Is showcasing your game, putting it on early access and talking about it to gaming journalists not considered marketing now?
You’re correct, but also I think we can assume this is referring to classical marketing, not all merketing.
There’s a few separate threads of people responding to your comment regarding what marketing is, so it’s probably helpful to add what the guy actually said in the linked article (I know, who reads the article anymore🙄).
“Marketing is dead,” he said. “Marketing is dead. It truly is—I can back this shit up, man. There’s no channels anymore—it doesn’t work. You used to have marketing, communication, and PR. Marketing was essentially a retail theory—you were trying to get your box on the right point of the store shelf, and you have partnerships with retail stores. Those pipelines are gone. Now you’ve got the internet. Nobody is looking at ads anymore … all of the channels that we would usually market through are no longer really viable. So their function is also reduced by the fact that players just want to be spoken to. They don’t want to be bamboozled—they just want to know what you’re making and why you’re making it and who it’s for.”
Good games sell themselves. Word of mouth in gaming still works.
Publishers tend to kill games.
I doubt it, I think there are many great games out there that don’t get noticed because not enough people talk about them. We get a ton of games every year. You can’t rely on word of mouth for your game’s success.
It doesn’t help when so many “AAA” studios push out DOA products that take 5 patches and broken promises to finally get to a state that’s playable. I could rattle off so many games in the last year that had so much hype and were almost unplayable by most of the people that preordered.
and the funny thing is that these games launch in such a bad state because the publisher paid for the marketing push to happen on a specific date, so come hell or high water, the game is gonna ship by that date
don’t get me wrong, deadlines are extemely important or your project will just end up with infinite scope creep, but games are a massive artistic and technical endeavour, which are two things that can be extremely difficult to estimate
there’s gotta be a better way
snorts line of coke
Ok, so the idea is, game make lots of money if people play it for a long time, so what we do is
sniff
We make an extremely flashy but mechanically very, veeery simple game, and we use big well known IPs, but make sure to hire writers off of Fiverr, that’ll save on overhead, anyway, season pass, microtransactions, lots and lots of marketing and hype!
After Game Release
WTF nobody is playing after a botched buggy launch, and people didnt enjoy the gameplay, complained it was too simple and unrewarding when it even worked, and that the story was awful?
How could this have happened???
Anyway time to layoff 1/4 of our employees and randomly shuffle the other half around our giant array of various studios and projects, that’ll shake things up and put the fear of God into our workforce.
What me? Oh no I’m retiring now with my golden parachute after my amazing work running thia department through a trainwreck
snort
I mean “guiding our team through a demanding development process”. See you in Cabo!
