Electronic Arts and BioWare are giving gamers the chance to play their latest game before its official release date. The only catch is that they will be dropped from space.
The video game industry has grown considerably since its humble beginnings and no one can ignore just how big it has become.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 beat out Avatar as the best-selling entertainment product in history and many publishers recorded record figures in terms of sales and revenue in the previous year. They did all of that during a recession.
Sony and David Jaffe teamed up to let random people remotely fire a machine gun at a gun through their laptop. The move was to promote their latest game, Twisted Metal, and allowed users to fire live rounds from an actual machine remotely.
Apart from a few lag issues, the move attracted a large number of participants.
EA and BioWare are looking to do something similar but are not letting the sky be the limit. In fact, they are sending actual copies of Mass Effect 3, which recently went Gold, into space by tying them to weather balloons.
The balloons will pop some thousands of feet in the atmosphere and the copies of the game will come crashing down back to Earth. Each copy of the game will have a GPS tracking device attached to it which gamers can use to track the game down.
How the games will survive their trip is a matter that is up for speculation but we’re pretty sure EA know what they are doing.
For those who think that is unlikely to happen a few facts and figures will help put things into perspective as to how seriously publishers market their products.
EA recently allocated $50-million to market Battlefield 3 and the move paid off big time, with the game going on to become the fastest selling title in the publisher’s history.
Also Sony has allocated $50-million for promoting the PlayStation Vita in the United States as well. So launching a handful of copies into the upper reaches of the atmosphere does not seem too difficult for EA to do.
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