I spent quite a bit of time today brooding about this week’s post. I have a list of engineering leadership topics that should take me well into 2023, but something happened this week that I wanted to talk about.
As some of you may know, I play World of Warcraft. A new expansion dropped recently, and that means new Marketing and Promotions. There was some really cool stuff over on Twitter where you could generate your own one or two sentence story for your WoW character. That was reasonably fun. This past week they announced a promotion with Twitch where you could earn an in-game mount in exchange for watching World of Warcraft on a Twitch Stream.
By itself, that sounds like a good idea. I decided I wanted to earn this reward and proceeded to link my experimental Twitch account to World of Warcraft and commence the en-stream-ening.
This is where things went into the no-so-good-idea category. I did the thing that most people would do upon joining a website with a list of channels—I clicked on the first one. The topmost stream during this promotional event had seventy thousand people watching and was more than ten times the size of the next six or seven streams.
I am not going to name the individual stream I was following. A little simple math and Googling of things will bring you to their name and their internet location. About ten minutes into the stream I realized that the channel I was watching was an incredibly profane and angry person exploiting a launch bug in the game. They were farming a large number of recurring drops from in-game monsters that were supposed to occur once per day per person.
As he was doing this activity, someone alerted him to a battlenet thread where someone watching the stream complained to tech support that this was happening. He started looking at names in the thread to find if any of the participants were in his group of exploiters so he could kick them out. Let’s set aside for a second that the most popular stream for the game during an official partner promotion was showing a large-scale exploitation operation in realtime. I was appalled at the language and attitudes of the people in the channel.
About thirty minutes into this, the game team hotfixed the game and removed the exploit in real time. It was quite fascinating to watch the reaction of all of the people in the channel. The streamer spent about ten to fifteen minutes brooding about the sudden change in fortune before starting to do something else.
Around this time I was explaining to people online what was happening. One of my more thoughtful team members suggested I find a different stream to watch in order to earn my free mount. I switched to the channel that he recommended to find that this new streamer was actually having an in-channel debate about what just happened to the original exploiting streamer—There was no escaping it.
So what the hell is the point of this story? We will get there. Let’s fast forward a couple of days first.
A company that runs Smash Tournaments announced this week that Nintendo had revoked their license and this year’s tournament was canceled with very little notice.
Nintendo followed up with a statement claiming “We canceled their license but we verbally gave them permission to run this year’s event since we did not want to ruin the fan experience”.
I am not a Smash Brothers fan, so I do not know how big or serious this is. Both of these things do not sit well with me and bothered me enough to set aside all of my engineering mentorship conversations for one week and talk about them.
Marketing partnerships are hard.
In the case of the World of Warcraft / Twitch partnership, a substantial number of players looking for a nice, free mount had their ears and eyes assaulted with vitriol for hours. It is not clear to me what the requirements are for a channel to have DropsEnabled in order to participate in company marketing events. If it was my brand and I cared about it, at the very least I would want to have some kind of ability to request that the flag be taken away from people who are publicly streaming exploits in my game and abusing them for personal gain, even if they were not verbally abusing people in the process. I was shocked that it was such an immensely popular channel and it did not reflect well on either Blizzard or Twitch.
Similarly, the cancellation of the Smash Bros event reflects poorly on both Nintendo and their partner company. Nintendo maintains that they have high brand expectations for these events. They revoked the license and then admitted verbally they were willing to extend it for this year to preserve the events for its fans.
Verbally?
Let’s pretend we are the leaders of the partner company for just a moment here. If you had an official license to perform some partnership event with a billion-dollar international company, and then you were verbally informed to proceed with this year’s event, would you still do it? If someone at Nintendo chose to take legal action against you, either through ignorance or malice, you have quite the burden of proof there. I would be hard pressed to suggest that “the show must go on!” on those terms.
One would think that if you really cared about the experience for fans, you might commit your 2022 license extension to a written notice.
Both Blizzard and Nintendo have large and loyal fan bases. Both of these feel like horrible failures to their fans and customers.
So why did I write a post about this?
I hope I never do something so stupid to a fan or a customer in the future that I come back and read this post with regret.
If you have fans and customers, please care for them.
If you are going to partner with other companies, please make sure the experience is well-thought and sufficiently curated.
If those partnerships are going to change, please communicate those changes with your partners with your fans in mind.
Both of these stories could have had outcomes that were orders of magnitude better than the outcomes that actually happened.
Thank you for listening to my ranting this week. If I am not chasing teenagers off of my lawn next week, I hope to resume my regularly scheduled engineering leadership conversations.
