaming company ever collaborated with a fast food chain. The idea actually came from Anton “Evilly” Pankov, whose title is now “Executive Publishing Producer, CIS” and Levon Grigoryan, who’s a “General Manager, CIS” and I never heard about him, which means he does his job well. The campaign was aimed at gamers because “they enjoy fast food more than anyone else”. Thanks.
It took three months to create the burger composition in BK main HQ in Madrid. In the end, it was WG that picked the indegrients from “favourite local food”, which apparently includes potatoes and smoke flavour sauce. The name “Tankburger” was picked by players in some competition. In the end, it was distributed in 250 restaurants all across CIS.
The expectation was to sell 100k of these in 2 months, but in the end it took only 2 weeks to sell them. Before the burger was released, CIS players moaned that it’s too American, fat and whatnot, but it was allegedly met with universal acclaim. WG continues to work with Burger King and they are preparing a line of sweets as well.
Another example of the cooperation with other companies is brand hardware, as explained by Inna Moroz, “Head of Licensing, CIS”. Hmmm, I wonder why they added her picture to the article as well.
The idea behind the Razer cooperation was that “for a virtual tanker, there’s nothing more pleasant than to play with a brand mouse or to have a couple of World of Tanks brand t-shirts in their closet.” Yea, because that will keep players totally happy during all the lag, RNG trolling and red teams. A 70 Euro mouse. Anyway, at this point, Inna Moroz emphasizes that they have to pick their partner carefully, because if the players get crappy products with WoT logo on them, they won’t whine at the manufacturer, but at Wargaming. That’s why they picked Razer, because quality bla bla reputation bla. The first round of the cooperation took place in Europe and Wargaming provided the Panzer IV Hydro as a part of the bundle. Funnily enough, many CIS players bought the product in EU and brought it home only to find out the Hydro code wasn’t working on RU server. Which kinda sucked.
In the next round, they released the Razer products in CIS after long negotiations with Razer. The result was extremely positive, as the WoT players broke the Razer website and the amount of views on it jumped by 475 percent. In less than a year, more than 400k pieces of WoT licensed products was sold in CIS territory.
Here ends the original article. You know, it’s like I wrote not so long ago. No matter how shit World of Tanks gets, no matter what they fuck up, even if the game gets totally lame… Wargaming still gets to make shitloads of money, so in the end, the quality of the game development is secondary. Oh and for EU players, wait till you hear what they have in store for EU tree… I am sure you will be as “amused” as I was.
can i get a job in those offices….bang tidy girls!!!!!!!!!! ive got a ‘development’ proposal for them!!
talkinjibberish
Face meet palm ste.. Face meet palm then head meet desk….
A “growing” development if you know what i mean
Me too, I wan’t to be Head Chief of WG Harem Department!
All I can think of is fat sweaty gamers getting all “American Pie” with their tankburger while perving over the latest eye candy additions to WG’s business team!
And the moral of the story is: want to sell branded fatburgers? Get pretty girls to present your product. Well, that actually works for any product.
Well quite. WG gets to make some money and BK gets to make some money and increased ‘brand awareness. All standard stuff really and a great way to fill the coffers.
Honestly, SS, your indignation at WG for running business is fine. It’s ok to be jealous of people who know how to make money and do it well.
But in the end it comes as a huge insult to gamer base (and your blog readers):
You are saying that WG are selling shitty fast food only because they have pretty girls doing it. And 100k burgers sold in two weeks.
That’s a huge number of probably players doing it.
So what you are saying is: People who play world of tanks are pathetic because they fall for standard advertising just like anyone else does? Which is why such thing as advertising and marketing exists?
Very high and mighty of you. Can’t wait for the next week article about evils of capitalism.
That Inna Moroz, “Head of Licensing, CIS” looks like
“teehee, I have something big and hard in my hands, teehee”
“The campaign was aimed at gamers because “they enjoy fast food more than anyone else”. Thanks.”
Can’t deny it’s true, though. Even in EU, the typical gamer means energy drinks, pizzas, burgers. Of course it’s not as pronounced in WoT player base because lots of older players (family meals and such), but the percentage of fast food shoppers is still higher there.
“Yea, because that will keep players totally happy during all the lag, RNG trolling and red teams. A 70 Euro mouse.”
You compare – as usually – two totally different fields. One is a quality of online services, which could always be better (there’s nothing as flawless connection, mechanisms or MM) and the other is something you can have even when you are offline or in a different game. Collectibles are an important part of marketing – you should just have a look at Japanese market which has TONS of collectibles – because that’s what players want, to show their passion in a certain field.
“Wargaming still gets to make shitloads of money, so in the end, the quality of the game development is secondary.”
Now this is just a very fragile… how do you say “oslí můstek” in English? It’s just bashing for bashing. They make money, so quality must suck (be secondary). They don’t implement my ideas, so quality must suck. No skill MM, quality must suck. I lost five times in a row, quality must suck. This is NOT how you consider a quality of a game – I think that the whole WoT development team cares about the game’s quality a lot – of course, screw ups happen, but the marketing managers (in this article) and WoT developers (who care about game’s quality) are something fundamentally different.
The last point – no, it’s not that (I know what you mean). This is actually more or less experience.
Yesterday, I got a hold of certain data, implying Wargaming’s future plans for certain tanks. They did not sit well with me and I talked about that to a guy in Wargaming (yes, they work Sundays too). Basically, his reply was: “well, either you stay and help, or walk away and WG will do it anyway, only in shitty quality and with fake stuff.”
THAT is what I mean. They don’t care about the quality nearly as much as you think. Take the Czech tanks. The impulse for that branch was one and only thing: that there’s a market for that. The quality of the branch is secondary.
Euro tree tanks will be premium/special/reward release only, not regular tanks?
This is my greatest fear….
To that point SS, I actually get your frustration.. You are clearly an expert on tanks and it’s very important to you that driver view slit is exactly 24 mm wide has a metal divet on it’s side.
That would make an amazing quality Czech tank in the game that absolutely not a single person will give a shit about except for you, Chieftain and 14 other people.
I, as well as I assume other millions of people, couldn’t care about those details. Your articles about tanks are fascinating and a good read, but that’s what they are… reading material.
When I am in the game, it doesn’t matter to me if KV-2 had leaf suspension or sprocket (to be honest, I have no idea what it has), what matters if the tank is fun to play and “relatively” historically accurate.
It doesn’t matter if tier 5 should be occupied by some obscure Czech tank rather than some other obscure Czech tank, because, no offense meant, to me they are all obscure. I assumed that Czechoslovakia might have had tanks during world war 2, but I didn’t know. Just like I don’t know half the tanks US or Russia or Germany had (RU251? What the hell is that?)
So in a way, sure, it’s great that with your participation EU tree will be released and will have some neat tanks… but in the end, no matter what they release, I will enjoy without caring if every last detail on the drawing got implemented.
As for WG response, it’s also on par. You are just a fan who is volunteering some knowledge/time for them, you ACTUALLY have no stake in whether the game succeeds or fails. If the move they make goes down in flames, you will just say “Oh well, my bad” and move on to Armored Warfare or something else. For them, it’s their jobs, livelihood, career, food on the table, you name it.
So in their place, I would do what I want to do as well, and if someone wants to help they will help to do what I want, not what they want. It’s like commenting on someone’s japanese tomato garden being shit and offering to build them authentic japanese rock garden, when all they want is tomatoes for dinner.
I’ll make it short, as you wrote enough for everyone’s eyes to bleed already: Go fuck yourself.
No… what he said is more or less right.. and said in a decent and constructive way….
SS is pissed at CZ tanks (and posibly some other Eastern euro tanks) not being done “as he would like”… most people outside CZ etc don’t care “that much”..
Us brits are pissed off about a lot of the shit on Brit tanks, so much is a fucking mile out of reality… but the rest of the EU/NA/RU players don’t care “that much”….
…repeat for french/german/US players etc etc et-fucking-cetera…
SS constantly has a go at WG, he also constantly gives them a shitload of publicity.. WG have tried to block/fuck him off in the past and its not worked… so they are “tolerating” him because he does still give a shitload of PR for them and does help keep the game community going, whether WG like it or not….
You are the one who needs to “go fuck himself” for being a shit fail-troll.
“marketing managers (in this article) and WoT developers (who care about game’s quality) are something fundamentally different.”
If you are going to sock-puppet, at least write something with a modicum of credibility.
Every decision about the development of WOT is first and foremost a publishing decision. One of WG’s key self defining features is that they publish their own games.
Every decision about the development of WOT is first and foremost a business decision. Fixed it for you.
And yes. That is entirely 100 percent right. Everything is a business decision. World is filled with people who wanted to do it their way, business sense be damned and none of them are rich.
I am still astonished how fucking people can put this on the forums blindly ignoring absolutely every day normal behavior for EVERY company. It’s like the company they work for doesn’t do shitty things because business calls for it.
I call bullshit. Having passion is fine, but you gotta bring your brains with it.
If what you wrote were true, there would be no game developers.
Perhaps you do not understand the distinction between game development and game publishing.
The traditional model is for a developer to make the best game that they can, then for the publisher to sell that product in the best manner possible. The combination of WG being developer and producer and the free-to-play model, mean that each and every development decision is first and foremost a publishing decision. Ultimately this is not good business as it drastically reduces the quality of the product. In the long term, customers, when presented with any sort of choice and approximate price parity, will chose quality.
“Oh and for EU players, wait till you hear what they have in store for EU tree… I am sure you will be as “amused” as I was”
Don’t leave me hanging, I gotta know.
Me too, the article was interesting, but mostly “Meh” until that finish…
Brace yourselves for a premium only tree..
It is WG afterall.
“Oh and for EU players, wait till you hear what they have in store for EU tree… I am sure you will be as “amused” as I was.”
Oh, please tell me. I can’t wait to rage and/or burst into laughter. Either way I’ll probably fall of my seat.
Not yet. Wait till Wednesday. Then we’ll see.
Hmm, they will release a premium only tree?
Milk the bloody cow.. milk it !!!!
I see Whales, whales everywhere
inb4 introductions to tank breakdowns, inability to hit the broadside of a barn and the asethics that are a hinderance to those of us blessed with sight.
and also tiny amounts of armour so that the Universally Superior Shooting Race can insta-pen :P
Wednesday, hmm? Sure, I can wait two days for an extra special serving of bullshit ;)
lol
Ewww Razer products. Better off with something like Logitech or SteelSeries. I’m using Razer products myself but switching 1 by 1 to Logitech. Razer is the shittiest “gaming gear” out there thanks to them being Made in China.
My son hates them, EVERY bonus code he has receive from them has NEVER worked Period.
Probably they wont implement the shitty czech junk tanks.
U seem abit salty son. Come and have a seat. Iam listening.
Nice KV1-B on that one, err nice tits ? I mean… oh well.
Those are Russian girls in their late 20, right?
I am a gamer and I don’t touch fast food (a.k.a. crap food, not food at all, ..).
About the mouse..I only recently bought the standard Deathadder (not WOT branded) with Destructor mouse pad. I have another razer mouse back home (Diamondback). Don’t regret a thing…so much better to use than some cheap POS mouse. I just hope it lasts.
Silent, I truely adore your writing manner :-)
The entire article is nice, but…
It simply shows how brainless the Russian people are, as customers.
Russians are mostly subhuman, but it’s not like customers in ‘the west’ are exactly geniuses. Bear in mind that Russians were only exposed to modern consumerism relatively recently.
“Oh and for EU players, wait till you hear what they have in store for EU tree… I am sure you will be as “amused” as I was.”
I think you mean to write “amoused”.
Brilliant……
Look how she lovingly holds that tank, like a proud parent with a newborn :)
One “tank burger”, Tank you very much…
Maybe next,
I will have that rare T-59 lama steak with some KV-1 fries on the side.
One Pasta with Pershing sauce please.
A Mause sausage with bread thanks.
We will have the WoT forever flower arrangement at our wedding.
In short, the business opportunity are endless ;)
-cb99
That Inna… Stronk Smile… ‘Nuff said :/
I have that exact same model, not the girl but the kv1, lol :)
”Oh and for EU players, wait till you hear what they have in store for EU tree… I am sure you will be as “amused” as I was.”
This just sounds depressing.
The funny thing about rockets is that they fly where they are aimed.
JSC Military-Industrial Corporation NPO Mashinostroyenia builds advanced space and rocketry equipment and are on the sanctioned list.
If Lin Industrial ever gets a rocket flying… who knows maybe they will hit the sanctioned list as well…Burger King might not want to be associated with Sergei Burkatovsky and WOT