I don’t disagree. At this point, all I care about are the games that im interested in and them being great or better. Whatever else happens happens.
Something that annoys me about Microsoft is… where’s the damn marketing for these games? The leadership did no favors shadow dropping Hi-Fi Rush with no marketing buildup whatsoever. Of course it bombed! No one in this forum knew about Hi-Fi Rush until the game dropped in the subscription service. Same goes for Hellblade 2, the marketing has been nonexistent, I’d wager Klobrille on Twitter does more advertising than Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond and the whole Xbox marketing department combined. The game isn’t even in the top 100 sales chart on Steam, even Returnal is currently outselling it.
People like to blame Microsoft (that’s fair) but the incompetent leadership in the Xbox division are equally to blame… how about an Xbox Direct a month before the Hellblade 2 release? or maybe some basic tv spots during the NBA playoffs?
Tbh, I don’t even see Game Pass being advertised other than Twitter. Sad
Rant over, I’m good now lol
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I’ve seen it on reddit and instagram
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it’s on social media, not tv. they target twitch, reddit, twitter, tiktok, and put ads before movies/etc. TV ads are dead, no one focuses on them anymore. Billboards are damned near useless for videogames as well.
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Agreed I still haven’t seen a single advert for Hellblade 2!
I check out Reddit and Insta constantly on my phone before bed. Those adverts have yet to reach me.
All those useless ads like Billboards, TV commercials, Vinyl wrapped busses brought in 80 million viewers to the Fallout show with record breaking engagement numbers to the video game series.
Twitch and TikTok helped too, but you get where I’m coming from.
I would say Amazon did more to help Bethesda than Microsoft honestly. the advertising was plastered everywhere and helped bring a casual audience to the franchise, other than just the hardcore gamer.
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Not a word.
Me neither.
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Brad Smith spelled it out back in early 2022 as part of how they were adapting to changing regulation. He explicitly said they will offer the same open store policies on console in time.
They can’t argue other tech giants need to allow vendors to have direct capabilities in transactions and communication with customers on iOS and Android if they aren’t practicing it themselves on their OS and stores, respectively.
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TV show advertising is not the same as video game advertising
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Notably these massive streaming drops can have marketing budgets that can be almost as big as the production budget.
Do you guys want a game made by half the devs but with a ton of ads?
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Still doesn’t excuse Xbox, but ok.
We’ve seen maybe 2 minutes of actual combat since the first reveal, awesome
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How many devs would you like fired to pay for ads? Currently as much of the budget as possible is in devs.
You assume you know what Xbox is/isn’t spending on marketing because of anecdotal evidence. It’s pointless.
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What? Read the thread we’re in… Microsoft is already doing that.
But okay, I’m done ranting.
I feel a lot of comments here are in bad faith. The hints have been there for a long time and are getting clearer as time goes on. People like to act like it’s all BS and like they don’t want to trust them for some reason, but Xbox has acted like that for quite some time with hints all over the place as they allude to what their plans are.
I even remember way back when Phil said the need to iterate on hardware during a generation as there could be advancements that were worth pursuing, and then a year or so later we got Xbox One S with added HDR and 4K. It’s basic but they were already preparing people for it in interviews before it happened.
They’ve been for years pushing for open marketplaces and it’s definitely coming, to me it’s clear as day, and it’s getting even more clear now that they have been a lot less subtle about it in public.
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If we are talking about hellblade 2 marketing, I havent seen any and I dont think there is any buzz around that game.
I haven’t seen any either, but tbh, loads of “big” games pass by without me seeing any ads for them.
The last video game that I’m sure I saw an ad for was for Mario Wonder.
Hellblade 2 is in an unfortunate position, imo.
If it’s broadly similar to the first game, it’s not going to be a mainstream hit, but it’ll almost certainly be judged for not being a mainstream hit. I think a big ad campaign for this game wouldn’t make sense, tbh. If it was 3rd party, nobody would even be talking about the ad campaign.
I’m not really sure why this has become a big talking point, Sony fanboys are currently obsessed with how much marketing Hellblade is receiving.
Probably a symptom of how many people are needed to be reached to have a very successful show. To get 80m people to watch a show, that’s what you need to do.
It’d be impossible to get 80m people to buy Hellblade 2, so a campaign that aims to reach that many people would probably be a waste of money.
Having said that, while I don’t know when I last saw a bus drive by with an Xbox ad on it, I can remember seeing a Halo 2 ad on the side of a bus (!) and thinking that was significant (obviously, I still remember it 70 years later). So at one point really, really big games were promoted in that way, but that was before YouTube ads were such a big deal, so those kinds of ads would be one of a smaller selection of outlets available for advertisers.
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In big companies like this there is absolutely no correlation between the budget for dev teams and the one for advertising. It’s not as simple as that. Even though they are reducing development teams they are more than likely increasing budgets in other areas.
Shit yes but that’s how companies like this work.
In fact you may even find yourself in a situation where you are dispensed with as no longer needed only to see your job advertised in another country at +2 pay grades higher.
Yes they are selling more consoles , the switch being a hybrid and having more people using attached to TV rather than handheld tells me that isn’t true, even though a 3ds never cost 350 dollars it costed 250 then 169 , and the Wii was always 250 dollars, it isnt the same and despite the market have suffered inflation because of COVID and wars, the market is still going on strong despite not growing this year because last year was The first which there wasnt a stock problem.
