Video game marketing is a pretty standard business: Build the best game you can, hope to get good reviews and pray that the player on the box helps you sell more copies.
Source: the10k.com
2K Sports Major League Baseball 2K10
But the minds behind Major League Baseball 2K10 are going where no sports video game marketer has gone before.
They're offering a huge prize -- $1 million -- to the first player who pitches a perfect game in their game.
"We believe our pitching mechanic in our game is superior to what is out there," said Jason Argent, vice president of marketing for 2K Sports. "So we were brainstorming as to what we could do to give this industry a shot in the arm."
They arrived at the $1 million prize.
When a player starts a game, he or she will be able to go to default settings (including All-Star mode) that will automatically qualify him or her should he pitch the perfect game. If a player accomplishes the feat, a code will pop up and if 2K Sports verifies that the player is the first one to do so, he or she will win the $1 million in a lump sum payment.
"We know that a perfect game has happened 18 times in real life, but it has obviously happened many more times in a video game," Argent said.
Because 2K Sports had never tracked the statistic before, it was unable to insure the $1 million prize. Insurance companies obviously need to know odds in order to be able to price out the insurance.
There's one more catch in collecting that $1 million prize. It has to be verified by noted video games record keeper Twin Galaxies and order for that to happened the whole perfect game has to be recorded, Argent said.
The $1 million contest starts on March 2 and runs for 60 days.
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