orthodoxy1095
Banned
Let's hold up.
The initial premise of the thread was that Sony "drops the ball on their first-party games" in terms of marketing compared to Microsoft. Now prima facie, that's not an insane or ridiculous basic argument. It's one I disagree with fundamentally because of the example of things like Uncharted 4, which had a broad campaign. I mean hell, they tried to market the Order, in all its glory, with a freaking Super Bowl ad. We can have that discussion, even if fvng's argument was silly since he provided three third-party non-exclusive examples and only one Microsoft example. But whatever. And I pointed out Uncharted early on as an example of a fairly Halo-esque campaign with TV spots, billboards and bubble mailers. This is all somewhat irrelevant though because where the thread went off the rails was with this kind of sentiment:
No one was arguing, and no one is arguing, that TLG should get no marketing, but that it doesn't merit a huge budget. A Halo sized budget for TLG? That's an incredible amount of money to commit to a game that has A) been in development hell and B) has a seemingly niche appeal. We're talking about a new game from a quietly influential man in Ueda, compared to a series that had such massive marketing that it merited its own page on Wikipedia just to catalog and describe it all. Fvng has bought into the idea that massive marketing can literally sell anything to consumers, a point that OrbitalBeard and I both addressed from different angles.
To this point, my argument was that blowing a huge marketing budget on a game with niche appeal would be a waste of time and more importantly, a waste of money. Just to clarify, the premise of this thread therefore was that TLG should be given a Halo-sized marketing budget. A Halo-sized marketing budget costs more than $40 million. Fvng came in here to triumphantly claim victory, and yet there is no victory yet when there is no proof that Sony is engaging in a Halo campaign with TLG. I haven't seen big TV spots, Amazon mailers with TLG printed on them, action figures, toys, or TLG-branded soda. So, for the moment, Sony seems to agree with me that targeted marketing on a more intentional scale is what best fits TLG.
And yet with that said, I still think putting ad space in TLG is a weird way to market the game, and probably ultimately a waste of money. That's not flipping a script, that's an analysis of their marketing strategy. TLG's best line of attack is likely to go heavy on the character-creature relationship and play the hell out of that on TV and internet ads and mostly ignore the puzzling aspect. It's a relationship that many people, especially those with pets would likely feel attracted to, and you can see Sony trying to get that across in the billboard. Nothing about the game merits a Halo budget to me still, and I don't think it does to Sony either.
I can't prove anything until the game is released and we get sales numbers. All I'm going by here is what my own opinion of the game tells me.
Conversely, you have no proof whatsoever that this was a smart financial move by Sony. The very basis of this thread is the unsubstantiated claim that "TLG would benefit from one because it has better potential and a better shot at becoming a massive game with the right marketing campaign."
Uh well, yeah. A third Ueda title only meeting SotC numbers would be most likely be seen internally as a poor return on years of investment. We live in a world where Tomb Raider selling 7-8 million copies was deemed a failure. In reality though, considering the state of the market, TLG selling those numbers are actually about where it should be and should probably be considered a solid result.
But fine. Let's accept for a moment the argument that the game has mass market appeal. It's being sent out in the busiest time of the year against the titles with the biggest market appeal. Tell me how it's going to fare against that? Either the game is niche and can maybe carve itself a respectable niche there, or it has mass appeal and is going to compete against the heavy hitting and heavily marketed titles of Q4, including but not limited to Forza Horizon 3, Mafia III, Gears of War 4, Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy XV and Watch Dogs 2.
To your Bloodborne point, games in that Souls/Bloodborne formula are absolutely still a niche. Saying a game is "niche" doesn't mean that it is a game that can't be very successful. All that term means is that they appeals to a very specific type of audience.
