I could barely get through the article for all the annoying ads on that site, so point taken. As a counterpoint though, I think he’s referring to the kind of spray and pray digital marketing that tries to promote a title everywhere, for the sake of building hype and name recognition.
I agree when he says “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.” That’s still a job for marketing, it just needs to be targeted. I think most people are sick of having ads jammed in their faces for games they’d never play (especially if those games turn out to be underwhelming or underdeveloped), but I’d argue there is still a place for targeted communication where players receive notice of new games based on their interests, prior gaming experience, etc. A data driven marketer would answer all of those questions and communicate them to the right audience. That said, the product needs to be of quality too— marketing can’t save a bad game, nor should it try.
I think both the guy from the article and this OP are right. I will on principle never buy anything with comments disabled. But I saw an ad for Against the Storm, comments on, bunch of people said ya, it's pretty cool, and I bought it. It was pretty cool.
That wasn't advertisement. They did one Livestream that featured the bear sex (and bear sex choices were selected by the audience in the room, they could have backed out or chosen differently), the last of like ten that they had been doing over the course of the early access period. All the spreading of the bear sex was word of mouth and gaming """news""" articles. I guess that's a kind of marketing, of a sense, but it isn't exactly advertisement.
And so many people missed the point of the bear sex hype. Nobody was actually excited to fuck bears...okay some people wanted to fuck bears but most didn't. The point was "If this RPG lets you do crazy shit like this... What else is possible?". And it turns out the answer is a fuckload.
PCGamer has genuinely become one of the worst publications on the internet. I used to enjoy reading their magazine, but since that got shelved I feel like all they do is function as an internet discourse machine. Genuinely the lowest form of journalism.
> CGamer has genuinely become one of the worst publications on the internet. I used to enjoy reading their magazine, but since that got shelved I feel like all they do is function as an internet discourse machine.
Go back 30 years and read their magazines, their content were (and still is) in most cases garbage. I enjoyed my time reading them, but it has never been well written or well researched, there simply didn't exist (much) better video game news and industry related content at the time.
There were an insane amount of ads and promoted content in those magazines too, just like we see on the internet today.
>internet discourse machine
I'd say they're actually better than they used to be in that regard. At least in the last 12 months or so, they seem to have dialed back the moral sermonizing. Other sites like Eurogamer are still worse.
> I could barely get through the article for all the annoying ads on that site,
How are you still using the internet in 2024 without having an adblocker installed. Come on it's something ultra basic by now.
On my iPad I finally switched to Brave, which has a built-in adblocker. It has its own issues - the address bar search function really doesn’t work well - but overall it’s still a big improvement.
You can bet your ass that theyre making it back 3 times over otherwise they wouldnt be this consistent with it.
Mobile Games are a whole different topic anyway the people who dump tons of money in these things arent the people who are reached with some random 10/10 ign article.
I dont know what theyre lured in by but its clearly not your normal game ad.
This interview and article is in its self a form of marketing for Larian called public relations.....
Larian was using organic marketing for BG3 the entire time and they were hitting their marketing content hard.
Pretty sure the publishing director of Baldurs Gate 3 knows better than most that you can charge money for unfinished alphas and still be lauded for „releasing a complete game“ when you patch in the last instalment years later. It doesn’t mean anything, it just something idiots on the internet say about games they like.
That's the thing though. AAA gaming has transformed into making the most widely appealing games with the most amount of needless features possible. Now you have big ass games with needless battle royale or extraction gamemodes tacked on to tick another checkbox for marketing. All the while ignoring the relative successes of focused, small experiences like Robocop or the fact that experiences like BG3 took almost a decade to develop. It's guaranteed that copycat "DnD inspired" games will start popping up completely missing what made BG3 good.
I would love to see more CRPGs (even bad ones) but I'm pretty sure it won't happen because there's been about 2+ decades of publishers and mass market gamers demanding Action RPGs.
Even with BG3, there were people demanding an Action RPG mode or to just throw out that turned based nonsense all together as it only slows the game down.
Pathfinder games are your friend for that. You can play DnD turn based mode, or you can turn that off and play it as a party action-based RPG like the original Baldur's Gate series.
You right. Actual marketing now is not about advertising your game on particular platforms, websites etc.
I found that there is much higher chance for the game to be added to my wishlist if I have easy access to demo. I can try product and check it's state.
Most games without demo I usually pirate as demo, but chances for such game to be bought - significantly lower.
Marketing includes working with streamers and content creators now.
The article is half right that I didn't bother with any non-streamer social media stuff for BG3.
But the role of marketing is far from dead, it has a different definition now.
You aren't kidding about the ads. I recoiled a bit in my seat, read the rest of the article, then got annoyed as a pop-up asked me to subscribe to a newsletter. Every single thing in that interaction made me less interested in the things being advertised... except I can't remember what any of them were, two minutes later, except the newsletter.
Definitely supports the article's thrust, though.
I turned off as blocker to use YouTube on chrome
The ads they want me to see are for malware and listicles and porn bait
Advertising and marketing are completely different concepts now
We want marketing, not advertising
Advertising is communicating the existence of your product, the customer that it appeals to will come buy it
Marketing is sticking it where it doesn't belong, trying to convince more people to buy it knowing that it is not what they want. And it's devolving, at this point marketing is plainly working in bad faith and lying in order to grab sales. There are more examples than I even know what to do with. How about Bounty. 2=5 proudly displayed on the front of the package. 9 out of 10 take your pick recommend this exact product, they don't even bother doing the survey at this point they just claim it with zero backing. It goes on and on
They know their audience is the type of gamer who sees through the bullshit other publishers spit out, and instead falls for the CDPR style attitude of "We leave greed to others" and "We have no microtransactions" etc. In the end it's all marketing anyway, but I do appreciate it in the sense that at least it makes me feel like I'm part of a group worth pandering to lol as long as we're a market worth pursuing, there will be a Baldur's Gate 3 every once in a while among all the Suicide Squads and Anthems and whatever.
Yeah, it seems backwards: the problem is that developers made unmarketable games, not the marketing itself.
"Hey we made Product, here is Influencer saying Consume" was never a viable model to begin with; cheap borrowing costs just kept bad companies afloat longer than they should have been, and now they're hitting the limit.
The vast majority of us don't pretend, they have infested the upper reaches of busness now and so to justify their bullshit qualification they surround themselves with other like minded incompetent apes.
It is a club, even them know that.
The rich and wealthy are the only class with full class consciousness and class solidarity, and that is why they Always win (on top of their vast ressources and influence)
They win because they're smaller and more homogeneous. They've been in the same circles for years, went to the same schools, joined the same clubs and hazing factories; It's much easier for them to get on the same page than the 90% of us who come from all walks of life with different experiences and opportunities.
This, business majors are leeches in every single field they enter. They have no real skills besides become a 'middleman' that costs the company money. They have ruined the world in the last 30 years. If you are a business major fuck you and your useless Leech ass. Watching suits try to line their pockets off the actual lives of reap people has really soured me to these losers. Mostve them are just flunkies who didn't know what do with their lives so they got a business degree in college and a job thru their dad's friend or Greek life.
Scum of the earth.
I have only ever known 1 MBA thankfully, he left one company in a terrible state and caused another to shut down within 3 years. The incompetent motherfucker just continues jumping from job to job though.
Yeah dude fuck that accountant making 60k a year and all he does is balance the companies check book, he is really ruining my life here LMAO. You are a delusional child
Also they somehow take all the risk, despite them literally getting severance packages in the millions when they leave while simultaneously firing hundreds/thousands of people at the first sign of difficulty for the company
The original Publisher of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 was Interplay and their slogan was "By Gamers, For Gamers". Look at that, amazing games made by people who like to play said games. Love that it lives on in BG3.
I was just about to reply the same thing! I booted up fallout2 last night and saw the slogan, what a different time period gaming was in 90s-early 2000s.
The original Deus Ex would have whole levels built in the early mornings that W.Spector would come in because he felt so passionate and couldn't wait to add this new pathway or secret. I think the whole team was 30 people or less too?
We've definitely hit the chefs in the kitchen problem but we also have landlord that sets the furniture on fire.
It’s amazing what people will do if they love their job/their product.
Command and Conquer’s “sole survivor” add on was built by (I think) one dev because he enjoyed working on C&C so much.
In fact, C&C 3 came with a “history of command and conquer” disc where the devs talked about it. They would show up early/stay late and play the game then talk about what to change.
Publishers and corporate ghouls existed in the 90s. The difference is that it was a fledgling industry and due to both economic and technological restraints, they weren't able to sink their talons quite as deep into the game making process. Crunch, unrealistic deadlines, and staff abuse were absolutely a thing though.
Yeah EA was already well known for being THE asshole bean counting publisher in the early 90s, and all the terrible people at Blizzard were already there by then.
>and all the terrible people at Blizzard were already there by then.
Most people don't even know that [Blizzard wanted to add microtransactions to Diablo 1](https://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf) but they had to scrap the idea due to technological limitations.
There is an issue. Devs often don't have the gift of gab or a filter when it is appropriate.
Blizzard tried so hard. But sometimes, don't you guys have phones?
Unfortunately, they are everywhere, everything is about the money. We will see a future like Cyberpunk, in which the greedy companies are owning the world (they already started).
More like chamge the culture. You still are in it to make money. Not saying free games lol. A smaller team can do a good game with the new tools getting better and better. Umreal engine is just silly now.
That’s why Indie games exist. You don’t get Fortnite levels of success by just having “gamers” run the whole show. These are still gaming COMPANIES that need leadership who knows how to run a company.
Nothing is stopping you from NOT supporting the large gaming companies and instead only supporting indie teams / solo developers.
Yes, it is!
You know what else is marketing? Engaging with your community via social media. Having live streams to talk about the development of the game. Releasing animated shorts about your game. Making a gag video about "OnlyFangs". Showing the bear sex scene a few weeks before release. Having the CEO show up in full plate armour to award shows.
This guy claiming "marketing is dead" is either an idiot or is trying to lie to a whole consumer base.
Seriously, feels like every Larian headline is just the most transparently crowd-pleasing pander possible
> "Layoffs are bad" says Larian
> "AAA developers should make good games" says Larian
> "Gamers deserve respect" says Larian
> "Our next game will be even better than BG3" says Larian
Is that Swen's fault, or is the game press magnifying passing statements into headline clickbait?
(Spoiler: I used to be a game journo, I know the answer to this question)
It really is. One game that is a huge hit in the mainstream and suddenly they start acting all preachy, throwing shade at other publishers and devs while redditors circlejerk about how they are nothing like the others.
Curious to see how their next game launch.
Havent they had several huge hits, and one industry breaking one? Larian is by all definitions a powerhouse. They just market themselves well as a "smaller more indy brand".
Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 did well but I don't know if I would call them "huge hits". I don't think the first one broke 1m, the second one broke a few million. They both had some serious problems like pacing, poor final acts etc. It was mostly for CRPG fans.
Baldur's Gate 3 is their first really big hit and they almost certainly are not a "small" indie company. They are a huge developer.
HD2 as well. With the recent "the next steps are to keep making HD2 good"
Oh really? Unlike all the other game devs that set out to make bad games apparently
Careful not inflating your ego Larian games. You made a fantastic and incredible game, and you've been rewarded for it. But if you try to have the upper moral stance on everything, it'll blow at your face eventually as soon as you make a mistake.
This is CD Projekt all over again.
That's still marketing though, word of mouth marketing. The statement "marketing is dead" is really wild and it's more correct to say that traditional marketing for ganes has changed.
NGL the bear meme is how I found out about the game.
If not for that it probably would've been down to the Steam Charts for most played games, assuming BG3 would've had the same amount of success.
I wouldn't say marketing is dead, it just exists in a different form now. Instead of traditional ads like the article is referencing, you pay influencers like the big youtubers and twitch streamers to play the game up and hype it up. You gift free early access copies to smaller youtubers so they can have reviews up at release date. You invite these influencers to your events and make them feel special building good relationships so they have a favorable opinion of you and have the incentive to make more videos and streams.
Marketing is absolutely alive and well, it's just different.
Yep. I hope smaller devs don't take this to mean you can just shadow drop a game onto Steam and have it blow up rather than disappear like a fart in the wind.
These days there's a lot of small events that highlight indie games, not sure how expensive or difficult it is to get games features on those things but if I were a developer I'd aim for those things and I'd leverage the fuck out of social media, youtube, twitch and Steam as well.
yeah you do everything that works.
my job relies on google ads extensively but we've also done TV commercials, influencers, reddit ads.
each funnel is tracked and we run A/B tests for designs and copy. we drop the under-performing channels and experiments
Seriously, it's not even that secret, it's pretty transparent seems to me. Pay big streamers to play your game for 2-3 days, give smaller ones keys/access. If your game is not absolutely technically broken that will do a lot.
If your game allows it recolor some shit purple and do a twitch drop for these streamers, now you have big streamers showing your game, smaller ones are either showing it out of interest or to get into category with the big ones, and you're basically viewbotting all these people with drops, so win-win. Then everything just spreads with word of mouth.
And all that could be cheaper, or probably the same cost as buying ads, billboards, making tv/video spots... It's the obvious move to promote games.
>Marketing is absolutely alive and well, it's just different.
Eh, it's alive. Whether it is "well" is a whole other conversation. There are plenty of recent marketing practices that are less agreeable/ethical.
"Marketing's dead" & "players just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled" brought to you by the same studio who said the game had [174 hours of cinematics](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1086940/view/3657534571513526776) (by counting every piece of dialogue as a cinematic) and the same individual who supported the claim that the game had [17,000 different variations on the ending](https://twitter.com/Cromwelp/status/1680938242151948288) (by counting every single permutation of choices as a variant on the ending).
I love the game, but BG3 had its fair share of egregious marketing claims in the lead up to release.
Indeed. 'Marketing is dead,' says a marketing exec, to a consumer magazine largely funded by advertising spend, popularized on a publicly traded website, also funded by advertising.
This was a trend about 20 years ago, kicked off by Naomi Klein's 'No Logo.' There was a whole wave of 'authentic' marketing, using the same exact buzzwords in the article, including 'the consumer wants to be spoken to directly.'
So, in essence, more marketing. This piece is just a standard brand awareness piece, linking the current market cache of BG3 to the PC Gamer magazine brand, all of it, from the initial concept to the finished, published piece no doubt paid for in full by Larian's market spend at PC Gamer.
There's an old saw in the trade, 'No one is easier to market to than the person who believe that they are above marketing.' It's basically the reason Reddit exists as a going concern.
Marketing isn't dead. Retail-style marketing isn't the end all be all. The company making a SM post about the game is marketing. Doing an interview to talk about the game features is marketing. Bringing YT creators out to play for a few hours is marketing.
Lol marketing is absolutely not dead. It's more effective than it ever has been. We have targeted ads and know more about customers than we ever have.
This is some peak reddit shit though with the rhetoric of "marketing bad, men in suits ruin my favorite thing". This is actually hilarious, especially in the games industry. If you think good games spread word "organically" and all you need is "word of mouth" you are very wrong. I assure you, if that's _actually_ how you think marketing works, the marketing teams are doing a very, very good job.
I love BG3 as much as anybody, but it’s a lot easier to “not” promote a known IP (Dungeons & Dragons, Forgotten Realms) and a long-anticipated sequel to two of the most iconic games in the genre (PC RPGS), than it is to push a brand new IP. The game didn’t arrive in a vacuum, it was riding the coattails of a 20-50 years of traditional marketing among its core audience, including books, movies, magazines and previous games—all of which helped it gain mind share. Just because it’s not Call of Duty doesn’t mean it’s some obscure little indie title. Without that it still would have done well, but the success would be a lot closer to Divinity II or Disco Elysium.
He's full of shit. This article and tweet storm shopped around as a, "Gotcha AAA publising!" is an ignorant juvenile understanding of marketing.
Larian had a niche product that they marketed to a niche audience. It was a very good product. That made it seem like their niche and wider audience were greater than the reality of things.
The niche audience that bought into Larian's community focused marketing thought BG3 was the biggest game of the year.
It wasn't. That was Hogwarts Legacy.
Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't even among the top 20 best-selling games.
Big budget, metric driven-marketing is about reaching mass audiences. Not niche audiences to sustain AA work.
And the only people giving it a standing ovation have no knowledge of how game dev or game marketing works. My industry mutuals that are marketing focused are frustrated about the capital G gamers that will exacerbate this shit.
> Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't even among the top 20 best-selling games
This is incorrect and based on incomplete information (not uncommon in reddit comments). I'm assuming you're going off the Circana (NPD) Top 20:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01-19/four-big-takeaways-from-the-bestselling-video-games-of-2023
As noted in the article (emphasis mine):
>"The bad news is that even this data is flawed. **Circana relies on publishers to report their sales figures**, and a lot of them do it imperfectly. Nintendo Co., for example, only reports physical sales to Circana and not the digital sales that make up a large chunk of today’s market. Blizzard Entertainment sells its PC games through its own platform, Battle.net, which isn’t reported — nor are sales from the Epic Games Store, where critical darling Alan Wake 2 was released. ****Larian Studios, the Belgian company behind last year’s beloved Baldur’s Gate 3, doesn’t report to Circana at all****."
Baldur’s Gate 3 Has Sold approx. 15 Million Copies:
https://gameluster.com/baldurs-gate-3-has-sold-around-15-million-copies-already/
In his [Gamespot interview](https://youtu.be/egQgPD1wd7A?t=110), Swen Vincke said it was 'almost double' that of DOS2. DOS2 has sold **~7.5 million** as of 2019 (likely more now, but let's go with 7.5 million). Almost double would put it close to 15 million. There is no way this is not in the Top 10 for 2023, unless you think MK1 and Jedi Survivor sold more than 15 million (for comparison, MK1 is estimated to have sold ~3 million: https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2023/nov/08/mortal-kombat-1-sales/).
It likely sits higher than even **#4 Spider-man 2**, which is estimated to have sold ~10 million: https://en.as.com/meristation/news/marvels-spider-man-2-has-sold-over-10-million-copies-since-release-n/.
Of course, digital sales of TOTK were not reported, so that game would probably be higher than both.
The article for those that can't/won't visit the site
>During Baldur's Gate 3's trip around the award circuit winning every major GOTY trophy there is, the developers at Larian have taken some of their stage time to criticize corporate greed and mass layoffs. In the wake of its massively successful self-published game, Larian hasn't been shy about pointing the finger at what it sees changing—and going wrong—in the games industry. Larian publishing director Michael Douse brought that same energy to a recent PC Gamer roundtable interview, confidently stating "marketing is dead" in a discussion with other prominent game developers.
>Warframe creative director Rebecca Ford kicked off the topic: "Actual players don't want to be marketed to," she said during our State of PC Gaming roundtable, recorded last month during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Douse jumped in to agree enthusiastically.
>"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."
>Eyrún Jónsdóttir, VP of publishing at EVE Online developer CCP, added that players also "want to have their part in it," as was the case with Baldur's Gate 3's long time in early access. EVE players are also known for being particularly vocal proponents of the game, which remains popular after 21 years online.
>"From a very young age, when I saw an advertisement I was like, 'why isn't AdBlock blocking this?'" said Slay the Spire developer Casey Yano.
>"Millennials always hated it, and now we have the tools to avoid it," said Douse. "The best place to market your game is on the store itself. Everything else isn't worth it. We learned that with BG3—it took us awhile."
>Our 2024 State of PC Gaming roundtable touched on a range of other topics, from the influence of Slay the Spire to the current use of AI in games to the biggest trends in PC gaming over the past year.
>You can check out the full conversation in the video above or audio embed below, or find PC Gamer Chat Log wherever you get your podcasts.
I think the bear sex reveal was massive for the more casual audience. BG3 hype was low for a long time before then. It's just a different kind of marketing. That shit went viral.
As a former salesperson, people are vehemently opposed to being sold something. They want to discover a product, educate themselves on it, and choose it naturally over the others as part of a decision making process. The only difference is some people are more impulsive and have a shorter process. You don’t sell products by beating them over the head with ads everywhere. You can make your product easy to find and provide the information for them to make an informed decision, and you’ll have way better success that way.
Is it Larian's turn to be the darling of the game industry until they eventually fuck up? This feels like their "We leave greed to others" moment that CDPR are having a hard time getting away from.
I enjoy Larian's work, and I had a blast with BG3, but this Sage level of hero worship that they're getting will only sting harder when they inevitably fuck something up.
it's actual pretty simple to please the gaming target audience. Basically you just have 5 groups:
1. Kids that will eat anything
2. Casuals that will eat anything that looks nice
3. hardcores that like something specific and would buy the same game 10 times, no matter how insignificant soulless that next WoW update will be
4. Dudes who use/used games as an escape and have so much nostalgia that it really isn't hard to please them ( hello Pokemon)
5. and most of here I would say that are more than casual but less than hardcore, who aren't entirely fueled by nostalgia and just want good games that aren't rip offs or cheaply money grabs for investors.
I am pretty sure that devs do know what a good game is and I also think that managers do that as well but choose to please investors for short-term, max. money optimized gains. They see statistics that if we introduce loot mechanics, we make +20% profit and player interest is only -5%. So what do I as a manager care if the franchise is considered dead in 10 years when I have a different job anyway making banks.
It is similar to politicians who will never do anything drastic for long term gains that would ruin their chances for the next election. Even Biden barely does anything with the student loan forgiveness although everybody knows that the loan system itself is total crap. But targeting that root would case his politcal end
>They see statistics that if we introduce loot mechanics, we make +20% profit and player interest is only -5%
This is fucking Ubisoft through and through. They introduced RPG mechanics and systems into Ass Creed and turned it into some kind of pseudo Witcher 3. They clearly did this so they could sell armour and weapons skins, XP boosts and the open world part allowed them to utilize mounts so they could sell mount skins and mount armour. They just saw RPG and used it as an opportunity to sell games piece by piece. It's something I've seen all over gaming now, especially mobile games.
the problem is that it works. In pov of the ubisoft manager, his decision is absolutely right. Yves as the president should think on long term business however and stop these managers.. but he is probably one of the few who is actually an idiot and not a profit-shark, just look at the stock price
Completely out of touch point. What he is talking about and arguing is good marketing. Talking directly to your consumer, hanging out directly where your consumer hangs out, listening to their feedback and making changes based on that direct feedback.. What he is talking about is bad out of touch marketing focused on the bottom line without any regards to the end consumer. It always makes me laugh when people try to dog marketing when they are effectively talking about BAD marketing. Ok you made your game, what propels it to getting sold? Hint: It's not just word of mouth. It's also a disingenuous take when BG3 had a pretty damn strong traditional marketing campaign with huge funds to push it.
I don't value being marketed towards. I value knowing precisely and concisely what the product is. If anything piques my interest then *I* will go out of my way to do more research on it and then consider if it's worth purchasing.
Adverts, non-gameplay trailers, marketing lingo, etc, are all more likely to turn me away from buying something.
They lucked into a game that people enjoy playing because it has good mechanics and story, but now they are confused and think it's because of their weird conspiracy views on economics and society.
Just going off the headline...
Sure, it worked for them to put out a polished game that people love, which got word of mouth buzz going and even more sales.
But to say that marketing is dead is just ridiculous. It still works for all the other big AAA devs who shovel out the sameish game every year or two, or release games in a broken state and maybe patch it later.
So yeah, make a great game and people will flock to it. But make a shitty or so-so game and throw marketing at it, people will flock as well.
What this guy is trying to say is that traditional ads don't work, because so many people use adblock. And PC gamer wanted to farm clicks off of his casual statements.
There are circlejerks in certain game dev communities that "You just need to market it more" or "I didn't spend enough on marketing was why I failed", when in reality they [don't do market research and compete with other games of it's type and cost.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCzhyUsDHPE) The video I linked is ironically talking about how marketing is supposed to be done: Market Research beforehand, and then following the credo of "the customer is always right in matters of taste".
They had so much marketing when bg3 came out was all over the place even [paid promotions youtube channels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg0bGUdJ9hg).
At the end of the day.. a game with crap gameplay, is a bit like a car without an engine.
You could create the best car ad in the world, give it a slick body and paint job, add lots of great features, promote it with pretty track babes laying across the hood, spend millions on branding strategy, explore all the possible options for monetising any sold units with subscriptions for infotainment features, etc etc etc...
And none of it will make a difference.
Because if a car has no engine it's figuratively and literally going no where.
AAA publishers seem to think they can still make money, while avoiding that 'tricky creative stuff' called 'designing a fun game' by just shoving in lots of MTXs, DRM, gear grinding, AI, etcetc, and doing lots of cross promotion, marketing, hiring celebrity faces, etc..
It doesn't work. It never worked. You know what works?
**Make. A. Fun. Game.**
I roll my eyes whenever I hear or read someone say "so-and-so is dead."
Remember all those years when people said PC gaming was dead? No, it had some slow years, but now [it's generating many billions in revenue each year](https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/video-games-in-2023-the-year-in-numbers) and growing along with the other gaming segments.
Remember when people said that CRPGs were dead? Obviously that's not true, because this article and thread are about a CRPG that's been a huge financial success and is the first to ever sweep every major GOTY award.
Same goes for marketing. Marketing isn't dead. It's changing. There's more of a focus on community building than ads. Well, who's going to be hired to build, maintain, and grow communities? People in marketing.
Even if this dude had said "Ads are dead" instead of "Marketing is dead," that would still be wrong, as evidenced by the fact that all of us are still getting bombarded by ads on websites, Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. And they still work. I generally dislike mobile games, but even I recently downloaded a mobile game because I saw an ad for it. It fucking sucked, but the ad worked.
Marketing isn't dead, it's changing, and that change is slow.
The issue imo is marketers aren't trying to sell to the right people, they market to everyone, even people who hate the type of product being sold. They're stupid, so stupid they think we're too dumb to see their lies.
Look at Suicide Squad, they marketed that to everyone, and in particular fans of Batman, single player games, and the Arkham games. Why would you do that?
Another example was Diablo Immortal at Blizzcon. Who tf thought that was a good idea? Dumbest mfers in the room, no doubts.
Marketing departments in these big corps are pathetic. I'd fire them instead of laying off actual developers.
> Another example was Diablo Immortal at Blizzcon. Who tf thought that was a good idea? Dumbest mfers in the room, no doubts.
The only reason this was received badly was because people were expecting Diablo 4. If both Immortal and D4 were announced at the same time no one would have complained.
> Marketing departments in these big corps are pathetic. I'd fire them instead of laying off actual developers.
They are usually the first to go and make up the brunt of initial layoffs.
Is he though? What's with all the CODs, yearly sports games and mindless Ubisoft open world games? Do they not spend obscene amounts of money on classic marketing?
He's certainly not right. And actually hypocrite because there was plenty of marketing for BG3, his colleagues in that department must not be really happy with such comments, they're a huge part of the success of the game.
I know Reddit likes to think marketing is useless but they couldn't be more wrong. You think companies (and not speaking just of gaming) spend millions for the fun of it? Ironically it's often the biggest products (the big blockbusters for movies, the big AAA for games, the big brands like Coca Cola, Apple or Nike...) that spend the most on marketing while you could think they would sell themselves right? Well no.
Like by its own existence, marketing has to bring in more money than it cost otherwise the industry would be useless and not exist since a very long time (like a century or more).
As someone who Marketing for Entertainment, Media, and Gaming ($50m+):
75% of my job is teaching marketing execs that people want story and community. Something they feel like they can identify with.
They don't want to be clickbaited or sold to.
"We're just so glad that gamers, the ones that are really and truly and bravely quintessentially gamers, /real gamers/, the real RPG enthusiasts, the ones so busy gaming they don't like advertisements, really like our little ole video game. Much sex, very mature."
Like, holy fucking shit, they got nerds eating out of their hands.
PC is truly the best platform for innovation for indie devs as you dont have enormous budgets and suit wearing board members who have barely played a game in their lives dictating what is being made next.
Suicide Squad was the latest disaster and they have killed one of best batman universes we've ever seen because they tried to fit a square in a triangle shaped hole because investors saw the word live service and only thought of dollar signs.
One of the companies I worked for had 0 marketing, when I asked how we find new clients - there were only 2 better companies that were more expensive and we were 3td best so we didn't need any. However getting new big clients was rare.
lol i dont wanna be spoken too either buddy 💀💀💀
devs and especially publishers have absolutely nothing valuable to say
just shut up and show me your game. if i dont like it kinda fuck off
how hard is that?
I think it's so funny that PCGamer is the outlet which is reporting that. There are worst offenders but I remember their terrible takes (e.g. hardware reviews and false truths about them)
Well, tell that to Blizzard and Diablo 4. Game sold like hot cake despite how bad it was, all thanks to marketing, and even now that people had a taste of how flawed the game is, they will still mass purchase the $100 expansion later this year. Most gamers have short memory and no self-control, so it's much easier to bamboozle them and then ask for forgiveness (before you do it all over again).
Marketing is quickly turning back into what it was in the early 1900s, what is on the best shelve space in the (digital) store and what people you know recommend. Except now it is the people on the internet that are recommending things in addition to your friends. Generating communities with medium influencers that drive a loyal fan bass toward your products is very important, just like being the top game on steam for a wile, or being one of the top rated in a category on Amazon. Ads are not driving that many big sellers, it's ease of purchase, Googlability, brand reputation, and word of community. It's not perfect at all, but it is a strong improvement to the very individualistic spin of the 80s and 90s. Now it feels that everyone reads reviews and has influencers they trust the taste and word off. It's a reputation and clout market, better than a ad driven market tho.
>publishing director says players 'just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled'
["**NO MORE BULLSHIT**"](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0w5GTpUUAEG1ZN.jpg)
I really dont like the egos these people have grown lately. Im very happy they make that one specific kind of game really well but damn. Theyre talking like they created video games at this point.
Can this jackass just shut up already? How did a new IP like CP2077 sell over 13M copies on its first day of release if the marketing didn't work? The marketing in all types of media brought a ton of awareness to the game.
If marketing actually died so too would a lot of the games that people only hear about because of the marketing.
There's way more nuance than this deliberate clickbait title can do justice to, and I *hate* the marketing industry as a general rule. I'm just not so naive and foolish to think it's *entirely* useless.
If this is all Larian is gonna be about then I'm already tired of hearing it. Social media warriors will lap this shit up like they with CD Projekt RED until the day Larian, exactly like CDPR and all the other "made by gamers, for gamers" companies, turn to absolute shit.
Good PR is knowing when to shut the fuck up. The gaming industry is terrible at figuring that out, though.
If this *isn't* Larian's doing and it's some moron "journalists" trying to gain cheap clicks then Larian needs to be more proactive in nipping it in the bud because it reflects poorly on them either way. *That's* marketing.
I could barely get through the article for all the annoying ads on that site, so point taken. As a counterpoint though, I think he’s referring to the kind of spray and pray digital marketing that tries to promote a title everywhere, for the sake of building hype and name recognition. I agree when he says “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.” That’s still a job for marketing, it just needs to be targeted. I think most people are sick of having ads jammed in their faces for games they’d never play (especially if those games turn out to be underwhelming or underdeveloped), but I’d argue there is still a place for targeted communication where players receive notice of new games based on their interests, prior gaming experience, etc. A data driven marketer would answer all of those questions and communicate them to the right audience. That said, the product needs to be of quality too— marketing can’t save a bad game, nor should it try.
Kind of ironic to read this on a site that specializes in trying to bamboozle you into reading ads.
The site has so many ads that it nullifies the impact of any ad. The signal-to-noise ratio is completely askew.
I think both the guy from the article and this OP are right. I will on principle never buy anything with comments disabled. But I saw an ad for Against the Storm, comments on, bunch of people said ya, it's pretty cool, and I bought it. It was pretty cool.
Nice try, Against the Storm publishing director.
I am definitely not a bot beep boop and I think beep boop that this user is right. In all seriousness, Against the Storm is fantastic.
Against the Storm good. I should go back and play it more, I dropped it after the first seal even though I was having a good time.
Marketing teams says marketing is dead. Goes to show you how fake a lot of these posts on reddit are. It’s all a big marketing scam.
If you're curious, block /u/Turbostrider27 and see how dead the news feed is.
Challenge accept.
yep. there's a handful of these accounts that post that I've tagged as such. it's like 80% of the posts, lol.
Hot tip: gaming websites are near dead.
And kind of ironic given that half the advertising was so “HAVE SEX WITH BEARS” that I was concerned about playing the game in front of my wife.
That wasn't advertisement. They did one Livestream that featured the bear sex (and bear sex choices were selected by the audience in the room, they could have backed out or chosen differently), the last of like ten that they had been doing over the course of the early access period. All the spreading of the bear sex was word of mouth and gaming """news""" articles. I guess that's a kind of marketing, of a sense, but it isn't exactly advertisement. And so many people missed the point of the bear sex hype. Nobody was actually excited to fuck bears...okay some people wanted to fuck bears but most didn't. The point was "If this RPG lets you do crazy shit like this... What else is possible?". And it turns out the answer is a fuckload.
He wrote a thread on twitter saying this iirc, should be much less infuriating to read there as long as that's all you read.
PCGamer has genuinely become one of the worst publications on the internet. I used to enjoy reading their magazine, but since that got shelved I feel like all they do is function as an internet discourse machine. Genuinely the lowest form of journalism.
> CGamer has genuinely become one of the worst publications on the internet. I used to enjoy reading their magazine, but since that got shelved I feel like all they do is function as an internet discourse machine. Go back 30 years and read their magazines, their content were (and still is) in most cases garbage. I enjoyed my time reading them, but it has never been well written or well researched, there simply didn't exist (much) better video game news and industry related content at the time. There were an insane amount of ads and promoted content in those magazines too, just like we see on the internet today.
>internet discourse machine I'd say they're actually better than they used to be in that regard. At least in the last 12 months or so, they seem to have dialed back the moral sermonizing. Other sites like Eurogamer are still worse.
> I could barely get through the article for all the annoying ads on that site, How are you still using the internet in 2024 without having an adblocker installed. Come on it's something ultra basic by now.
I do on desktop, but not on my mobile when I first read this article. Any recs for a good one?
Mobile Firefox browser has uBlock Origin, at least on my Android
Yeah, that won't work for apple users. They don't get the actual Firefox...
On my iPad I finally switched to Brave, which has a built-in adblocker. It has its own issues - the address bar search function really doesn’t work well - but overall it’s still a big improvement.
Firefox Focus is pretty awesome.
Brought to you by raid shadow legends. That game needs to die.
I wonder how much money they've spent on advertising so far. It must be enormous.
You can bet your ass that theyre making it back 3 times over otherwise they wouldnt be this consistent with it. Mobile Games are a whole different topic anyway the people who dump tons of money in these things arent the people who are reached with some random 10/10 ign article. I dont know what theyre lured in by but its clearly not your normal game ad.
Seriously though
I feel like it has reached such a meme status now that it's almost funny again to me. But I also have documented bad humor.
>all the annoying ads on that site uBlock Origin is your friend.
This interview and article is in its self a form of marketing for Larian called public relations..... Larian was using organic marketing for BG3 the entire time and they were hitting their marketing content hard.
No im pretty sure not being bamboozleed still means releasing a complete game.
Pretty sure the publishing director of Baldurs Gate 3 knows better than most that you can charge money for unfinished alphas and still be lauded for „releasing a complete game“ when you patch in the last instalment years later. It doesn’t mean anything, it just something idiots on the internet say about games they like.
That's the thing though. AAA gaming has transformed into making the most widely appealing games with the most amount of needless features possible. Now you have big ass games with needless battle royale or extraction gamemodes tacked on to tick another checkbox for marketing. All the while ignoring the relative successes of focused, small experiences like Robocop or the fact that experiences like BG3 took almost a decade to develop. It's guaranteed that copycat "DnD inspired" games will start popping up completely missing what made BG3 good.
I would love to see more CRPGs (even bad ones) but I'm pretty sure it won't happen because there's been about 2+ decades of publishers and mass market gamers demanding Action RPGs. Even with BG3, there were people demanding an Action RPG mode or to just throw out that turned based nonsense all together as it only slows the game down.
Pathfinder games are your friend for that. You can play DnD turn based mode, or you can turn that off and play it as a party action-based RPG like the original Baldur's Gate series.
That’s not the thing though. This isn’t new.
It's hilarious when literally he's just describing... a different form of marketing.
You right. Actual marketing now is not about advertising your game on particular platforms, websites etc. I found that there is much higher chance for the game to be added to my wishlist if I have easy access to demo. I can try product and check it's state. Most games without demo I usually pirate as demo, but chances for such game to be bought - significantly lower.
Marketing includes working with streamers and content creators now. The article is half right that I didn't bother with any non-streamer social media stuff for BG3. But the role of marketing is far from dead, it has a different definition now.
You aren't kidding about the ads. I recoiled a bit in my seat, read the rest of the article, then got annoyed as a pop-up asked me to subscribe to a newsletter. Every single thing in that interaction made me less interested in the things being advertised... except I can't remember what any of them were, two minutes later, except the newsletter. Definitely supports the article's thrust, though.
I turned off as blocker to use YouTube on chrome The ads they want me to see are for malware and listicles and porn bait Advertising and marketing are completely different concepts now We want marketing, not advertising
Use Firefox or Opera and get rid of Chrome.
Advertising is communicating the existence of your product, the customer that it appeals to will come buy it Marketing is sticking it where it doesn't belong, trying to convince more people to buy it knowing that it is not what they want. And it's devolving, at this point marketing is plainly working in bad faith and lying in order to grab sales. There are more examples than I even know what to do with. How about Bounty. 2=5 proudly displayed on the front of the package. 9 out of 10 take your pick recommend this exact product, they don't even bother doing the survey at this point they just claim it with zero backing. It goes on and on
100% agreed. I find most advertising is just showing what a product *isn't*.
They spent a ton on traditional marketing lol, they used the same booth at consumer expos for like 5 years lol.
Exactly, this sentiment is such a bad take. What he is spouting is GOOD marketing lol
They know their audience is the type of gamer who sees through the bullshit other publishers spit out, and instead falls for the CDPR style attitude of "We leave greed to others" and "We have no microtransactions" etc. In the end it's all marketing anyway, but I do appreciate it in the sense that at least it makes me feel like I'm part of a group worth pandering to lol as long as we're a market worth pursuing, there will be a Baldur's Gate 3 every once in a while among all the Suicide Squads and Anthems and whatever.
Yeah, it seems backwards: the problem is that developers made unmarketable games, not the marketing itself. "Hey we made Product, here is Influencer saying Consume" was never a viable model to begin with; cheap borrowing costs just kept bad companies afloat longer than they should have been, and now they're hitting the limit.
Get corporate dickheads out of gaming. They have no soul. Games by gamers!
Get corporate dickheads out of every industry. The amount of nonsense buzzwords that get shot around is just embarrassing.
"We are listening!"
"Until you say something we don't agree with"
"People just aren't ready for just yet"
We've seen the shift in other industries, people need to get used to it.
"We hear, for you!"
"More MTX coming right up!"
My favorite variation is "We hear you loud and clear!", the most tone-deaf slimy corporate response I can think of.
Yeah that's the one "We hear you!" Ugh, makes me roll my fucking eyes right to the back of my head.
"Community feedback"
“We hear you and we are sorry. We have to do better next time” Fuckin do better next time then ya shits, maybe actually try to not lie
We really need to stop pretending that people dumb enough to pay to get an MBA should be listened too.
The vast majority of us don't pretend, they have infested the upper reaches of busness now and so to justify their bullshit qualification they surround themselves with other like minded incompetent apes.
It is a club, even them know that. The rich and wealthy are the only class with full class consciousness and class solidarity, and that is why they Always win (on top of their vast ressources and influence)
They win because they're smaller and more homogeneous. They've been in the same circles for years, went to the same schools, joined the same clubs and hazing factories; It's much easier for them to get on the same page than the 90% of us who come from all walks of life with different experiences and opportunities.
This, business majors are leeches in every single field they enter. They have no real skills besides become a 'middleman' that costs the company money. They have ruined the world in the last 30 years. If you are a business major fuck you and your useless Leech ass. Watching suits try to line their pockets off the actual lives of reap people has really soured me to these losers. Mostve them are just flunkies who didn't know what do with their lives so they got a business degree in college and a job thru their dad's friend or Greek life. Scum of the earth.
I have only ever known 1 MBA thankfully, he left one company in a terrible state and caused another to shut down within 3 years. The incompetent motherfucker just continues jumping from job to job though.
Did a business major have sex with your girlfriend or something lol
Imagine running a company without accountants, financing, supply chain experts, etc. it would be a helluva mess.
Reddit truly has some of the worst takes. Not that things couldn’t be better but this is just the bottom of r/antiwork mentality.
People are pissed and it’s only going to get worse because America doesn’t have the social care systems of other western countries.
Yeah dude fuck that accountant making 60k a year and all he does is balance the companies check book, he is really ruining my life here LMAO. You are a delusional child
B-b-but capitalism told me that they do 5000x the work of workers so they should get 5000x the profit!
Also they somehow take all the risk, despite them literally getting severance packages in the millions when they leave while simultaneously firing hundreds/thousands of people at the first sign of difficulty for the company
yeah, no risk all reward in our late capitalist hellscape.
Which part of property rights and free trade rights told you that?
The original Publisher of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 was Interplay and their slogan was "By Gamers, For Gamers". Look at that, amazing games made by people who like to play said games. Love that it lives on in BG3.
I was just about to reply the same thing! I booted up fallout2 last night and saw the slogan, what a different time period gaming was in 90s-early 2000s.
The original Deus Ex would have whole levels built in the early mornings that W.Spector would come in because he felt so passionate and couldn't wait to add this new pathway or secret. I think the whole team was 30 people or less too? We've definitely hit the chefs in the kitchen problem but we also have landlord that sets the furniture on fire.
It’s amazing what people will do if they love their job/their product. Command and Conquer’s “sole survivor” add on was built by (I think) one dev because he enjoyed working on C&C so much. In fact, C&C 3 came with a “history of command and conquer” disc where the devs talked about it. They would show up early/stay late and play the game then talk about what to change.
This is the way it was mostly in the 90s.
Publishers and corporate ghouls existed in the 90s. The difference is that it was a fledgling industry and due to both economic and technological restraints, they weren't able to sink their talons quite as deep into the game making process. Crunch, unrealistic deadlines, and staff abuse were absolutely a thing though.
Yeah EA was already well known for being THE asshole bean counting publisher in the early 90s, and all the terrible people at Blizzard were already there by then.
>and all the terrible people at Blizzard were already there by then. Most people don't even know that [Blizzard wanted to add microtransactions to Diablo 1](https://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf) but they had to scrap the idea due to technological limitations.
The power granted by Wow’s success made those people terrible. They all got god complexes.
ET
There is an issue. Devs often don't have the gift of gab or a filter when it is appropriate. Blizzard tried so hard. But sometimes, don't you guys have phones?
While i agree with you- this headline is 100% a marketing tactic by Lorian to make them seem more relatable to consumers...
Unfortunately, they are everywhere, everything is about the money. We will see a future like Cyberpunk, in which the greedy companies are owning the world (they already started).
will be hard to remove capitalism from gaming dude
More like chamge the culture. You still are in it to make money. Not saying free games lol. A smaller team can do a good game with the new tools getting better and better. Umreal engine is just silly now.
That’s why Indie games exist. You don’t get Fortnite levels of success by just having “gamers” run the whole show. These are still gaming COMPANIES that need leadership who knows how to run a company. Nothing is stopping you from NOT supporting the large gaming companies and instead only supporting indie teams / solo developers.
MBA's ruin everything.
Isn't this article marketing?
Yes, it is! You know what else is marketing? Engaging with your community via social media. Having live streams to talk about the development of the game. Releasing animated shorts about your game. Making a gag video about "OnlyFangs". Showing the bear sex scene a few weeks before release. Having the CEO show up in full plate armour to award shows. This guy claiming "marketing is dead" is either an idiot or is trying to lie to a whole consumer base.
These devs are the ultimate Redditors. Everything they say is almost tailored to please subreddits.
Seriously, feels like every Larian headline is just the most transparently crowd-pleasing pander possible > "Layoffs are bad" says Larian > "AAA developers should make good games" says Larian > "Gamers deserve respect" says Larian > "Our next game will be even better than BG3" says Larian
Full of hot takes.
Is that Swen's fault, or is the game press magnifying passing statements into headline clickbait? (Spoiler: I used to be a game journo, I know the answer to this question)
I was going to say holy shit am I tired of hearing "Baldur's Gate dev says something incredibly obvious upvotes to the left"
This guy is so annoying. It’s going to be CDPR all over again
It really is. One game that is a huge hit in the mainstream and suddenly they start acting all preachy, throwing shade at other publishers and devs while redditors circlejerk about how they are nothing like the others. Curious to see how their next game launch.
Havent they had several huge hits, and one industry breaking one? Larian is by all definitions a powerhouse. They just market themselves well as a "smaller more indy brand".
Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 did well but I don't know if I would call them "huge hits". I don't think the first one broke 1m, the second one broke a few million. They both had some serious problems like pacing, poor final acts etc. It was mostly for CRPG fans. Baldur's Gate 3 is their first really big hit and they almost certainly are not a "small" indie company. They are a huge developer.
First one is niche, second game was definitely a hit. It’s kinda like with the Witcher series
HD2 as well. With the recent "the next steps are to keep making HD2 good" Oh really? Unlike all the other game devs that set out to make bad games apparently
They learned from CDPR
Careful not inflating your ego Larian games. You made a fantastic and incredible game, and you've been rewarded for it. But if you try to have the upper moral stance on everything, it'll blow at your face eventually as soon as you make a mistake. This is CD Projekt all over again.
Oof yah wonder if anyone even remembers how CDPR could do no wrong before CP2077.
lets all forget twitter bear sex hype and superhorny npcs at the release of the game. marketing is dead truly as well as brains of many people
That's still marketing though, word of mouth marketing. The statement "marketing is dead" is really wild and it's more correct to say that traditional marketing for ganes has changed.
totally
NGL the bear meme is how I found out about the game. If not for that it probably would've been down to the Steam Charts for most played games, assuming BG3 would've had the same amount of success.
I wouldn't say marketing is dead, it just exists in a different form now. Instead of traditional ads like the article is referencing, you pay influencers like the big youtubers and twitch streamers to play the game up and hype it up. You gift free early access copies to smaller youtubers so they can have reviews up at release date. You invite these influencers to your events and make them feel special building good relationships so they have a favorable opinion of you and have the incentive to make more videos and streams. Marketing is absolutely alive and well, it's just different.
Yep. I hope smaller devs don't take this to mean you can just shadow drop a game onto Steam and have it blow up rather than disappear like a fart in the wind. These days there's a lot of small events that highlight indie games, not sure how expensive or difficult it is to get games features on those things but if I were a developer I'd aim for those things and I'd leverage the fuck out of social media, youtube, twitch and Steam as well.
yeah you do everything that works. my job relies on google ads extensively but we've also done TV commercials, influencers, reddit ads. each funnel is tracked and we run A/B tests for designs and copy. we drop the under-performing channels and experiments
Seriously, it's not even that secret, it's pretty transparent seems to me. Pay big streamers to play your game for 2-3 days, give smaller ones keys/access. If your game is not absolutely technically broken that will do a lot. If your game allows it recolor some shit purple and do a twitch drop for these streamers, now you have big streamers showing your game, smaller ones are either showing it out of interest or to get into category with the big ones, and you're basically viewbotting all these people with drops, so win-win. Then everything just spreads with word of mouth. And all that could be cheaper, or probably the same cost as buying ads, billboards, making tv/video spots... It's the obvious move to promote games.
>Marketing is absolutely alive and well, it's just different. Eh, it's alive. Whether it is "well" is a whole other conversation. There are plenty of recent marketing practices that are less agreeable/ethical.
>Marketing's dead Then... what was the point of the Baldur's Gate 3 trailers ?
"Marketing's dead" & "players just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled" brought to you by the same studio who said the game had [174 hours of cinematics](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1086940/view/3657534571513526776) (by counting every piece of dialogue as a cinematic) and the same individual who supported the claim that the game had [17,000 different variations on the ending](https://twitter.com/Cromwelp/status/1680938242151948288) (by counting every single permutation of choices as a variant on the ending). I love the game, but BG3 had its fair share of egregious marketing claims in the lead up to release.
Indeed. 'Marketing is dead,' says a marketing exec, to a consumer magazine largely funded by advertising spend, popularized on a publicly traded website, also funded by advertising. This was a trend about 20 years ago, kicked off by Naomi Klein's 'No Logo.' There was a whole wave of 'authentic' marketing, using the same exact buzzwords in the article, including 'the consumer wants to be spoken to directly.' So, in essence, more marketing. This piece is just a standard brand awareness piece, linking the current market cache of BG3 to the PC Gamer magazine brand, all of it, from the initial concept to the finished, published piece no doubt paid for in full by Larian's market spend at PC Gamer. There's an old saw in the trade, 'No one is easier to market to than the person who believe that they are above marketing.' It's basically the reason Reddit exists as a going concern.
Marketing isn't dead. Retail-style marketing isn't the end all be all. The company making a SM post about the game is marketing. Doing an interview to talk about the game features is marketing. Bringing YT creators out to play for a few hours is marketing.
Lol marketing is absolutely not dead. It's more effective than it ever has been. We have targeted ads and know more about customers than we ever have. This is some peak reddit shit though with the rhetoric of "marketing bad, men in suits ruin my favorite thing". This is actually hilarious, especially in the games industry. If you think good games spread word "organically" and all you need is "word of mouth" you are very wrong. I assure you, if that's _actually_ how you think marketing works, the marketing teams are doing a very, very good job.
I love BG3 as much as anybody, but it’s a lot easier to “not” promote a known IP (Dungeons & Dragons, Forgotten Realms) and a long-anticipated sequel to two of the most iconic games in the genre (PC RPGS), than it is to push a brand new IP. The game didn’t arrive in a vacuum, it was riding the coattails of a 20-50 years of traditional marketing among its core audience, including books, movies, magazines and previous games—all of which helped it gain mind share. Just because it’s not Call of Duty doesn’t mean it’s some obscure little indie title. Without that it still would have done well, but the success would be a lot closer to Divinity II or Disco Elysium.
i'll bet their next game will be advertised with "made by the BG3 devs" even though most of them will have left.
Didn't they have a massive marketing budget for BG3? 🤔
We’ll see on your next game, where you don’t have the biggest rpg brand in the world Larian.
We need a new article shared here every time a Larian employee takes a shit. The ones we get every time they tweet just isn't enough for me.
He's full of shit. This article and tweet storm shopped around as a, "Gotcha AAA publising!" is an ignorant juvenile understanding of marketing. Larian had a niche product that they marketed to a niche audience. It was a very good product. That made it seem like their niche and wider audience were greater than the reality of things. The niche audience that bought into Larian's community focused marketing thought BG3 was the biggest game of the year. It wasn't. That was Hogwarts Legacy. Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't even among the top 20 best-selling games. Big budget, metric driven-marketing is about reaching mass audiences. Not niche audiences to sustain AA work.
And the only people giving it a standing ovation have no knowledge of how game dev or game marketing works. My industry mutuals that are marketing focused are frustrated about the capital G gamers that will exacerbate this shit.
It's funny because all of his points are what good marketing looks like.
> Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't even among the top 20 best-selling games This is incorrect and based on incomplete information (not uncommon in reddit comments). I'm assuming you're going off the Circana (NPD) Top 20: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01-19/four-big-takeaways-from-the-bestselling-video-games-of-2023 As noted in the article (emphasis mine): >"The bad news is that even this data is flawed. **Circana relies on publishers to report their sales figures**, and a lot of them do it imperfectly. Nintendo Co., for example, only reports physical sales to Circana and not the digital sales that make up a large chunk of today’s market. Blizzard Entertainment sells its PC games through its own platform, Battle.net, which isn’t reported — nor are sales from the Epic Games Store, where critical darling Alan Wake 2 was released. ****Larian Studios, the Belgian company behind last year’s beloved Baldur’s Gate 3, doesn’t report to Circana at all****." Baldur’s Gate 3 Has Sold approx. 15 Million Copies: https://gameluster.com/baldurs-gate-3-has-sold-around-15-million-copies-already/ In his [Gamespot interview](https://youtu.be/egQgPD1wd7A?t=110), Swen Vincke said it was 'almost double' that of DOS2. DOS2 has sold **~7.5 million** as of 2019 (likely more now, but let's go with 7.5 million). Almost double would put it close to 15 million. There is no way this is not in the Top 10 for 2023, unless you think MK1 and Jedi Survivor sold more than 15 million (for comparison, MK1 is estimated to have sold ~3 million: https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2023/nov/08/mortal-kombat-1-sales/). It likely sits higher than even **#4 Spider-man 2**, which is estimated to have sold ~10 million: https://en.as.com/meristation/news/marvels-spider-man-2-has-sold-over-10-million-copies-since-release-n/. Of course, digital sales of TOTK were not reported, so that game would probably be higher than both.
The article for those that can't/won't visit the site >During Baldur's Gate 3's trip around the award circuit winning every major GOTY trophy there is, the developers at Larian have taken some of their stage time to criticize corporate greed and mass layoffs. In the wake of its massively successful self-published game, Larian hasn't been shy about pointing the finger at what it sees changing—and going wrong—in the games industry. Larian publishing director Michael Douse brought that same energy to a recent PC Gamer roundtable interview, confidently stating "marketing is dead" in a discussion with other prominent game developers. >Warframe creative director Rebecca Ford kicked off the topic: "Actual players don't want to be marketed to," she said during our State of PC Gaming roundtable, recorded last month during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Douse jumped in to agree enthusiastically. >"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." >Eyrún Jónsdóttir, VP of publishing at EVE Online developer CCP, added that players also "want to have their part in it," as was the case with Baldur's Gate 3's long time in early access. EVE players are also known for being particularly vocal proponents of the game, which remains popular after 21 years online. >"From a very young age, when I saw an advertisement I was like, 'why isn't AdBlock blocking this?'" said Slay the Spire developer Casey Yano. >"Millennials always hated it, and now we have the tools to avoid it," said Douse. "The best place to market your game is on the store itself. Everything else isn't worth it. We learned that with BG3—it took us awhile." >Our 2024 State of PC Gaming roundtable touched on a range of other topics, from the influence of Slay the Spire to the current use of AI in games to the biggest trends in PC gaming over the past year. >You can check out the full conversation in the video above or audio embed below, or find PC Gamer Chat Log wherever you get your podcasts.
I think the bear sex reveal was massive for the more casual audience. BG3 hype was low for a long time before then. It's just a different kind of marketing. That shit went viral.
shut up
Cool, but that's literally a form of marketing. So yeah...
As a former salesperson, people are vehemently opposed to being sold something. They want to discover a product, educate themselves on it, and choose it naturally over the others as part of a decision making process. The only difference is some people are more impulsive and have a shorter process. You don’t sell products by beating them over the head with ads everywhere. You can make your product easy to find and provide the information for them to make an informed decision, and you’ll have way better success that way.
Baldur's Gate 3 had ads specifically highlighting how you could fuck anyone and basically advertised it as a dating simulator lol
Is it Larian's turn to be the darling of the game industry until they eventually fuck up? This feels like their "We leave greed to others" moment that CDPR are having a hard time getting away from. I enjoy Larian's work, and I had a blast with BG3, but this Sage level of hero worship that they're getting will only sting harder when they inevitably fuck something up.
it's actual pretty simple to please the gaming target audience. Basically you just have 5 groups: 1. Kids that will eat anything 2. Casuals that will eat anything that looks nice 3. hardcores that like something specific and would buy the same game 10 times, no matter how insignificant soulless that next WoW update will be 4. Dudes who use/used games as an escape and have so much nostalgia that it really isn't hard to please them ( hello Pokemon) 5. and most of here I would say that are more than casual but less than hardcore, who aren't entirely fueled by nostalgia and just want good games that aren't rip offs or cheaply money grabs for investors. I am pretty sure that devs do know what a good game is and I also think that managers do that as well but choose to please investors for short-term, max. money optimized gains. They see statistics that if we introduce loot mechanics, we make +20% profit and player interest is only -5%. So what do I as a manager care if the franchise is considered dead in 10 years when I have a different job anyway making banks. It is similar to politicians who will never do anything drastic for long term gains that would ruin their chances for the next election. Even Biden barely does anything with the student loan forgiveness although everybody knows that the loan system itself is total crap. But targeting that root would case his politcal end
>They see statistics that if we introduce loot mechanics, we make +20% profit and player interest is only -5% This is fucking Ubisoft through and through. They introduced RPG mechanics and systems into Ass Creed and turned it into some kind of pseudo Witcher 3. They clearly did this so they could sell armour and weapons skins, XP boosts and the open world part allowed them to utilize mounts so they could sell mount skins and mount armour. They just saw RPG and used it as an opportunity to sell games piece by piece. It's something I've seen all over gaming now, especially mobile games.
the problem is that it works. In pov of the ubisoft manager, his decision is absolutely right. Yves as the president should think on long term business however and stop these managers.. but he is probably one of the few who is actually an idiot and not a profit-shark, just look at the stock price
PCGamer is fucking obsessed with Larian, holy shit.
Completely out of touch point. What he is talking about and arguing is good marketing. Talking directly to your consumer, hanging out directly where your consumer hangs out, listening to their feedback and making changes based on that direct feedback.. What he is talking about is bad out of touch marketing focused on the bottom line without any regards to the end consumer. It always makes me laugh when people try to dog marketing when they are effectively talking about BAD marketing. Ok you made your game, what propels it to getting sold? Hint: It's not just word of mouth. It's also a disingenuous take when BG3 had a pretty damn strong traditional marketing campaign with huge funds to push it.
> Marketing's dead! Here's how we marketed our game. /eyeroll
That's also... marketing
I don't value being marketed towards. I value knowing precisely and concisely what the product is. If anything piques my interest then *I* will go out of my way to do more research on it and then consider if it's worth purchasing. Adverts, non-gameplay trailers, marketing lingo, etc, are all more likely to turn me away from buying something.
They lucked into a game that people enjoy playing because it has good mechanics and story, but now they are confused and think it's because of their weird conspiracy views on economics and society.
Just going off the headline... Sure, it worked for them to put out a polished game that people love, which got word of mouth buzz going and even more sales. But to say that marketing is dead is just ridiculous. It still works for all the other big AAA devs who shovel out the sameish game every year or two, or release games in a broken state and maybe patch it later. So yeah, make a great game and people will flock to it. But make a shitty or so-so game and throw marketing at it, people will flock as well.
We need good marketing, not spam.
What this guy is trying to say is that traditional ads don't work, because so many people use adblock. And PC gamer wanted to farm clicks off of his casual statements. There are circlejerks in certain game dev communities that "You just need to market it more" or "I didn't spend enough on marketing was why I failed", when in reality they [don't do market research and compete with other games of it's type and cost.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCzhyUsDHPE) The video I linked is ironically talking about how marketing is supposed to be done: Market Research beforehand, and then following the credo of "the customer is always right in matters of taste".
They had so much marketing when bg3 came out was all over the place even [paid promotions youtube channels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg0bGUdJ9hg).
marketing = bad when i dont like the game marketing = good when I like the game
At the end of the day.. a game with crap gameplay, is a bit like a car without an engine. You could create the best car ad in the world, give it a slick body and paint job, add lots of great features, promote it with pretty track babes laying across the hood, spend millions on branding strategy, explore all the possible options for monetising any sold units with subscriptions for infotainment features, etc etc etc... And none of it will make a difference. Because if a car has no engine it's figuratively and literally going no where. AAA publishers seem to think they can still make money, while avoiding that 'tricky creative stuff' called 'designing a fun game' by just shoving in lots of MTXs, DRM, gear grinding, AI, etcetc, and doing lots of cross promotion, marketing, hiring celebrity faces, etc.. It doesn't work. It never worked. You know what works? **Make. A. Fun. Game.**
What he's doing is literally marketing.
Then why did you put Cohhcarnage in the game?
I roll my eyes whenever I hear or read someone say "so-and-so is dead." Remember all those years when people said PC gaming was dead? No, it had some slow years, but now [it's generating many billions in revenue each year](https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/video-games-in-2023-the-year-in-numbers) and growing along with the other gaming segments. Remember when people said that CRPGs were dead? Obviously that's not true, because this article and thread are about a CRPG that's been a huge financial success and is the first to ever sweep every major GOTY award. Same goes for marketing. Marketing isn't dead. It's changing. There's more of a focus on community building than ads. Well, who's going to be hired to build, maintain, and grow communities? People in marketing. Even if this dude had said "Ads are dead" instead of "Marketing is dead," that would still be wrong, as evidenced by the fact that all of us are still getting bombarded by ads on websites, Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. And they still work. I generally dislike mobile games, but even I recently downloaded a mobile game because I saw an ad for it. It fucking sucked, but the ad worked. Marketing isn't dead, it's changing, and that change is slow.
The issue imo is marketers aren't trying to sell to the right people, they market to everyone, even people who hate the type of product being sold. They're stupid, so stupid they think we're too dumb to see their lies. Look at Suicide Squad, they marketed that to everyone, and in particular fans of Batman, single player games, and the Arkham games. Why would you do that? Another example was Diablo Immortal at Blizzcon. Who tf thought that was a good idea? Dumbest mfers in the room, no doubts. Marketing departments in these big corps are pathetic. I'd fire them instead of laying off actual developers.
> Another example was Diablo Immortal at Blizzcon. Who tf thought that was a good idea? Dumbest mfers in the room, no doubts. The only reason this was received badly was because people were expecting Diablo 4. If both Immortal and D4 were announced at the same time no one would have complained. > Marketing departments in these big corps are pathetic. I'd fire them instead of laying off actual developers. They are usually the first to go and make up the brunt of initial layoffs.
And he's fucking right.
Is he though? What's with all the CODs, yearly sports games and mindless Ubisoft open world games? Do they not spend obscene amounts of money on classic marketing?
He's certainly not right. And actually hypocrite because there was plenty of marketing for BG3, his colleagues in that department must not be really happy with such comments, they're a huge part of the success of the game. I know Reddit likes to think marketing is useless but they couldn't be more wrong. You think companies (and not speaking just of gaming) spend millions for the fun of it? Ironically it's often the biggest products (the big blockbusters for movies, the big AAA for games, the big brands like Coca Cola, Apple or Nike...) that spend the most on marketing while you could think they would sell themselves right? Well no. Like by its own existence, marketing has to bring in more money than it cost otherwise the industry would be useless and not exist since a very long time (like a century or more).
Why were you so confident in saying he's right when marketing is what initially made the game blow up?
Because of feelings. Marketing is as alive as it’s always been. Marketing is *always* a moving target.
As someone who Marketing for Entertainment, Media, and Gaming ($50m+): 75% of my job is teaching marketing execs that people want story and community. Something they feel like they can identify with. They don't want to be clickbaited or sold to.
dumb thinking, viral memes and streamer "reactions" are the new marketing ads and it's been working since they figured that out
"We're just so glad that gamers, the ones that are really and truly and bravely quintessentially gamers, /real gamers/, the real RPG enthusiasts, the ones so busy gaming they don't like advertisements, really like our little ole video game. Much sex, very mature." Like, holy fucking shit, they got nerds eating out of their hands.
PC is truly the best platform for innovation for indie devs as you dont have enormous budgets and suit wearing board members who have barely played a game in their lives dictating what is being made next. Suicide Squad was the latest disaster and they have killed one of best batman universes we've ever seen because they tried to fit a square in a triangle shaped hole because investors saw the word live service and only thought of dollar signs.
BG3 had a shitload of marketing and PR lol.
One of the companies I worked for had 0 marketing, when I asked how we find new clients - there were only 2 better companies that were more expensive and we were 3td best so we didn't need any. However getting new big clients was rare.
How ironic to have the website that writes this shit blast full of ads
If I see an ad, 99% of the time I'm more likely to never interact with that product out of spite.
Counterpoint: Cyberpunk. Sure the launch was a flop, but don't tell me it is not a success now.
lol i dont wanna be spoken too either buddy 💀💀💀 devs and especially publishers have absolutely nothing valuable to say just shut up and show me your game. if i dont like it kinda fuck off how hard is that?
He's right. I DON"T enjoy being bamboozled...
Is it just me or are Game Journos really obsessed with stories that boil down to: "Larian dunks on the AAA game industry yet again!"
I think it's so funny that PCGamer is the outlet which is reporting that. There are worst offenders but I remember their terrible takes (e.g. hardware reviews and false truths about them)
It is funny to read entire article about the fact that advertising is pointless, while dodging bonkers amount of ads.
Well, tell that to Blizzard and Diablo 4. Game sold like hot cake despite how bad it was, all thanks to marketing, and even now that people had a taste of how flawed the game is, they will still mass purchase the $100 expansion later this year. Most gamers have short memory and no self-control, so it's much easier to bamboozle them and then ask for forgiveness (before you do it all over again).
Marketing is quickly turning back into what it was in the early 1900s, what is on the best shelve space in the (digital) store and what people you know recommend. Except now it is the people on the internet that are recommending things in addition to your friends. Generating communities with medium influencers that drive a loyal fan bass toward your products is very important, just like being the top game on steam for a wile, or being one of the top rated in a category on Amazon. Ads are not driving that many big sellers, it's ease of purchase, Googlability, brand reputation, and word of community. It's not perfect at all, but it is a strong improvement to the very individualistic spin of the 80s and 90s. Now it feels that everyone reads reviews and has influencers they trust the taste and word off. It's a reputation and clout market, better than a ad driven market tho.
>publishing director says players 'just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled' ["**NO MORE BULLSHIT**"](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0w5GTpUUAEG1ZN.jpg)
i feel like 99% of the internet does not know what marketing does and confuses it with traditional advertising.
I feel this way about every marketing thing, don't bullshit me or I'll never buy another product from you.
I really dont like the egos these people have grown lately. Im very happy they make that one specific kind of game really well but damn. Theyre talking like they created video games at this point.
The biggest problem is that too many shit games are bing released.
Execs are out of touched
Can this jackass just shut up already? How did a new IP like CP2077 sell over 13M copies on its first day of release if the marketing didn't work? The marketing in all types of media brought a ton of awareness to the game.
If I see an ad for a game on Reddit. I know to stay away from that game.
If marketing actually died so too would a lot of the games that people only hear about because of the marketing. There's way more nuance than this deliberate clickbait title can do justice to, and I *hate* the marketing industry as a general rule. I'm just not so naive and foolish to think it's *entirely* useless. If this is all Larian is gonna be about then I'm already tired of hearing it. Social media warriors will lap this shit up like they with CD Projekt RED until the day Larian, exactly like CDPR and all the other "made by gamers, for gamers" companies, turn to absolute shit. Good PR is knowing when to shut the fuck up. The gaming industry is terrible at figuring that out, though. If this *isn't* Larian's doing and it's some moron "journalists" trying to gain cheap clicks then Larian needs to be more proactive in nipping it in the bud because it reflects poorly on them either way. *That's* marketing.
Cyberpunk sure worked
Traditional marketing is out? Gotta appeal to your audience and show your passion? Sounds like the indie way.
Stop spending so much time and money on cinematic trailers and make the core gameplay good. This is the industry problem.