Music works in waves as genres (and artists) crash in and out of the beach of public consciousness. And the same also applies to marketing trends. There was the Rock Band/Guitar Hero era of music and gaming, then it moved to apps with Tap Tap Revenge, then there was Twitch, then there was Fortnite.
The gaming continues; only the platforms change. But now, for this month at least, gaming + music is back at the top of the agenda and it seems to be taking a scattershot approach to platforms with a retro feel.
MARSHMELLO was, of course, the first major star to play a show within Fortnite and sell all manner of virtual goods there – as well as battling Ninja in a Fortnite tournament. Now he’s going old-school with a mobile game (if you can describe a callback to something from a few years ago as “old-school”).
Developed by Vietnamese games company Gamejam for iOS and Android, Marshmello Music Dance has echoes of Tap Tap Revenge as you tap along to Marshmello tracks in order to make an avatar of him and other characters move and score points. And those tracks, with incredible convenience, all come from Joytime III, his new album. The tracks were all available in the game the day before the album was released, obviously designed as such to get fans to install the game in order to hear the album early. The game is free to download, but of course there is a monetisation angle where fans can buy “gems” (the game’s virtual currency) to unlock new characters.
Going even more old-school is TRISHA YEARWOOD who is returning to FarmVille, the game that took Facebook by storm before it was replaced by seemingly innocuous quizzes that may or may not have compromised private data. To mark the 10th anniversary of FarmVille (yes, it’s really been a decade), the country singer is partnering with developer Zynga to make a cameo in cartoon form in FarmVille 2: Country Escape. It will also feature her new single, ‘Every Girl In This Town’, and Yearwood’s 2D alter ego will appear as a “down-to-earth farmhand avatar” in the game, offering rare items and other in-game rewards.
Next up are BTS – whose BTS World game has finally been released. We have already covered it here, primarily due to the pre-marketing around it, which was something we had not seen before on this scale for a music-centric game. Of course, given the nature of their fans, it makes perfect sense to have such a long build up. The game, in brief, puts you in the role of a virtual manager who has to steer the nascent boyband to international fame. The hook for fans to install and play the game is that it contains 10,000 (yes, ten thousand) new photos of the members and 100 exclusive video clips.
On top of that is new music linked to the game in the shape of an original soundtrack, with the single ‘Heartbeat (BTS World OST)’ being available in the game 48 hours before the album release. There are also, as with the Marshmello game, packs of “gems” for sale – but they range from the acceptable ($0.99) to the jaw-dropping ($99.99). Yes, there is plenty of exclusive content for the fans, but there are also plenty of ways for the group to make money here. Truly the gaming version of the old business maxim that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
And finally, LAUV has gone back to Flappy Bird for inspiration for his Billy Meets World game. It is designed to push his ‘Drugs & The Internet’ single which is taken from his upcoming album, ~how i’m feeling~. The Billy in the game title is Lauv’s dog and players have to “navigate the digital universe” of the video for ‘Drugs & The Internet’, collecting rewards as they go to earn discounts on purchases from his online store as well as getting to unlock wallpaper and watch an exclusive video of him performing an acoustic song.
Is this all a coincidence and it just so happens that four acts released a game tie-in in the same month? Or is this part of a trend where contemporaneous games are built around nostalgia for games from the past decade? If so, who is going to be bold enough and go even further back in time to base their entire album campaign around the third level of Jet Set Willy?
