![]() Fall Guys has brought in everything from Godzilla to Pusheen to Disney's The Jungle Book to a Half-Life headcrab. Multiversus lets Game of Thrones' Arya Stark throw down with LeBron James and Tom and Jerry. Lots of what's going on with brand collaborations in gaming seems to rely on this same appeal. "Wow, a cereal mascot on Twitch? That's so absurd I'll probably watch out of curiosity." I'm sure Kellogg's is going to tightly control the content of the livestream as much as possible, and the whole promotion seems to rely on the novelty of the thing. ![]() That's to say nothing of its history as a platform that has fostered misogynists among the ranks of content creators as well as employees, a platform whose founding vision welcomed the Ku Klux Klan, a platform that needed to be forced by others to care about user safety at every turn. Never mind the gun violence and voice chat pitfalls that would be possible in such an event to start with, Tony is also doing this on a platform that has this year been riding a wave of interest in people livestreaming literal gambling. Yes, Tony the Tiger will be showing up on Twitch to play an unspecified popular battle royale game. "I promise I'm gonna blow some minds with this research I've been doing on 4chan, but first, I need y'all to smash that subscribe button for me guys!" ![]() Tony will make his streaming debut - making Kellogg's Frosted Flakes the first brand globally to work with Twitch, to transform a brand mascot into an interactive VTuber - in Tony the Tiger's GR-R-REAT CEREAL BOWL OF GR-R-REATNESS livestreamed event." – One of the worst press releases I received this week. QUOTE | "Kellogg's Frosted Flakes® and Tony the Tiger® are leveling up the fun for cereal fans and gamers with their first-of-its-kind collaboration with Twitch's Brand Partnership Studio. It seems games are seen as such a simultaneously lucrative and effective marketing strategy as to overcome almost any outmoded concerns companies might have about reputational damage or unsavory connotations. So I don't think there's any ignorance to point to here, especially not when Fortnite has been running these crossovers for so long and we even see something like PUBG Mobile (which has been banned in multiple jurisdictions for addicting and corrupting youth) and Baby Shark (which to be fair, has been banned in plenty of households for the same offence). But if it was just ignorance, we would have seen an end to this with the first viral video of Superman riding the pony during the "I Have a Dream" speech. ![]() Kurt Cobain performs "YMCA" (screenshot from video by YouTube user Ben Galindo)Īnd as we saw with the regrettably predictable MLK Fortnite activation, even game developers can be pretty clueless as to what people will do with their work. I mean, No Doubt and Kurt Cobain's estate apparently didn't realize when they respectively signed deals for Band Hero and Guitar Hero 5 that their in-game avatars would be singing other people's songs as well. Maybe they don't really know what they're signing up for. On the other hand, it's basically guaranteeing that there will be footage of Rick and Morty shotgunning your characters directly in the face as Captain America and Darth Vader exchange inappropriate emotes in the background. It's such a popular thing now that there are entire studios set up explicitly to create brand activations in one specific game. They get to make some money by bringing their popular brand to games without the difficulty of faithfully converting it to an interactive medium or the expense of trying to build a stand-alone game, and it's going to introduce their brand to tons and tons of kids who might go on to be fans. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense why companies would sign up for this. This week we saw the arrival of Dragon Ball characters to Fortnite, which is yet another in an interminable march of tie-ins to the popular battle royale shooter that fit not because they work with the core experience and gameplay of Fortnite, but because they work with the almost arbitrary amalgamation of unrelated brands it has become. Brands adapt to the times, they are routinely refreshed, reinvigorated, and re-sold to audiences in a variety of guises, some paying wonderful homage to their origins, and others less so.Īnd while that's always been the case, I get the feeling these days that brands are increasingly malleable. Hard to kill certainly, as Atari's continued existence reminds us. These days – and especially on this site – we use it to talk about intellectual property more than physical property, a popular franchise of games or the nebulous connotations consumers hold in their head about an actual product line.Īnd in that sense, a brand is very much impermanent. Once upon a time, a brand was a pretty much permanent thing, something to say who owned livestock, or where goods had been made.
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