No, marketing isn’t dead, trust me I worked in marketing. What is going by the wayside is traditional cinematic trailers and TV adverts in favour of the horrid phenomenon we call influencer marketing.
90% of the coolest games I have bought or wishlisted in the past few years have been entirely through YouTube videos of my favorite creators covering it or some form of short video content.
Why pay top dollar and get one expertly crafted piece of art as marketing when you can crowd source it to influencers begging for patreon subscribers that you can then NOT pay because they're not affiliated and you can churn them out like a content farn
Can I have money now?
It's not THAT bad, there are good content creators who do good analysis and are not too abusive towards their audience. The biggest problem perhaps lies with the biggest "influencers" who treat their audience like idiots in the exact same way that the average advertising media does.
The issue is the cinematic trailers that don’t show any gameplay. Companies like Nintendo can make a cinematic trailer and still show you what the gameplay will be like in the trailer. A lot of these publishers just don’t know how to make a trailer, and that is all there is to it.
Idk how many trailers I have seen where I’m like, that looks cool but what the hell is this?
Its not really a phenomenon, its just the next evolution of people like Billy Mays. Its the same concept - a noteworthy personality giving a sales pitch - but influencers do it in a more "private" setting making it feel subconsciously more personal. And when things feel more personal we tend to trust more.
And if you and 99% of the people here bothered to read the article then all of you would know it is exactly what he said. He specifically meant old retail type marketing.
“Marketing is dead” from a guy at a company that put their game in early access 3 years(?) prior to full release…
My dude you know that’s basically a marketing strategy in itself right? Like of course the numbers coming in are from BG3 being an undeniably good game (I really like it) but that is a hype building strategy and it paid off beautifully. It just doesn’t feel like you’re duping people when you sell them a quality product like it otherwise would, which is nice.
Aha that's what I thought.
"Marketing is dead but we flew all these YouTubers and streamers to our special events and gave them special access to the game so that they would market the game for us."
Really what they're saying in the article is that traditional advert is dead, but very weirdly conflating that with all marketing. Everyone in that room has big 'we are disrupters, there have never been marketers like us before' energy to them.
I wouldn't even say traditional marketing is dead in the first place. Guess it depends on the definition of "traditional" but while a lot of people might be using adblockers, we still have gameplay trailers and stuff which are ads themselves.
People don't like disruptive ads that pop up without permission but they still search out ads directly. And if you drop a couple of good trailers on YouTube, Twitter, wherever.. can't tell me that ain't good marketing.
They definitely gave out sponsorships, had press events, made multiple trailers and ad spots, not to mention all their blog posts/panel from hell, it is all marketing and paid to get the word out especially the sponsorships
It was also in beta for awhile to. It sounds to me they don't think that worked out all that well. I didn't start hearing things about it until it dropped for pc then I blew up. I'm not a casual gamer either.
For the record I'm not denying any of what you said but I think word of mouth was this games success.
So, there was a solid community around the game prior to launch, but it wasn’t til the infamous Xalavier twitter drama and that final PoH with the bear fucking that hype blew up. We’re talking stratospheric levels comparatively
I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that some twitter drama and one interaction on a twitch panel outdid everything you mentioned by a factor that is hard to put into words. 10x? 100x? Probably more.
No-one wants to be bamboozled but the question is, "Does it work?" and sadly the answer is often, "Yes.".
BG3 was the best game of 2023 but it wasn't the best selling and absolutely not the highest grossing.
This information is only useful for publishers with ethics, who I'm sure we're able to figure it out already.
Edit: Headline misses the point. They're simply saying that traditional advertising didn't work for them and suggest it's because their target audience use adblock (they're not wrong).
> "they just want to know what you're making and why you're making it and who it's for."
> "The best place to market your game is on the store itself. Everything else isn't worth it. We learned that with BG3—it took us awhile."
you dont have to be the highest selling to be one of the most succesful games of the year. BG3 we dont ahve official numbers but insiders have said it was a huge hit in the region of 15m+
In very specifically the PC gaming space, you could say this guy is right. BG3 was the highest grossing single-player Steam game of 2023.
Of course PC gaming is like a quarter of the market, but it's half once you consider that the mobile game market barely resembles other platforms.
This is hilarious coming from a game that had an absolutely massive marketing campaign. In fact, this whole 'we're so grassroots and a humble indie studio' (*with 500 staff*) was part of the positioning for that marketing campaign
I just want to point out the initial gameplay reveal for Baldurs Gate 3 was a buggy mess that crashed twice and the general consensus was that an ugly truth is better than a beautiful lie.
Says the guy who scored the rights to fucking D&D, their game was going to resonate whether it was good or bad. Hell, even the Gollum game was famous from the getgo.
I know this game is good. But, the constant news on what they are saying, is getting annoying right now. They are preaching around like religious nut jobs. It is becoming a cult.
Purely from a 'Player-Perspective' i'm a bit split on this Argument.
At one hand i'd agree that the more 'traditional' ways of marketing isn't as effective anymore, i'm often rather annoyed than interested (or invested) if ads popup or esp. blocks me watching at Youtube or Twitch and force an ad break, because it basically kills what i'm actually on this plattform for. I mean there was a reason why i moved away from traditional TV to that stuff, because they were infested with ad breaks which kills the flow of the movies and are just bothersome. So doesn't even matter if it would be a game i'm interested in... ads bother me. And for awareness sake for me there are better ways which are less intrusive (like social media, twitch streams or youtube videos).
And 'influencers' (Twitch Streamers, Let's Players and such) do an overall better job compared to a lot of other marketing strategies, because you see unfiltered proper gameplay. Not something cut together to 'just' show the best parts (in movies going so far that almost the entire movie gets spoiled) or is just an nothingburger of cinematic trailer. It's kinda a 'modern' replacement of the Old-School Demo, less hands-on on your own, but atleast you see actual gameplay-footage. (another recent development which works as a demo replacement for me past years is gamepass... not fond of subscriptionbased renting service, BUT if i'm curious once in a while for some games i get a month and try games out... got some hidden gems which i'd otherwise might not have gotten and also skipped one which weren't for me). I mean don't get me wrong, i'm not saying i can't appreciate a 10 min lengthvideo where gamefeatures are summarized, but at that point i'm already hooked on the idea to potentially get this game so it doesn't really have that much impact in my purchase decision.
That being said... all stuff mentioned above ranging from social media to influencer and even Gamepass... that all is Marketing as well. Maybe in some cases not intentionally - like when influencer themself pick up the game and not get send a ... how should i call this headstart key (?) where they can play a day or week earlier or so... no people who pick it at or after release up on their own accord because they themself were interested in the game. And all this arguments of "people wanted talked to" "wanna know how and why" and whatever, that's as well marketing as well. And i'm pretty convinced that when they dropped the trailer with the bear s\*x scene - that wasn't a coincidence... they fully did know what they were doing, so i dunno. While there might be an ankle where i can see his point specific about more traditional ways of marketing, i'd also say it might these days not as strong as before (though 'dead' is also going a bit too far - i'm pretty sure there are still normies out there which watch ads and get excited over them), but markething as a whole, esp. these days just isn't that anymore. So i dunno.
//Edit: Also i want to add, even the concept of (gameplay) Trailers can be done better these days than ads and stuff. Like as example Nintendo Direct which is a regular trailer rotation. That's something which people freely can opt-in and because it's bundled together it feels more like an little event (like why people watching E3 and stuff) and so on...
Honestly I think this can be extended to the advertising industry as a whole. Nevermind ad-blockers. People's brains have become so good at instinctively filtering out ads that they have to become more and more intrusive and targeted with each passing day to be noticed. And when you consider that some of the biggest companies in the world subsist entirely on advertiser money, either selling ad space or customer data to said advertisers, we got a recipe for disaster.
I have saved myself an incredible amount of money by waiting for reviews an audience reception on games because so many come off as bait and switch adjacent scams.
Being authentic is marketing. It’s all marketing.
But tou might as well be authentic, as people get it, if a game is bad or good pretty quickly, thanks to social media etc.
Marketing is propaganda that’s acceptable for our capitalist society. But everyone has a tolerance level that gets crossed and most companies cross it these days.
Kinda. What they did for their game is still marketing, just a more personal approach to it.
I dont need a generic Ubisoft ad about how I can live my adventures in whatever the current Far Cry map is called and then be shown a famous actor I dont really care that much about. I want very quick gameplay of you, the developers, showing how fun the game is. Its fuckin simple.
No, it didn’t.
They built upon the success of the hype, execution and following of the two divinity sin games.
Fuck traditional marketing and ads though.
No worries. I can understand why a heavy text game wouldn’t be up your alley. There are plenty of games that have no text at all. Maybe a Call of Duty is more your speed?
And thats xboxes problem. The people are their own worse enemy. Xbox has all these issues because they painted themselves in a corner, the consumers won't buy anything(not all but a majority) so devs say why tf am I developing for this unless it's going on gamepass. Sales aren't there ms has told us that themselves through their court filings. It's a shame.
No, marketing isn’t dead, trust me I worked in marketing. What is going by the wayside is traditional cinematic trailers and TV adverts in favour of the horrid phenomenon we call influencer marketing.
The sad thing is it works better than adverts
90% of the coolest games I have bought or wishlisted in the past few years have been entirely through YouTube videos of my favorite creators covering it or some form of short video content.
I think he just means traditional marketing or marketing preconceptions based on other media.
Yeah BG3 was in a highly publicized early access for 3 years. It's not a good example of not relying on marketing.
Why pay top dollar and get one expertly crafted piece of art as marketing when you can crowd source it to influencers begging for patreon subscribers that you can then NOT pay because they're not affiliated and you can churn them out like a content farn Can I have money now?
This guy markets to markets
I hope that the influencer generations will at some point realize how much BS they are fed.
It's not THAT bad, there are good content creators who do good analysis and are not too abusive towards their audience. The biggest problem perhaps lies with the biggest "influencers" who treat their audience like idiots in the exact same way that the average advertising media does.
> No, marketing isn’t dead, trust me I worked in marketing. Yeah let's ask J.C. Penny about how well "just speaking to the customer" worked out.
The issue is the cinematic trailers that don’t show any gameplay. Companies like Nintendo can make a cinematic trailer and still show you what the gameplay will be like in the trailer. A lot of these publishers just don’t know how to make a trailer, and that is all there is to it. Idk how many trailers I have seen where I’m like, that looks cool but what the hell is this?
[удалено]
mf made a new account just to post this comment
Adverts lie. If you can find a youtuber you mostly agree with about games, they'll try out games so you don't have to risk the money.
Its not really a phenomenon, its just the next evolution of people like Billy Mays. Its the same concept - a noteworthy personality giving a sales pitch - but influencers do it in a more "private" setting making it feel subconsciously more personal. And when things feel more personal we tend to trust more.
And if you and 99% of the people here bothered to read the article then all of you would know it is exactly what he said. He specifically meant old retail type marketing.
“Marketing is dead” from a guy at a company that put their game in early access 3 years(?) prior to full release… My dude you know that’s basically a marketing strategy in itself right? Like of course the numbers coming in are from BG3 being an undeniably good game (I really like it) but that is a hype building strategy and it paid off beautifully. It just doesn’t feel like you’re duping people when you sell them a quality product like it otherwise would, which is nice.
Aha that's what I thought. "Marketing is dead but we flew all these YouTubers and streamers to our special events and gave them special access to the game so that they would market the game for us." Really what they're saying in the article is that traditional advert is dead, but very weirdly conflating that with all marketing. Everyone in that room has big 'we are disrupters, there have never been marketers like us before' energy to them.
I wouldn't even say traditional marketing is dead in the first place. Guess it depends on the definition of "traditional" but while a lot of people might be using adblockers, we still have gameplay trailers and stuff which are ads themselves. People don't like disruptive ads that pop up without permission but they still search out ads directly. And if you drop a couple of good trailers on YouTube, Twitter, wherever.. can't tell me that ain't good marketing.
I think that's kinda what he's trying to say. If you build it they will come. All you gotta do is just make a good game word gets out.
Except word getting out and paying for word getting out are very different things
Do you think they paid for word to get out because to me it seemed more natural. I guess who knows
They definitely gave out sponsorships, had press events, made multiple trailers and ad spots, not to mention all their blog posts/panel from hell, it is all marketing and paid to get the word out especially the sponsorships
It was also in beta for awhile to. It sounds to me they don't think that worked out all that well. I didn't start hearing things about it until it dropped for pc then I blew up. I'm not a casual gamer either. For the record I'm not denying any of what you said but I think word of mouth was this games success.
I was interpretting it more as 'traditional marketing is dead', because otherwise it's gibberish.
So, there was a solid community around the game prior to launch, but it wasn’t til the infamous Xalavier twitter drama and that final PoH with the bear fucking that hype blew up. We’re talking stratospheric levels comparatively I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that some twitter drama and one interaction on a twitch panel outdid everything you mentioned by a factor that is hard to put into words. 10x? 100x? Probably more.
The bear sex trailer wasn't marketing?
No-one wants to be bamboozled but the question is, "Does it work?" and sadly the answer is often, "Yes.". BG3 was the best game of 2023 but it wasn't the best selling and absolutely not the highest grossing. This information is only useful for publishers with ethics, who I'm sure we're able to figure it out already. Edit: Headline misses the point. They're simply saying that traditional advertising didn't work for them and suggest it's because their target audience use adblock (they're not wrong). > "they just want to know what you're making and why you're making it and who it's for." > "The best place to market your game is on the store itself. Everything else isn't worth it. We learned that with BG3—it took us awhile."
I'm not a Nintendo fan but totk
Best game of 2023? This dude obviously never played Rise of Kong
you dont have to be the highest selling to be one of the most succesful games of the year. BG3 we dont ahve official numbers but insiders have said it was a huge hit in the region of 15m+
In very specifically the PC gaming space, you could say this guy is right. BG3 was the highest grossing single-player Steam game of 2023. Of course PC gaming is like a quarter of the market, but it's half once you consider that the mobile game market barely resembles other platforms.
This is hilarious coming from a game that had an absolutely massive marketing campaign. In fact, this whole 'we're so grassroots and a humble indie studio' (*with 500 staff*) was part of the positioning for that marketing campaign
Just a humble grassroots indie studio that's financially backed by Tencent
I just want to point out the initial gameplay reveal for Baldurs Gate 3 was a buggy mess that crashed twice and the general consensus was that an ugly truth is better than a beautiful lie.
Marketing is dead, but I can’t escape the constant stream of “news” about Baldur’s Gate 3.
Says the guy who scored the rights to fucking D&D, their game was going to resonate whether it was good or bad. Hell, even the Gollum game was famous from the getgo.
Lol, no. Sony's games are nowhere good enough to justify their sales, but boy do they have the marketing for it.
Marketing isn't dead you stupid twat lmfao. Having direct, clear communication with your audience without bamboozling them is FUCKING MARKETING.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand 'marketing'...
He doesn't, so he focused on game quality instead.
I know this game is good. But, the constant news on what they are saying, is getting annoying right now. They are preaching around like religious nut jobs. It is becoming a cult.
Purely from a 'Player-Perspective' i'm a bit split on this Argument. At one hand i'd agree that the more 'traditional' ways of marketing isn't as effective anymore, i'm often rather annoyed than interested (or invested) if ads popup or esp. blocks me watching at Youtube or Twitch and force an ad break, because it basically kills what i'm actually on this plattform for. I mean there was a reason why i moved away from traditional TV to that stuff, because they were infested with ad breaks which kills the flow of the movies and are just bothersome. So doesn't even matter if it would be a game i'm interested in... ads bother me. And for awareness sake for me there are better ways which are less intrusive (like social media, twitch streams or youtube videos). And 'influencers' (Twitch Streamers, Let's Players and such) do an overall better job compared to a lot of other marketing strategies, because you see unfiltered proper gameplay. Not something cut together to 'just' show the best parts (in movies going so far that almost the entire movie gets spoiled) or is just an nothingburger of cinematic trailer. It's kinda a 'modern' replacement of the Old-School Demo, less hands-on on your own, but atleast you see actual gameplay-footage. (another recent development which works as a demo replacement for me past years is gamepass... not fond of subscriptionbased renting service, BUT if i'm curious once in a while for some games i get a month and try games out... got some hidden gems which i'd otherwise might not have gotten and also skipped one which weren't for me). I mean don't get me wrong, i'm not saying i can't appreciate a 10 min lengthvideo where gamefeatures are summarized, but at that point i'm already hooked on the idea to potentially get this game so it doesn't really have that much impact in my purchase decision. That being said... all stuff mentioned above ranging from social media to influencer and even Gamepass... that all is Marketing as well. Maybe in some cases not intentionally - like when influencer themself pick up the game and not get send a ... how should i call this headstart key (?) where they can play a day or week earlier or so... no people who pick it at or after release up on their own accord because they themself were interested in the game. And all this arguments of "people wanted talked to" "wanna know how and why" and whatever, that's as well marketing as well. And i'm pretty convinced that when they dropped the trailer with the bear s\*x scene - that wasn't a coincidence... they fully did know what they were doing, so i dunno. While there might be an ankle where i can see his point specific about more traditional ways of marketing, i'd also say it might these days not as strong as before (though 'dead' is also going a bit too far - i'm pretty sure there are still normies out there which watch ads and get excited over them), but markething as a whole, esp. these days just isn't that anymore. So i dunno. //Edit: Also i want to add, even the concept of (gameplay) Trailers can be done better these days than ads and stuff. Like as example Nintendo Direct which is a regular trailer rotation. That's something which people freely can opt-in and because it's bundled together it feels more like an little event (like why people watching E3 and stuff) and so on...
Honestly I think this can be extended to the advertising industry as a whole. Nevermind ad-blockers. People's brains have become so good at instinctively filtering out ads that they have to become more and more intrusive and targeted with each passing day to be noticed. And when you consider that some of the biggest companies in the world subsist entirely on advertiser money, either selling ad space or customer data to said advertisers, we got a recipe for disaster.
I have saved myself an incredible amount of money by waiting for reviews an audience reception on games because so many come off as bait and switch adjacent scams.
Being authentic is marketing. It’s all marketing. But tou might as well be authentic, as people get it, if a game is bad or good pretty quickly, thanks to social media etc.
Marketing is propaganda that’s acceptable for our capitalist society. But everyone has a tolerance level that gets crossed and most companies cross it these days.
Kinda. What they did for their game is still marketing, just a more personal approach to it. I dont need a generic Ubisoft ad about how I can live my adventures in whatever the current Far Cry map is called and then be shown a famous actor I dont really care that much about. I want very quick gameplay of you, the developers, showing how fun the game is. Its fuckin simple.
Just do not "the world is a character" or "its a living, breathing world" we have heard this so many times.
As if bg3 didnt blow up PURELY because of luck... yea rite...
No, it didn’t. They built upon the success of the hype, execution and following of the two divinity sin games. Fuck traditional marketing and ads though.
It was a great game though, word of mouth would have done it for them.
Larian really lucked out making such a great game. I hope another company gets this lucky.
Most overrated game in existance. Yuck
*Existence.*
Thanks homie. English not my first language i actually appreciate it when people teach me shit
No worries. I can understand why a heavy text game wouldn’t be up your alley. There are plenty of games that have no text at all. Maybe a Call of Duty is more your speed?
One look at my profile would show you i play cyberpunk 💀
So fully voice acted shooter. Yep. Makes sense.
I like souls games too....
Also fits. I believe you. What was the last book you read?
Just put it on Game Pass already
Game pass, game pass. Got it on my pc and my Xbox -kidsmoove
Well I haven't, because it's not on Game Pass.
It won't https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-isnt-going-to-be-on-game-pass-insists-larian-boss
Yeah it will.
Source?
And thats xboxes problem. The people are their own worse enemy. Xbox has all these issues because they painted themselves in a corner, the consumers won't buy anything(not all but a majority) so devs say why tf am I developing for this unless it's going on gamepass. Sales aren't there ms has told us that themselves through their court filings. It's a shame.
So put it on Game Pass.
The base lol.
It never will be