'Marketing's dead, and I can back this s**t up': Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director says players 'just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled' - eviltoast
  • Delphia@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Helldivers 2 had zero advertising that I saw and it slaps.

    Cyberpunk might have actually delivered on its promises if they spent half of their advertising budget on the dev team instead of billboards.

    • ghen@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      I will never play helldivers, not my style, but god damn i read the news rabidly lol

      • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        It has a seemingly active community on Lemmy of all places, their posts frequently show up in my feed. What triple A game has this? Although I’m not interested in it too and they banned my country for a reason, I’m guilty in looking how to buy it.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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          7 months ago

          No current AAA games have this on lemmy because of late they are all one or more of:

          -Massively Overhyped Flop

          -No Lasting/Enduring Replayability

          -Insufferable Gacha/Microtransactions

          -Hugely Popular, But Basically Only Played By Rabid Children/ManChildren w/ Multiple Psychological Disorders

            • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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              7 months ago

              Yeah, it is a rare exception, though I would argue it is not really a AAA game, more AA.

              True, it did have a huge budget and a large staff, but AAA games have even larger budgets, even larger staffs, and often shorter development times.

    • Skepticpunk@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Most of my exposure to HD2 before picking it up was either streamers playing it or people complaining they couldn’t play it because the servers were well over capacity.

    • Ilflish@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      It was showcased in Sony State of Plays (what felt like) most of last year but it didn’t really wow anyone from them other then existing Helldivers fans. Even if a game is what people want, someone has to play it first to spread the word. Among Us is a great example of that.

      • pancakes@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        I wouldn’t defend cdpr’s shit but cyberpunk has been an objectively good game for years. No amount of hating the launch, company, or external factor will change that.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        I posted on Reddit after CP77 launched that it would take them at least a year to fix the game up to actually working with what it launched with, and longer than that to get to everything that was promised.

        Now… it has been a good number of years, and with everything other than multiplayer?

        Theyve done it. It is an incredible game now.

  • dsemy@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Is showcasing your game, putting it on early access and talking about it to gaming journalists not considered marketing now?

    • ReallyZen@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      No, that’s PR. Marketing is buying ads, buying reviews, buying people.

      • dlpkl@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        That’s not marketing at all. Marketing is anything that creates awareness for your product. Early access and what the person you responded to stated is exactly that.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      You’re correct, but also I think we can assume this is referring to classical marketing, not all merketing.

    • Dinsmore@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      There’s a few separate threads of people responding to your comment regarding what marketing is, so it’s probably helpful to add what the guy actually said in the linked article (I know, who reads the article anymore🙄).

      “Marketing is dead,” he said. “Marketing is dead. It truly is—I can back this shit up, man. There’s no channels anymore—it doesn’t work. You used to have marketing, communication, and PR. Marketing was essentially a retail theory—you were trying to get your box on the right point of the store shelf, and you have partnerships with retail stores. Those pipelines are gone. Now you’ve got the internet. Nobody is looking at ads anymore … all of the channels that we would usually market through are no longer really viable. So their function is also reduced by the fact that players just want to be spoken to. They don’t want to be bamboozled—they just want to know what you’re making and why you’re making it and who it’s for.”

    • Meowing Thing@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The main difference I think has to do with how this is done. Marketing is much more aggressive. Think like Google ads where products appear in unrelated queries. Much more sensationalism and less information. While the article says gamers want to read actual reviews, comment on the game while being developed, etc.

      • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Honestly the last game I played due to advertising was spore, everything else has been word of mouth and one or two youtube lets plays.

      • dlpkl@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Marketing is not necessarily aggressive. Product placement is the prime example of this.

    • misterdoctor@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      As a non-Tarkov player I have to say I’ve been loving the drama of this story. I’m able to watch a good v evil story unfold in front of my eyes with zero stakes.

      • ridethisbike@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Can’t blame you, tbh… It’s been a shit show. Hopefully they figure it out, but they’ve been pretty tone deaf at every turn over the past few years so it’s likely that they’ll just try to ride this out until the community just kinda… forgets about it. Which is sad. One reason being that we shouldn’t be in this position to begin with… The other is that it shows that companies can literally just bend us all over and as long as they walk back the extreme behaviour a little bit, they’ll get away with it.

        I’ve killed more than a few people with bigger pockets than normal and it just saddens me that people can actually support this nonsense.

        • misterdoctor@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          It feels like every day there’s a new development that somehow makes the developer look worse than they already did smh

          Edit: I will say, drama aside, I do genuinely feel sick to my stomach for the people like yourself who have invested time and money and heartache in this game only for the developers to treat you like this. It’s such a shitty situation.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      Have they solved the rampant hacking yet or has it come out that the devs are just straight up making the hacks and selling them on the side?

      I of course cannot prove the latter, but would be entirely unsurprised.

      • ridethisbike@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Nope. They claim that some of it has to do with Unity and the way the engine is coded and not just their own code… Which might be true to an extent, but they’ve also admitted that their own code is hard to work with because it’s all gotten so complex.

        As for selling their own cheats… Man who knows… Money IS a great motivator.

  • Turtlesson@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    It doesn’t help when so many “AAA” studios push out DOA products that take 5 patches and broken promises to finally get to a state that’s playable. I could rattle off so many games in the last year that had so much hype and were almost unplayable by most of the people that preordered.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      snorts line of coke

      Ok, so the idea is, game make lots of money if people play it for a long time, so what we do is

      sniff

      We make an extremely flashy but mechanically very, veeery simple game, and we use big well known IPs, but make sure to hire writers off of Fiverr, that’ll save on overhead, anyway, season pass, microtransactions, lots and lots of marketing and hype!

      After Game Release

      WTF nobody is playing after a botched buggy launch, and people didnt enjoy the gameplay, complained it was too simple and unrewarding when it even worked, and that the story was awful?

      How could this have happened???

      Anyway time to layoff 1/4 of our employees and randomly shuffle the other half around our giant array of various studios and projects, that’ll shake things up and put the fear of God into our workforce.

      What me? Oh no I’m retiring now with my golden parachute after my amazing work running thia department through a trainwreck

      snort

      I mean “guiding our team through a demanding development process”. See you in Cabo!

    • Fitzsimmons@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      and the funny thing is that these games launch in such a bad state because the publisher paid for the marketing push to happen on a specific date, so come hell or high water, the game is gonna ship by that date

      don’t get me wrong, deadlines are extemely important or your project will just end up with infinite scope creep, but games are a massive artistic and technical endeavour, which are two things that can be extremely difficult to estimate

      there’s gotta be a better way

  • derpdiggler@lemmynsfw.com
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    7 months ago

    Good games sell themselves. Word of mouth in gaming still works.

    Publishers tend to kill games.

    • weirdo_from_space@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      I doubt it, I think there are many great games out there that don’t get noticed because not enough people talk about them. We get a ton of games every year. You can’t rely on word of mouth for your game’s success.

  • dlpkl@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    That’s cute coming from the game that was in early access for nearly 3 years.

    • olutukko@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      they also released it finished and excellent. everyone knows it’s not complete if it’s early access. however released game should be complete and finished

      • dlpkl@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Doesn’t mean they didn’t market the game. That’s the whole point of the post

        • olutukko@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I don’t think they were even trying to claim that

          ““Marketing is dead,” he said. “Marketing is dead. It truly is—I can back this shit up, man. There’s no channels anymore—it doesn’t work. You used to have marketing, communication, and PR. Marketing was essentially a retail theory—you were trying to get your box on the right point of the store shelf, and you have partnerships with retail stores. Those pipelines are gone. Now you’ve got the internet. Nobody is looking at ads anymore … all of the channels that we would usually market through are no longer really viable. So their function is also reduced by the fact that players just want to be spoken to. They don’t want to be bamboozled—they just want to know what you’re making and why you’re making it and who it’s for.””

          they did market it, but with being honest. not giving some empty promises and over hyping like most of the game companies nowadays do