Is Drip Feed Video Game Marketing The Way Forward?

With any up and coming games, most of us are just waiting to board the hype train. Remember the build up to the release of No Man’s Sky? Remember how excited we all were to for it to come out and then it just turned out be a massive disappointment?

Yeah, we all felt pretty pissed off about that. It was lauded to be the next big thing in sci-fi gaming. One for the ages in which anything and everything was possible and Sony certainly banged the drum the loudest when it came to NMS and yet it failed to live up to expectation. So lesson learned in terms of marketing a new game?

Rather than shout the loudest about how great your game is, maybe you should tip us the wink and point us in the right direction. Look at the way in which Rockstar announced Red Dead Redemption 2. There was a picture on Twitter, a video, and that was about it. The internet went nuts. So far RDR2 has been severely underhyped and yet you know that everyone will be buying RDR2 when it eventually comes out. So what’s the answer?

Give us something little and not very often, make us work for it, or just go loud from day one?

Rockstar can probably get away with giving us very little because we know that the product will probably be pretty damned good. Whereas an Indie game would take all the publicity it could get.

The gaming community is rather like a crowd of vultures. They are there ready to devour any morsel of new video game media that comes our way. So do we have ourselves to blame?

We are always wanting gameplay videos and other forms of early access so that every angle of the new game can be analysed. Now this would work for the AAA titles because more often than not, they’re marketed so that the general public will really want to buy it when it comes out.

Games like NMS are a little different. They say any publicity is good publicity, and NMS certainly got its fill of marketing and publicity before the great release and the even greater disappointment when we started to play it.

What I would rather see is something little and often, rather than saturate us with every little detail make us want more.

Should games be shown to us less to make us want them more? Ultimately with games like RDR2, Call of Duty, and Battlefield, we will always get every form of PR and marketing stunt going.

The onset of global mass media means that really the problem will only get worse before it gets better. So I am all for getting 20 minute gameplay videos, trailers and all other forms of early access and mass marketing. However, it’s nothing short of disappointing when the game is given to us after promising so much and it fails to deliver on those promises.

By seeing a game that much more, does that mean it’s going to be any better? NMS being the prime suspect, it looked like everything we could have possibly wanted in a sci-fi open world game and yet it let us down so badly. Think of games like Watch Dogs and The Order: 1886. When we saw the trailers and the developers made their pitches to the baying audiences at E3, these two looked like the next best thing in console gaming. We were led to believe that these games would be a step in the right direction, but when they were released, we were given something completely different.

So really what we need here is a happy balance – games need to be shown off for the works of art that they are. However, if we are saturated with a product chances are we will either buy it or ignore it completely. I would rather see games marketed to us like RDR2; make us look a little harder rather than having it shoved straight into our faces.