_BR Firm Produces First Video Game: Title features black colleges

Sept 6, 2007

Nerjyzed Entertainment Inc., an African American-owned digital entertainment firm, will launch its first title, "Black College Football Experience," during Bayou Classic week, also known as the week of Thanksgiving.

BCFx will put players and fans into the heart of college football, fusing advanced video game design with music and entertainment, according to Nerjyzed. The Baton Rouge company will market the game with a 12-week road tour to the campuses of historically black colleges and universities, football classics and homecoming games.

"Marketing to HBCUs is very smart. It's better to have a target audience when you're a startup like this than to try and grab as many eyeballs as possible," said David Riley, senior public relations manager for NPD Group Inc., a leading provider of consumer and retail data for a variety of industries, including video games. "And even though they may be targeting African-American students, the sports genre it's not a black-white genre.

Sports titles appeal to men, women, black, white, it doesn't really matter."

Nerjyzed will likely generate sales outside of those campuses, Riley said.

Nerjyzed officials were unavailable for comment Wednesday. However, the company announced it has secured an exclusive five-year licensing agreement with the Southwestern Athletic Conference, Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and Central Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. The licensing agreement also includes several schools within the Mideastern Athletic Conference as well as independent historically black colleges and universities.

BCFx features more than 40 teams, bands and mascots; interactive halftime shows; realistic stadiums; play-by-play commentary; and 10 authentic Classics. The game is compatible with Sony PlayStation 2 and 3 systems and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The game is scheduled for release Nov. 23, the day before the Bayou Classic. BCFx will also be available for PCs in November. Riley said around 2,000 new video game titles are released each year in the United States.

It's not easy for a company to break into the industry, he said. Initial investment in a startup, the cost of development and marketing campaigns can amount to millions of dollars.

Although advertising and retailers are the main ways gamers find out about new products, smaller companies can use viral marketing on the Internet to promote their games, Riley said. However, a company has to be well-versed in what's going on in the online "blogosphere" to succeed.

"To market themselves via nontraditional mediums, such as YouTube and all the gaming blogs out there is a lot of work, but it's also fairly effective if you know what you're doing," Riley said.

It's also difficult for a smaller group of developers to create a game that can take advantage of the power in the current generation of consoles, the Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, Riley said. EA, publisher of Madden NFL, and Activision Inc., whose titles include Guitar Hero and Doom, put all of their manpower into single titles just to utilize those platforms to their full advantage.

"If it doesn't look like a next-generation title, the chances are you're not going to appeal to the consumer," Riley said. On the plus side, the key to success isn't being able to play with the industry's big boys, Riley said, it's creating a game that appeals to the masses. Gamers are not about to pay $40 or $60 or more for a game that won't entertain them. No game is going to push Madden NFL out of the top spot, but gamers have shown a willingness to buy more than one football game, Riley said.

"If it's a good football game, people are going to play it," Riley said.

The other good news is that the video game industry is huge and booming, Riley said.

Last year, U.S. computer and video game sales grew to $7.4 billion, according to the Entertainment Software Association.

"There's plenty of room. You just have to develop games that consumers want," he said.

By Ted Griggs. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.