'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'
'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'
In our State of PC Gaming roundtable, Larian's Michael Douse argues marketing isn't the right way to reach today's gaming audience.
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.
82I will never play helldivers, not my style, but god damn i read the news rabidly lol
20Most 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.
7It 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.
2And there's so much people in Reddit that defend cp2077 going "B-But le 2.0 fixed le game, it delivers everything!!!!111!1"
-3I 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.
1Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/omyoJ7onNrg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
1I 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.
1
Is showcasing your game, putting it on early access and talking about it to gaming journalists not considered marketing now?
30No, that's PR. Marketing is buying ads, buying reviews, buying people.
5That'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.
11
You're correct, but also I think we can assume this is referring to classical marketing, not all merketing.
4There'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."
2The 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.
1
HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU, BATTLESTATE GAMES
10As 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.
4Can'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.
2
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.
1Nope. 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.
1
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.
10and 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
1snorts 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!
1
Good games sell themselves. Word of mouth in gaming still works.
Publishers tend to kill games.
9I 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.
2
That's cute coming from the game that was in early access for nearly 3 years.
0