This has some really interesting implications that are not restricted to gaming.
Traditional marketing is dead. No one likes ads. But the amount of people watching game streams? Enormous. Slay the Spire is the typical tale of how streaming sparked a deck building gold rush and it started when a streamer played a few hours and got some word of mouth going.
Marketing is still a very viable approach to figuring out how to sell a product. But ads themselves are actually poorly regarded and when folks are given the option of how to receive retail information, they don’t want unstoppable messages for things that don’t appeal and will never be purchased. And it sours the brand to viewers who have to watch.
But getting some charismatic people to have fun with your product? Guaranteed to get some eyeballs who are willing to be there. That’s what ads will start to look like: appeals to friendship.
Marketing is still working but unskippable billboards on the gates of our entertainment are dying off.
You’ve just described astroturfing with the appeal to friendship thing. You may not always know if a random dude on social media who talks about a thing is doing so because they actually like it, or if they’re a paid shill. They even sometimes run smear campaigns against competing products, so if someone is badmouthing a thing, they could have been paid to do that also.
“Marketing” is just the publically exposed arm of a go to market strategy. It will never die as long as money exchanges hands for goods and services.
The methods and language change, and sometimes some of the methods of delivery, but regardless of how a market operates - it will always have a function that bridges the product and consumer, provided there’s a plurality of both.
A W-shaped, multi touch funnel to nuture MQLs into a RFQ is just more sophisticated version of yelling “Fresshhhh Fishhhh” really loud as the boat comes in.
Whatever. The bear sex announcement was a marketing genius move. It got everyone talking about the game. Of course it helped that they then also delivered.
Cities Skylines 2 went the opposite direction.
Here’s hoping lessons are learned. Entire generations have learned to be deeply skeptical even with trusted brands.
And, yes, I hope that skepticism and relationship based, authentic(?) word of mouth brings sanity for a while.
Until businesses try to optimize that into oblivion too. We gotta put guard rails in place.
Yeah I got burned badly by saints row 5. I figured it couldn’t be any worse than 4. I was so wrong.
Their marketing dept is probably concerned.
I think this is part of why Amazon is introducing ads the way it did. People instinctively hate ads, so they have shorter ads and they get longer deeper into the season. Essentially retraining people to accept ads.
Everyone at Google will think this a challenge. Wrong step to take.
I think a little bit of marketing can’t hurt, but purely relying on hype marketig probably doesn’t as much, as before, although there will always be people that can be persuaded into preorder by marketing. (Or if you still have a few amounts of studios where you have enough trust in them to preorder)
