Friday, November 13, 2009

MW2 - Modern Warfare is winning the sales game


So maybe you are skeptical that content matters? Here’s food for thought. According to Broadpoint AmTech analyst Ben Schachter Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had already sold over 1.2 million copies the first day of release in the U.K. alone.

There are some experts questioning the reporting data and how those numbers could be tabulated so quickly. I’m no expert but am questioning them too. Are they counting units shipped? If so, that should be pretty easy. The fervor is a demand creator. Clever don’t you think?

Extrapolating from the U.K. sales data and the approximate 2-to-1 relationship between Modern Warfare 2 and the previous U.K. record holder Grand Theft Auto IV, Schachter has estimated that Modern Warfare 2 has sold around 7 million units across the globe in its first 24 hours. For comparison purposes, GTA IV sold "only" 3.7 million units on its first day. The game costs U.S. $ 60 (or you can buy the Prestige edition for $ 160) – if you can get it at all. Analysts are saying that MW2 will sell over $ 1 billion dollars of the game in just a few months.

How many products do you know of that have the capacity to sell a billion dollars in as short a time frame as several months? My 20 year old son has obtained the game and rates it a WOW! (not World of Warcraft which is another HUGE franchise). He is not at all surprised the game is doing so well – it’s that good – or so he says
since I have not seen nor played the game and likely will not ever do so.

My WOW was the speed and breadth of how MW2 caught the attention not just of gamers but business people (jealous ones no doubt). What it means to me is that if a company comes up with the right product, at the right price, for the right audience, amazing success is still possible.

In a constantly changing world some things won’t change so much. And that’s reassuring to me. Is it to you?

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

First sleep and second sleep - the good old days?


I got 7 ½ hours last night and almost always get from 7-8 hours of sleep nightly. I have been thinking about how people sleep today versus throughout human history. Full disclosure - one of our clients Tempur-Pedic is a highly successful manufacturer of mattresses but they know nothing (and are not the least bit concerned) of my blog posts.

What got me thinking about the history of sleep was something I read not long ago about Ben Franklin and sleeping during the time of the American Revolution. Apparently there was a ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’. Such that people would get up after sleeping for several hours in the middle of the night and be awake for some period of time prior to going back to sleep after sleep halftime.

From Wikipedia - Segmented sleep, divided sleep, bimodal sleep pattern and interrupted sleep are modern Western terms for a polyphasic or biphasic sleep pattern found in medieval and early modern Europe and many non-industrialized societies today, where the night's sleep is divided by one or more periods of wakefulness. This is particularly common in the winter. Maybe they were talking about NFL coaches who seemingly sleep in their offices in season.

Because members of modern industrialized societies, with late hours facilitated by electric lighting, no longer have this sleep pattern, they may misinterpret and mistranslate references to it in literature. Common interpretations of the term 'first sleep' are 'beauty sleep' and 'early slumber'. A reference to first sleep in the Odyssey was translated as such in the 17th century, but universally mistranslated in the 20th.

Far be it for me to get into things like REM (Rapid Eye Movement), Circadian rhythms, and dreams (I will leave that to Aristotle and Freud), but it is interesting to me that in all of human history only over the last 200 years (gas lighting came into practice in 1807) or so have humans sleep habits dramatically changed. It seems to me that many people do not value sleep as much as they should. The health benefits of a good night’s sleep are fairly well documented. It also helps make people less cranky (maybe President Obama should mandate sleep for Congress as they seem particularly cranky although it might be due to them getting too much sleep in House and Senate sessions).

But the notion of a true ‘first sleep’ with an ‘awake’ period in between and a ‘second sleep’ is foreign to me and, I would imagine, most people. I wonder how Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan ‘slept’. Did they get their 8 hours? Rampaging and pillages is very tiring after all. Maybe it is that since there was so much less to do at night before the advent of electricity, sleep was valued more as a pastime? After all, until recently people did not have Facebook to keep them up at night.

How about you – do you have a nightly targeted sleep amount? And are you cranky when you don’t get it?