Marketing Games Or Hype: What Marketeers Can Learn
Advertising (especially marketing games) is a complicated profession and one that can really turn the tide of any situation just by presenting a product or a service in a new, 1337 even, way. There have been numerous great examples of advertisements that really “nailed it” and made headlines not just for the product they tried to sell, but for the quality of the advertising itself. Nike’s Just Do It, Dove’s Real Beauty and others are excellent examples of well-used advertising.
But what when the advertising provides to be too much of a hype-machine, and the product fails to live up to the expectations? While they might not be vaporware, let’s discover the 3 most overhyped video games and their campaigns from recent memory, and what can you learn from their success (or lack thereof).
All Talk, No Frag in Marketing Games
The basic idea behind overhyped games is that the developers and publishers claim a lot of things before the release of the title, that the game simply cannot accomplish. This may be due to the restrictions of hardware, as is the case with poor graphics in the final builds, or simply the lack of features promised that’s due to, well, not putting them in the game.
For whatever reason, every overhyped game can give you a lesson in how not to advertise and develop a product, and even though most of these games aren’t bad, they are not what they claimed they will be.
1. Titanfall, Or How The Market Can Bring You Down
When you take a look at the current state of FPS games in the world, it’s hard to find a top-tier AAA blockbuster that isn’t just running around and shooting other people. There’s Call of Duty, with futuristic shooting, Counter Strike with complex competitive shooting, Overwatch with cartoonish shooting and more.
What made Titanfall a great idea is that it tried to distance itself from the pure running around and shooting stereotype by allowing players to pilot enormous robots and fight that way, in addition to the “regular” FPS gameplay. Combine that with awesome parkour mechanics and you have yourself an amazing shooter that everybody would want to play, right?
Well, not so much. Titanfall is a great game, it’s extremely fun, well-made and enjoyable. It was also advertised as such, being described as the most anticipated game of the year, and the one shooter that will combine Call of Duty and Mechwarrior, to name a few. It is true that the game had a good release, and that it was great to play for a few weeks, but after that, it simply got watered down by not being as rewarding and “addictive” as Counter Strike is. True, this is more of a Battlefield competitor, but still isn’t as “meaty” as the famous shooter game is.
Still, Titanfall is one of the rare games that were overhyped in its day but are still popular with players today. It’s a shame that something so good was let down by the state of the market, but Titanfall 2 is releasing soon, and we believe that one will be a real winner.
Takeaway: Know Your Competitors
The second thing about it is that while there are a lot of games out there, there are a LOT of shooter games. Shooters are the most universally loved genre, and due to that saturation of the market, games like Titanfall fail to deliver, because even though the product is good, it doesn’t have the power to draw the players for long. That can be because of the style of the game, lack of content in the release or simply the way people are, but surely that’s what’s happened here – people bought the game, and then just got bored of it.
The thing you need to learn from this is (apart from the fact that you need to be careful what you hype) that you need to know the market before you go in with a new product or two. If you’re starting a blog on fashion, and you really want it to succeed, don’t just go out and make it.
Yes, you know you need to research your competition but do you really do it?
Even if you have a great idea, you need to spend hours upon hours researching what you need to do to succeed in that field of work. Aside from that, you need to sit down, fire up that Google search and find out what are the things that are keeping people engaged with fashion blogs.
But googling isn’t enough. You need to dive deeper, just like Titanfall should have! And also – deliver on that research. Is there a Counter Strike to Your Titanfall? There might be hundreds of tools and techniques on how to cover your competitors, but you still won’t do it. What to do?
CCO: It’s time to make someone the owner of competition research by making them your chief competition officer. They will have to keep the team updated on what competitors are doing with either weekly chats, calls or Slack links. You don’t even have to have one person on it – you can have different team members covering competitors from their own department’s view. For example, Steve could track a competitor’s mobile app development, while Sarah should cover their social media strategy!
Is it content? Is it humor? Is it something totally unrelated? You need to know these things. That way you won’t do the mistake Titanfall’s developers did and make a product that is great in theory but simply doesn’t work all that well in the real world. Your job is to eliminate the things that might hinder your success, and make the best possible product, right now.
2. Duke Nukem Forever, Or How Slow And Steady Isn’t The Way To Go
Get this: Duke Nukem Forever was in the works for 15 years. 15 years! Well, at least it was less than your startup idea, am I right? To put it in perspective, the latest Battlefield game will be released on October 21st, and it was first mentioned in June 2015. You do the math on that one.
Now that’s out of the way, we need to realize what can time do to a video game. Most games are developed over the course of a year or two simply because once they’re out, they need to look fresh and new, with the gameplay and graphics as good as they can be. When you work on a game for 15 years, the things you started work on 13 years ago are so outdated that nobody can save them anymore, and that spells the end for your game.
Considering that Duke Nukem franchise was one of the most popular ones on Playstation 1, the hype that followed this big reboot was enormous, with everyone expecting a great title suitable for the latest generation of consoles and computers. When the development got longer and longer, it was the fans and the game that suffered, which reflected on the abysmal reviews for something that was in the works for so long.
Takeaways: MVPs Aren’t MVPs If You Don’t Deliver
What’s there to learn from this, you ask? Well, for starters, don’t promise and take too long to deliver! Even though that might be useful in some cases, in marketing and digital business, in general, it’s extremely bad to be slow, and even though that is something not all of us like, it’s also something we need to live with. When you consider the amount of time that went into Duke Nukem Forever, you can figure out what went wrong right away.
The advice we can give you is to try to be as focused on your big project as possible. This isn’t that easy when you have a lot of things going on, but take at least an hour every day and try to work on it. Your first step is to find a great team that can do great work. If you can’t find someone in your network who knows how to build web pages for example, simply use Upwork or some other freelancing network to find someone who is good at that, and let them do the work themselves.
Once you get a good team, you need to communicate better. We recommend Slack for great team communication, as it’s something we at .ME use very often. Once you got your team, and the way to communicate with said team, you need a plan! You can use all sorts of tools for this one, but we would recommend something like Google Docs for its sheer simplicity, and powerful collaboration tools.
But what are you going to write inside those tools? The need to move fast and – probably – break things. While fans loved the Duke Nukem style, the developers were just too afraid of their customers to release it outright, fearing that it might not satisfy new gamer’s tastes. They were right. After 15 years of development, your startup idea shouldn’t be the same as it was first conceived. The market has changed, your customers have changed (and in Duke’s case – grown up) – and you need to change some things.
While Duke’s developers might have made different variations of a viable product, they shouldn’t have waited years to release it. Making versions of a product does not a MVP make. Release it, like the Duke’s developers should have years ago.
3. No Man’s Sky, And How Promises Can Only Get You So Far
Oh, boy. The hype was strong with this one. But let’s be honest here. If someone told you that they will make the game with so many planets that even if a new one is explored every second, it’d take 585 billion years to find all of them, and that all of them are different, and that all that will be in the game, you’d be hyped too.
And hyped we were. No Man’s Sky was the most anticipated game of 2016, one of the most anticipated titles ever made actually, and the subject of so much collective drooling, that it’s a surprise that anyone still has any saliva in their mouth. But good thing we still do, because now we can taste the bittersweet taste of the release, which is to be perfectly honest: a slight downgrade from everything we wanted.
Sure, the planets are here, but the graphics aren’t the same, the multiplayer is non-existent, the game is terribly weird at times (you need to hold down your mouse button to click on anything), and it was priced at 60$ on release day, the same price that you need to pay for any other high-profile title. Except that this is an indie studio we’re talking about here.
Ever since it was released, it was faced with the backlash from disappointed gamers, that culminated with a large number of buyers seeking refunds over different online retailers. That’s a bad sign, right?
To look at the effect this game has had makes you think about what could’ve been done to prevent this. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind was: don’t promise something you can’t fulfil.
Both in gaming and in online business, promises are often believed in by a large number of people. When it comes to gaming, in particular, people are easily impressed with trailers, pre-release screenings and things that are made just to impress you and make you want to buy the game.
Takeaway: Set The Right Expectations
The advice you can take from No Man’s Sky is pretty simple: don’t lie to people. Don’t promise what you can’t fulfill just to please critics. What we can suggest, apart from not lying, is to take it slow, and try to think about what you’re giving away both to the press, and the public themselves.
While you might not be making vaporware, quit when you’re ahead in hyping your product. Have you gotten them excited, gotten tons of leads on your email list and done everything we’ve been writing about for years. Great, now you need to se the right expectations. Your customers should expect exactly what you deliver, not too much or too little. How to do this?
- Use SurveyMonkey to survey your leads on what they are most excited about;
- If they expect something you won’t be able to deliver, overcommunicate that it won’t be available in the release but you might be planning a future upgrade? Better to explain beforehand! Set an autoresponder in your email marketing software that communicates automatically with your future customers interested in a particular feature!
- If they aren’t excited about a feature you know works really well, once again – overcommunicate why they should be excited about it by writing a blog post that shows demos, examples and ‘sells’ it in such a way to get the community of your customers to sell it to each other!
With gaming becoming the largest entertainment industry in the world, too few marketers truly look to it to learn how more about marketing – and they should! These three (overhyped) games give us three key lessons that we should take to heart. But what lessons would you take away from your favourite games, hyped or not? Super Mario, GTA…? Tell us in the comments…
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