Celebrity endorsement has never been a factor in how well a videogame does either way, regardless of level of star power or degree of involvement for the celebrity: Keanu Reeves playing a heavy hand (heh) in the story of Cyberpunk 2077 did little to stop the game’s initial bad press, and the main reason Baldur’s Gate 3 did well isn’t because JK Simmons is playing Kethric Thorm. (still, he had a great performance). Gameplay matters a lot more for a videogame.
It’s unsurprising then, that Oscar winning actor Will Smith’s involvement in a game in the oversaturated genre of zombie survival shooters did not become successful.
Plus, I don’t think paying celebrities to promote videos on their YouTube channel is an effective marketing strategy, mainly because nobody really watches any celebrities’ own YouTube channel, with the exception of Jack Black’s gaming channel, of course.
Yes, he did. But neither the main praise nor criticism of the game was not directed towards him but on the overall buginess and removal of RPG elements from the game.
Ok, what rpg element was removed? I just played it (without dlc), and it’s basically first person witcher 3 in cyberpunk setting, including all the faults. Basically true to type with CDPR.
They advertisd heavily on “complex branching storyline” and “every decision will have consequences” so the expectation was at the minimum a bigger Deus Ex Human Revolution, but then what they actually delivered is a worse GTA 5 with neon lights.
Right. But I just played it, and it has nothing to do with GTA. It’s literally witcher 3 in first person. Same level of branching, same slightly shallow rpg mechanics and shallow ish combat. It’s much more action, though and theoretically stealth is an option unlike witcher.
I wouldn’t hold it against Keanu personally because its clear he really cared and did gave a good performance but i feel like his involvement with cyberpunk ruined a lot of things that could have been.
No one will hold it against him personally, it’s not uncommon.
There are certain actors who performs great in every single movie they appear in, yet still have many of these movies flop. Many times, it’s out of the actor’s control.
CDPR effectively rewrote the campaign after Keanu Reeves told them that he’s game if CDPR wants to record more lines. I still remember the E3 demo where CDPR said that the campaign has been completed and they’re just in the polishing stages.
I have nearly 1000 hours in Baldur’s Gate 3 and JUST NOW learned that Jason Isaacs was the voice of Gortash… I did recognize JK Simmons but honestly wasn’t 100% sure it was him until the second or third time meeting him and finally looking it up on IMDB to confirm (and somehow still missed Jason Isaacs - I did learn about Matt Mercer’s role as Minsc which still blows my mind).
wtf I never heard of this game before. How come a game that cost ~$140 million had virtually no marketing except for Will Smith posting it on his youtube channel?
The post-apocalyptic zombie shooter allegedly had more than 300 developers on it and a budget of nearly 1 billion yuan (around $140 million)
The word “allegedly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There is no way on this Earth that a mess like that cost $140 million to develop, unless somebody pocketed $130m of that and then just outsourced the rest to a tinpot Z tier studio.
He wishes he got that from it, and looks like he was barely involved other than a quick poorly made advert and use of his face. It’s not even his voice in game.
The whole thing looks like it was thrown together in Unity by a dozen people from mostly stock assets. If that figure is anywhere near accurate then Tencent got scammed.
I genuinely have no interest in anything he does any more. Not actively boycotting his projects or anything, more complete disinterest. And I’m not even saying all art has to be viewed through the lens of the artist. But there are people that have such memorable or distinct performances that afterwards they have trouble getting other roles… This is like that, but cranked up to 11.
And I know he’s a meme and we joke about it… but because of his weird hangups he chose to use violence on another person on a world stage, with cameras on him. By his own actions he made it impossible for me to lose myself in any character he plays, instead I’ll only think about The Slap.
I genuinely have no interest in anything he does any more
This was me when he started trying to shoehorn his kid into the spotlight with those cringe interviews and that really awful movie about not being scared of aliens or whatever. I care about it so little that I can’t remember the name of the movie and have zero interest in looking it up.
This comment about not caring about Will Smith is the maximum effort I’m willing to put into anything related to him.
His kid has been in a few movies now, and his daughter made that one song. I honestly don’t care that he is trying to promote his kids because I think they wanted that and Will had the sway to do it. I think most parents would use their privilege to help their kids. But I do agree that that alien fear movie was trash.
Eh, I think he’s a good person that was hit by a horribly misplaced attempt at chivalry. There’s a lot of stuff he’s done that I don’t like, but it’s mostly been in his attempts to protect and help his family.
There are worse reasons to do bad things. It’s not an excuse; I just think he’s not a terrible person.
Oh, for sure. I don’t think he’s necessarily a bad person, he’s just not particularly likeable anymore. Maybe it’s age, or what life has thrown his way, but his personality no longer seems as appealing. That’s the main thing he had going for him, imo.
I mean, the key part of that sentence was Dunkey. Its kind of funny too because I now feel similar about Dunkey as I do Smith. They did that one persona REALLY WELL, but its just one persona, and eventually it gets old
Agreed, I used to really like Dunkey, then i watched his videos on Death Stranding after immensely enjoying the game myself and found them a little played up for content while painting the gameplay in a less than generous light.
That being said, I do realize it's a persona, and even his "reviews" are called dunkviews, and at times he does certainly have some nice insight, and he's funny for certain, I don't think he's a bad YouTuber or anything, but I hope people don't use his videos as purchasing advice like you might a true review
I'm cool with dunkview, he calls it that for a reason. Some people will still use it as a review, like the original guy I commented to. It's a shame if someone treats it that seriously, but I don't think Dunkey is out there pretending to tell you the grand worth of games, it's, in my eyes, obviously enough comedy.
That being said, not even the zombie game video was called a dunkview, that was just... A video. So some people will use anything as a review, I suppose
Lmfao the trailer doesn't even include any dialogue from Will Smith's character?! Imagine paying (I assume) millions of dollars to get an A-list Hollywood celebrity in your game and you don't even show them in your trailer!
I watched a sunkey video for it, indont think there is any dialogue from will smiths character. Like they didnt bother to record it. There was one or two instances where he spoke, and it wasn’t will smith.
What would be cringingly terrible, but entirely possible, is if Will DID record lines for his character, but content pipeline faults/laziness or programming errors mean it doesn’t play ingame.
I even feel like that same circumstance has happened before…
I’d be careful to read too much into this. If they wanted it to be successful, it would have been Raid: Shadow Legends or Genshin Impact level promoted, especially with $140M sunk in dev.
This seems like they had no confidence in the finished product so they didn’t even bother to market it, just shat it out to app stores probably to meet contractual obligations and it will be gone soon.
Either that or there is some behind the scenes nonsense happening preventing it from being marketed. Think something like Will Smith having it in his contract that it has to release and giving him 25% of sales, for example.
But for something to cost that much and bomb that hard, it’s essentially impossible without them basically cutting their losses before launch and expecting it to fail. It’s the mobile game equivalent of the “lowest grossing movie”, basically something that was only released because it has to be, and not a true reflection of product quality. Like I’m sure it sucks, but is it THAT much worse than 99% of mobile trash? Probably not.
This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.
It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.
I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).
I agree with the rest but it’s not just modern gaming it was happening back in the 90s on consoles and earlier in arcades. One of the first games I played was an obvious cash grab by Marvel, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge for the Gameboy. It was barely playable.
Ive commented on this before, as sad as it is if we want innovative, expansive, beautiful AAA titles we have to accept that investors arent going to keep backing the money truck up on maybes. Microtransactions, subscriptions, dlcs… there has to be an ongoing income stream or an absolutely eyewatering launch price OR we get used to safer and safer bets or games with very narrow scopes.
Yep, it’s a real quandary. I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one from our perspective… it’s no point voting with my wallet when there’s millions of others who won’t.
I think you have to ask yourself if the company is behaving ethically.
If a game is F2P but has microtransactions that arent P2W and the devs are continuing to maintain the game then its hard to be mad that they want to make some money off the basic game you get for free. (Mechwarrior online is a pretty good example of this)
If its a subscription, are you getting regular additional content for the money or is the subscription just allowing you to play the game you paid for? Do you still have to buy DLCs and pay subscription?
If its DLC, is it meaningful storylines/maps/characters? Does it make the prospect of another playthrough different or more interesting? Is it a reasonable price for what it gives you?
You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.
Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.
I personally like to think this trend of enshittification in the gaming industry is geared more towards the triple AAA side of things because a lot of the actual indie devs (not the people putting out low effort mobile games or shovelware or scams or straight up large corporatios masquerading their games as indie titles) are putting out some of the best games I’ve seen in years for single player experiences.
Though I absolutely agree with your assessment of the situation in general.
This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!
Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).
I don’t think I can recall something truly novel since I think we’ve pretty much gone past the point of novel concepts in the majority of genres, but there have definitely been standouts in certain genres over the years.
In the deck building and rogue like genre we’ve seen Balatro, the poker based game. In the retro inspired games genre, we’ve got Corn Kidz 64, a shorter game that controls and looks like an N64 title.
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