Whenever I play a really low budget iPhone game I always get lots of ads for other games that seem really cool but in reality are just as cheap and boring as the game I am currently playing. One of my favorite ads to see is a survival game that is set in the universe of The Walking Dead(TWD). As a fan, I think it is really cool to be able to interact with the TV characters through a virtual environment on my phone. The ad makes sure to mention that you can “team up with Rick and the gang” so it seems like that aspect of the game is very appealing to Walking Dead fans like me. I’ve always wanted to get into these games but I’ve heard from others that they are very time consuming and always incentivize spending money. This got me thinking, how much money does TWD make from video games?
I looked up the numbers but I could find the profit for one game called “Walking Dead: The Game” which made $40 million dollars in its first year of release. An article I read on COMPLEX stated that TWD makes around $8 million on their season premiere episode, which is their highest earning episode every season. If every episode made as much as the premiere episode, then TWD would gain $96 million every year. When comparing this to the one game that makes $40 million a year it seems like a lot more is being earned by the main series show. However, TWD has more than 12 games on the AppStore and plenty of other games on PC, Xbox, Playstation, etc. Even if the other eleven games on the AppStore made half as much money as “Walking Dead: The Game”, it would still be over $260 million which is considerably more than $96 million. Now I ask myself, is TWD really a television series? Or is it just a brand that has expanded its way onto video games, toys, arcades, spin-offs, books, and many more.
One reply on “It really is just brand management.”
I think the notion of world building and tansmedia marketing is very interesting. I first starting thinking about this transmedia franchising after reading Henry Jenkin’s “On Cinema and Convergence” last year, which applies the concept to the Star Wars franchise. However, his analysis remains largely philisophical, so I appreciate that you took the time to gather some actual numbers on TWD games as a revenue stream. I’ll be honest, I certainly didn’t expect a mobile game to rack up $40 mil… In directly comparing the Star Wars franchize to The Walking Dead, I think it’s also fascinating to see how the nature of franchizing and branding has changed. The franchizing George Lucas famously capitalized was centered around physical tangible things: t-shirts, lunch boxes, posters, comic books, etc. Such marketing required established production lines, consumer research, vendor distribution deals, etc. Today, most franchizing / transmedia marketing seems to come in the form of digital content. There are still T shirts and stickers and what not, you included a TWD action figure for instance, but marketing has largely moved away from the physical object. There’s still a lot of work that goes into building a game, but the overhead cost is dramatically lower that establishing a production line, and the potential for monetary return is probably much higher. You can only buy a T shirt once, micro-transactions keep you spending money on a consistent basis. Anyways, yeah very interesting how franchizing and marketing has changed in recent years.