Halo 4 lights up the Thames but doesn’t impress

Monday night saw the launch of one of the biggest entertainment properties in the world.

10,000 stores worldwide opened at midnight to cater for the fans. Tens of thousands were spent in one evening of frivolity.

And what was the reason for all this hype?

To get people talking about a franchise that, in its last incarnation, shifted $300 million worth of stock in its first week in the US alone. Total sales were estimated in the billions.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Halo 4 has made its debut. Here is a video of a bunch of people playing the game and its makers telling us it's brilliant:

Watching the hype build across the media about this launch over the past week, I was expecting something really impressive – epic indeed.

And the team undoubtedly delivered “scale”.

But I’m not convinced that they really delivered “impressive” – and certainly didn’t really achieve “interesting” – at least for the non-Halo obsessive.

As an observer of the whole thing – both from the river and reading through the online reports this morning – I can’t say there’s anything in this one that blew me away.

As a partially interested gamer (rather than professional observer of stunts and PR japery), there wasn’t anything that made me sit up and take note.

For those who didn’t see it (and I suspect there are plenty of you), Londoners shivering on the banks of the Thames were treated to the site of a UFO making its way across the London skyline – apparently the biggest lighting rig ever created, measuring 50 feet in diameter and weighing over three tonnes – suspended from a helicopter displaying a bloody great big Halo logo.

Now maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t feel like the kind of truly remarkable launch activity that a title like this deserves.

Particularly when the launch event has been so hyped by its creators that the frenzy of expectation across the blogs that follow these things was almost palpable.

From time-to-time, using PR to tease the PR which teases a launch before there is – at long last – a launch, works. But it’s rare – and generally restricted to the world of a very few film franchises.

In this case, Microsoft has made, in my book, a real mistake in its launch planning.

There is of course a huge community of players who will buy this game regardless of its launch PR. The launch event seems to have been designed for that group. Perhaps in the hope that they would talk positively of it – being opinion formers amongst their peers and online – and thereby spread the word.

But I felt ultimately let down by the launch work for two reasons.

First because it just isn’t interesting enough to create the kind of word-of-mouth it has been designed to deliver; this stunt just doesn't deliver a huge amount to talk about. And with the build-up that Microsoft stoked-up, the reveal needed to be more impressive to meet self-created expectation.

Secondly because I fear the reach for this activity will not be a great deal wider than the serious fans –  so I suspect while the hard core gamers will talk about it, the all important game dabblers, probably wont.

To increase the reach of the stunt beyond the hard core gaming community the whole thing really needed something that got every media outlet in the country talking about the game, not something that was to be achieved by an LED ad hoarding suspended across the City of London.

It’s a classic lesson: if you’re going to PR your own PR before it’s even happened, you’ve got to be bloody sure that the majority will leave satisfied by the pay-off.

James Gordon-MacIntosh is a managing partner at Hope&Glory PR and occasionally pens things on Spinning Around, a blog that he describes as “thinking out loud”. He hasn’t been thinking much lately.