BREAKING: Panasonic's "The Jungle" Clearcut

The handheld that will never be.

Shocking news announced today: Panasonic has cancelled its hugely anticipated handheld MMO gaming device, "The Jungle." Yes, it's hard to believe given the overwhelming worldwide interest in Panasonic's offering, which I detailed in this post. OK, I did call it "The Fiasco", which turns out to be prescient. Amazing... what a stunning prediction. I mean, if you compare the stats of The Jungle to the 3DS and the NGP... wait, Panasonic never did announce any stats, did they? Or a price, or a launch date, or any reason at all to be enthusiastic.

At least it's a great lesson on how not to announce a product. Or develop one. I sure hope someone at Panasonic lost their job over this massive waste of company resources on a project that anyone with even a passing familiarity with the game market could have told them was a bad idea.

Well, Nintendo and Sony can breathe a little easier now that The Jungle isn't a threat.

The Jungle Is Testing The Waters

Panasonic's mysterious The Jungle handheld (yes, it's The Jungle, not just Jungle) is about to begin testing with consumers in the US, according to Bloomberg. If you were one of the people signed up on their website, you may have gotten an email... wow, Christmas comes early, doesn't it?

Panasonic has still not revealed any more information about the handheld device. Of course not; that would be telling. Better to have a cloud of expectations rather than hard facts. It's mysterious and murky, like a real jungle. Or maybe it's like watching a car crash in slow motion... Panasonic continues to provide lessons in how not to launch a product.

Oh, wait, here I am talking about it! More press is good, right? Somehow I don't think my comments will be causing people to rush out and buy this thing... if they ever will be able to buy one, that is.

I guess I just have a fondness for the oddball devices that have littered the roadside of the gaming industry... Gizmondo, Phantom, N-Gage, Virtual Boy... It always amazes me to see millions of dollars spent on something that just doesn't seem to have a chance. THough at least all of these other devices had a cooler name than The Jungle...

Marketing Lessons of a Fiasco

I savaged Panasonic pretty good in my last post about the lousy marketing job they've done (so far) with their new handheld. Upon consideration, I think it's instructive to look at what they've done wrong and how it should be done better.

The Product. Let's start with the behind-the-scenes part of the marketing effort, which should have begun well over a year ago... or at least, whenever the product was being considered. Somewhere deep inside Matsushita (the owner of the Panasonic brand), some bright boy (it's a Japanese company, odds are it's a male engineer) had an idea for a handheld device. It was probably an engineer, rather than a marketer, as Matsushita is a typical engineering-driven tech company. Perhaps a prototype was cobbled together, or at least a specification list and some rough drawings. At this point Matsushita had to decide whether or not to move forward with this product idea. What should have been done before making this decision was to bring in Marketing to figure out what the audience for such a device might be, and how many Matsushita might be expected to sell. Ideally some user surveys might be consulted. A competitive analysis would be done; what are the direct competitors to the product? (The DS line, PSP, iPhone, etc.) How many do the competitors sell? How can the product be positioned against the competitors? All of which leads to a sales and profitability estimate (which really should be a range, given uncertainties), which should inform the decision about whether or not to proceed.

Sometimes you do go ahead even if the product doesn't look like a moneymaker, because it's useful for strategic reasons. (Example: The Prius didn't turn a profit for many years, but it helped Toyota's brand immensely as a technology leader.) Usually some changes would be made to the product based on the marketing analysis (it needs more RAM, a sleeker design, compatibility with some technical standard... whatever).

The Launch. Once you've decided to go ahead with the product, you plan the launch. Usually you look at the production schedule and find out when you can actually have the units, and in what quantities. Then you see what makes sense for a release date given that, and the marketplace. For a gaming device, you'd want to make sure you hit the holiday season with plenty in stock. Working backwards from there, you'd want to start the buzz building well in advance to help generate retailer preorders. The counter-argument to releasing info far in advance is that it gives your competition time to arrange countermeasures (like introducing their own new widget, or lowering prices, or bundling software, or other things). Usually you'd want to start showing off the device in January at CES (especially if you have little or no track record as a hardware company in the gaming industry), then provide details of the device and the ship date and the starting software lineup by E3, so you can book orders for your October/November launch (you absolutely need to be in stores by Thanksgiving).

January is when you'd release key info about the device, particularly why it's better than the competition. You need at least some key details for the fans to slaver over. Importantly, you need to line up software support big time, and announce them as early as you can. Specific titles are even better; they validate the machine. If EA says Madden will be on it, that's validation of reality. Support from major publishers is essential if you want to be seen as real; if you don't have that, you'd better offer something incredibly compelling if you're launching as a gaming device.

You also need a trademarkable name that's recognizable and suggests the key selling points of the device (the ones you identified in your product plan). Plus a PR strategy that will get buzz building at magazines and web sites. An incredible convention presence to drive home your messages. Maybe an Alternate Reality Game to get buzz going. Some high-profile celebrity endorsers. An amazing web site that has key info, dates, constant information updates.

Compare all that to what The Jungle has... it makes you wonder why they are wasting their time and money. Look, the hardware could be amazing for multiple reasons, but I don't know. Neither do you. Because they haven't said anything about it. A scrap of data or two would be enough to get the buzz started; say "The screen resolution is better than an iPhone 4" or "The CPU runs rings around any other handheld" or "Jane Famousperson says it's the most revolutionary thing she's ever seen in gaming." Instead, we get a German Flash game company with a CGI movie suggesting it is part of a game, and an animated talk show. And no data.

I've only scratched the surface here, but this should give you a better idea of just what's wrong with this product launch.

Panasonic's New Handheld -- "The Fiasco"

Sometimes reality is far more surreal than a Chris Nolan film. When I first  saw this news release from Panasonic via CrunchGear, I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st. When you know the details (the few that exist), you'll be wondering if you're imagining this. I'm pretty sure it's real; Panasonic has job postings for engineers in San Jose to work on this. Ah, but you want to know what I'm talking about, so prepare yourself for the impending introduction of... The Jungle.

Wait, what? You thought I was talking about a new gaming system. Well, I am. That's the name Panasonic has chosen for its new handheld gaming device, no doubt because it automatically suggests cutting-edge hardware oriented towards gaming. Or not. I have rarely seen a worse name for a product. Let me explain why... First, the name has nothing to do with gaming, or technology, or online, or connectivity. It doesn't even have any inherently positive qualities that you would like to adhere to your brand. Second, it's not even remotely trademarkable; it's not an unusual spelling and it's utterly commonplace. Third, it's entirely unmemorable; at least a made-up hi-tech name like Gizmondo or N-Gage is unusual enough so you have a chance to remember it. My suggestion for a name: The Fiasco. Or, to make it trademarkable, The Fiazco.

OK, well what about the device? As you can see from the picture above, it looks like an engineer pumped steroids into a spec sheet and called it a product, right after cold-cocking the designer before they could attempt to make it look pretty. It's a clamshell, with lots of buttons, and a full mini-keyboard, and various ports, all wrapped up in a chunky, ugly shape that looks like a Before picture in an ad for an industrial design firm. From the 1980's. All we know is that it has a high-res screen, and a mini-HDMI port, a micro-USB port, and a headphone jack, and it's built on some kind of Linux kernel.

At this point you're probably wondering if this is a North Korean plot to sabotage Panasonic's brand. You may be right. I wasn't sure how much worse this launch effort could be until I went to the Jungle's web site and watched the videos. Yep, it's a North Korean plot all right. The annoyingly 90's retro-hip web design clashes perfectly with the pseudo-snarky withit-wannabe text. I rate this site NFR (No Finger Required to begin evacuating your stomach contents). It's ugly, it's annoying, it's not compelling or interesting, and it's so lacking in information content it could be a standard political stump speech.

Of course, what hardware launch would be complete without a lengthy list of companies developing for the device, and all the cool titles they're developing, along with screenshots and... You have how many? One? The only announced title is Battlestar Galactica Online, a browser-based MMO from Bigpoint. Bigpoint is a German developer known for browser-based games (think Farmville clones). On the web site is a CGI movie from BSG... no gameplay, of course. That would be telling. The only other content mentioned is a video podcast from Machinima, which looks sort of funny... but how is this content for a handheld device that makes you want to buy the device? Wouldn't you be able to put this on anything that plays video?

Listing all the things Panasonic is not doing would be a very lengthy post. Suffice it to say that this is by far the worst product launch I've ever seen in videogame history, and I was there when the Virtual Boy was introduced, and the N-Gage, and the Gizmondo, and the Phantom... The Jungle wins hands down. You would've thought Panasonic would have learned something from the 3DO experience. I can't figure out why someone at Matsushita (the owner of the Panasonic name) would have greenlit this project. Compromising photos? A huge debt to some yakuza oyabun? I can't wait to see more of this train wreck unfold in slow motion over some period of time... I don't know how long because, of course, no timeline for launch was even hinted at. In any event, keep watching to pick up valuable tips on what not to do with your own product launches.