In a story-driven game, if the ending sucks it can ruin the whole franchise”: evaluating a narrative brand’s crisis recovery

Abstract

The Mass Effect video game series, a narrative brand, and its Canadian developer, BioWare, were investigated to determine if their brand equity had recovered in 2016 after a brand crisis in 2012 by analyzing comments posted on five online news outlets using thematic analysis and non-participatory netnography. The investigation found that, although both brands had positive prior reputations, they had not recovered. Many players were intensely emotionally attached to the narrative brand and viewed the narrative shortcomings as a performance-related crisis and attributed it to BioWare and the Mass Effect 3 writers. It was also found that the video game industry and video game journalists failed to recognize the importance of narrative to the games’ players. These results have implications for crisis research, video game journalists, and the video game industry as well as publishers of other narrative brands such as movie and television series.