Agreed, pre-orders are a thing after all…but it’s possible that it still works too often and also that gamers are becoming a bit more jaded about marketing. I don’t buy anything till the Metacritic and Steam reviews are out, and I only watch gameplay videos any more cause who cares about the cut scenes? I’m sure I’m not the only one. Consumers eventually learn their lessons but then a new crop of consumers comes up.
Call of Duty is a good game tho… I personally don’t like it but there is a reason it’s so popular. Outside of Battlefield there really isn’t much else out there on the quality level of call of duty as far as arcade shooters go.
Any other good quality shooters tend to be PC only and are a lot slower paced. Squad, hell let lose, escape from Tarkov are all great shooters but those games are very slow paced compared to call of duty.
Halo is similar as is Destiny but those are in a fantasy setting and a lot of people like the realistic setting of call of duty.
Its a good game but most releases are DLC level, yet they are forcing the player to buy, at least every few releases, because you slash the remaining userbase every time you release a new game.
I think the issue is there’s a constant influx of young gamers entering the market and all the old tricks are new to them. The teen to young adult age bracket is very lucrative and will never stop unless we stop having sex and procreating. If we all abstain for like 20 years, we’ll finally disrupt big gaming and also have no one in chat insulting anyone’s mother.
I wish this was true, but marketing is explosively effective. I have a top 10 VR app and it only gets sales when I market it despite the glowing reviews. Heck you cannot even sort by review on many sites as then you would not need to market if you title was great.
I was not a big fan of BG3 or even the divinity series, but I love Larian. Their products show clear passion for the budget they have, they don’t bad mouth other dev just to gain some brownie pts with gamers (CDPR) and their games are well supported.
To me it just felt like divinity with higher budget. It has Proper cinematic cutscenes and different rules to the combat. I guess I just don’t like CRPGs, I never properly feel immersed in the world.
Its weird because I loved dragon age origins and Pillars of eternity. I thought Wasteland 3 was ok.
I think with D:OS 2 I was annoyed that I didn’t choose a premade character at the start, and that the storyline was just, become a god. I don’t find that kind of narrative compelling. I also didn’t like the fairytale lighthearted vibes. The world didn’t feel “meaty” somehow.
You are giving me same vibes as myself, that meaty comment is spot-on. The game tell you that you’re traveling continents, but it never really feels like it, maybe we need a bit more imagination lol
The game has like four major maps, that’s why it feels tiny compared to your average CRPG that has dozens of smaller maps to create a sense of a big diverse world.
I wonder what happens when the last whale has been milked dry. With the number of shitty cash grab games out there with heinous monetization, surely the ecosystem reaches a tipping point where there literally just isn’t enough money to go around, both because the whales themselves run out and the remaining number gets spread too thin among too many Clash of Clans, FIFAs and Diablo Immortals. Do you think we’re going to start seeing real effort in those spaces to appeal to players again, or do they just implode because nobody wants to serve a declining market?
I wonder what happens when the last whale has been milked dry.
I have some bad news for you friend.
I work at a casino. There is no end of whales. There are whales that are rich enough to sustain their habits and spend more than you or I could morally spend if we had the means. Then, there are whales that spend outside their means, burn out, and are replaced by a new person who does the same thing.
When a whale (highroller) stops coming, we usually assume they’ve gone to one of our competitor’s casinos.
I see no reason why this wouldn’t apply to real-money transactions in video games. It’s just another casino.
Marketing is far from dead. Larian themselves used it to great effect with BG3. Does no one remember the announcement trailer released for BG3 well in advance of any gameplay footage? That’s marketing, though and through. And yes, it worked plenty well on me. A D&D game based around Mind Flayers, made by the folks behind Divinity Original Sin? Shut up and take my money. Also, when I noticed the outline of a Nautiloid ship in the background, I may have needed a change of shorts.
The difference with BG3 was that Larian didn’t just pull an Edward Bernays style marketing as a con. They delivered a good product, worked with players to fix any issues and have gone above and beyond supporting the game after release. They have done everything right to build long term customer relationships. Maybe they don’t reach the same level of profits some other companies might, by stuffing microtransactions in every orifice. But, I suspect they are profitable and seem to be better built be continue long term and not have to tear the company up and saddle one of those pieces with insane amounts of debt.
While I can’t promise that I’ll buy their next game, I’ll undoubtedly keep an eye out for it. Larian puts out a quality product and doesn’t fuck their customers. That’s what makes their brand of marketing work.
Meanwhile, FIFA players: “when can I pre-order the next edition of my game, and could I just pay for the cards in advance, or do I have to wait until release?”
Sadly, bamboozling players, dark patterns and nickle-and-diming work, and work VERY well at that - if they didn’t, people would stop doing it a long time ago…
I wish that was actually the case but we all know marketing works like gang busters on gamers looking for their next fix. It it wasn’t they wouldn’t be hiring psychologists and paying them mid to high six figure starting salaries.
Edit: sales and marketing don’t exist to sell stuff that people want, they exists to sell stuff that people don’t want. If you sell something with a high demand then you’re not a salesman, you’re a glorified cashier. Salesmanship involves getting people to buy stuff they wouldn’t otherwise buy. Most companies don’t have anything special that everyone wants, so they have to resort to sales and marketing to stay in business.
Can they please not? I’d rather not have Blizzard stay Blizzard, seeing what they did to WoW, SC2, D3, D4, DI, Overwatch and worst of all, Heroes of the Storm.
He is the one that still wanted to make Project Titan work. Overwatch was the crawl, PvE was suppose to be the walk and then they’d have the run with the MMORPG.
Have they done something to SC2? I quit playing that game years ago, but it seemed like they were done touching it, and it was still in its original glory.
The most recent expansion for WoW has been really good. Blizzard has been transparent with their changes and have been listening to the community. Recently the alpha for the next expansion has released and seems very promising with positive response from the community.
So I disagree, I’m glad microsoft is letting blizzard developers do their own thing. After the tumultuous expansion Shadowlands, a lot of the old guard for blizzard were removed and the current executive producer Holly Longdale has been doing a great job.
Oh I had not yet heard that they’re turning the ship around. That’s really really cool. After all this time I just stopped following stuff around it since it got so depressing over the years.
She was working on classic before being promoted to her current position. Regardless, the entire wow dev team has been incredible these past few months. There has been such an influx of news of upcoming content these coming weeks its almost hard to keep up. Hoping that they can keep on the gas as The War Within comes out.
I can’t speak to your preferences as there are multiple different ways to play an mmo. I can, however, speak to the community’s perspective and I have not seen the wow community be more positive about the current expansion since modern wow.
Its hard to judge community response for wrath or vanilla for a game made 16+ years ago (lots of people tend to looks things back with rose-tinted glasses).
I’ve been playing since MoP and started doing high end content in WoD. So from this perspective, I can say that I haven’t seen a more community response for the game since then, including legion. No endless grind for power, blizz being transparent about changes, and they are also listening to feedback.
Additionally, Shadowlands did a number of Dragonflight’s sales but recent reports indicate that more subscribers are coming back to retail wow and the expansion does not have the post-expansion drought of subscribers.
Not Wrath or Legion good, if the numbers are any indication. While the community has generally been positive, Dragonflight simply hasn’t sold very well.
The expansion’s over, anyway. They have officially moved the expansion cadence to only two major patches from three.
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Aktywne