I’ve never been much of a fan of the pure first day hype machine, but I’d like to give a good argument here as to why. There is such a thing as a wrong customer.

Roughly speaking we can divide customers into three groups. Positive growth customers, neutral growth customers and negative growth customers. It’s important that we use the term growth here, since while their effects are real and definite, they aren’t going to be entries in the income or expense columns. As you can probably guess, positive growth customers are people who give you good word of mouth, but it’s not limited to that. Positive growth customers are also more likely to buy expansions and dlc, or to replace lost games by buying them. In general, though, a positive growth customer is someone who has converted to your gospel and will directly influence an increase in future sales.

We can skip neutral growth customers, as I think they’re fairly self explanatory. The last group is the negative growth customer. They spread poor word of mouth, are more likely to sell a game used, and may turn to piracy if they ever have a need to replace medium lost or given away. Even though they are as much a paying customer as the others, they will soon have cost your company more than they paid in. Unfortunately their costs are invisible and their presence is hidden in the income side of your balance sheet.

I’ve already ran in to some disagreement on this, but by and large I don’t think negative growth customers have flawed personalities or anything like that. Mostly, I believe it’s that they either self-identify as your core audience even though they aren’t, or have been convinced by your marketing that they are part of your target audience even though they weren’t. Oft times, it’s a feeling of betrayal that motivates them to action.

MMOs are especially open to these influences. Unlike many other types of games, the success of an MMO is hinged on it’s long term prospects rather than it’s first week sales, this leads to there being a much more obvious and dramatic curve to follow. The two most famous examples I can think of are WAR and SWG. WAR was the butt of an especially overblown hype campaign, leading them to open with almost a million players, a million over-excited, over-sold players. When the opening wound up being less than perfect, not only did they drop to 300k within the first few months, revealing many of those to be negative growth customers, even among those that remained there was a large segment of negative growth customers. The game is still around, but all signs point to their not having truly recovered from the damage yet.

SWG, on the hand, hand a strong start with plenty of positive growth customers and excellent prospects. Eventually though, came a series of game changing patches culminating in the infamous combat upgrade(CU). What really sent SWG down to life support for the next few years though was not the changes to game mechanics, it was that they essentially turned entire communities of positive growth customers into negative growth customers. The sales and revenue lost, indirectly, to the CU are probably enough to make George Lucas cry, but they’ll never appear on any balance sheet or book keeping. Going back to WAR, they’ve probably lost more money from their marketing campaign than from any design flaws actually present in the game.

The good news for the amateur marketer is that while you may not be able to build good metrics for positive and negative customer populations, it’s still fairly easy to determine a general zeitgeist for your game. How are your reviews generally fairing, how are you sounding in the blog o sphere, do posts about your game generally open a wellspring of bile and hatred, compare that with what your actual customer growth statistics are saying and you should have a general idea where you’re headed. Also pay attention to what message your marketing is sending, if you’re seeing a sudden decrease in growth a while after a major campaign, it may be that your campaign is giving people false impressions of your game.

Finally while negative growth customers are bad, they also aren’t walking crisis that all need to be fixed. Some of the largest games on the market have insane numbers of negative growth customers, but they are completely overshadowed by the cumulative force of the positive growth customers.