So I went down to the official Modern Warfare 3 launch in London (Oxford Street) on Monday evening, and to be fair Activision and Microsoft put on a good show, I just couldn’t help but feel EA missed a trick here. As you do at these launches, I got talking with some friends in the queue and thought that it would have been awesome to see EA make an appearance in some capacity, to crash the party so to speak, which got me thinking.
I wanted a repeat of this
How awesome would it have been, with like thirty minutes to go before the clock strikes twelve, to pull up on Oxford Street, theme blaring, with soldiers jumping out the Battlefield 3 tank (they brought one along with them to the launch two weeks ago), handing out free copies to everyone in line (around 750 people)? Totally stealing the show away from Activision in the process.
Now, it would be stupid to assume gamers would walk away from the queue they’ve been standing in for hours, go home with their new copy of Battlefield 3 and live happily ever after, but putting copies of the competition in the hands of the competitor’s user base wouldn’t have be a bad thing – would it? Some might already own Battlefield 3 yes, but for a lot of people in that queue Modern Warfare 3 will be one of the only gaming purchases they’ll make this year – trust me I was there. Better yet, a stunt like that would get people talking, tweeting and definitely steal at least a bit of the limelight away from Activision’s money making machine, especially on the gaming sites and in the morning papers. Who knows, you might even get some converts from it. If not for the new players a stunt like that would bring in, it’s something that would have been worth the press alone right?
Going off EA’s aggressive marketing prior to the game’s release, I, for one wouldn’t have put it past them, and with thirty minutes left to go I was still checking my watch like an anxious kid, waiting for EA to land one final blow. Unfortunately, this never happened