Selling the Hype: A Look at Marketing Video Games

Almost anyone who has been on the internet in the past month is at least aware of the existence of the MMORPG Rift. Their massive internet marketing campaign spans comics of all kinds, videos on Youtube, Facebook ads and other sites with massive traffic. However, for all of its outreach, I haven’t met anyone that is that excited about this game. I’m sure Rift has its merits as a solid MMO, but I just can’t get worked up about it. On the other hand, free-running shooter Brink has hardly any self-generated hype, but I keep wanting to find out more about it. This led me to ponder the question: what exactly creates the hype around video games that makes them sell?

Advertising video games is nothing new. Even in the early 1990s, video games held TV spots on national television, but these were mostly campy Nintendo ads. Don’t get me wrong, I love these ads for their over-the-top characteristics, but they were directed at an audience that gets distracted by flashing lights and cartoony characters. It was brilliant marketing, but could not last as these gamers eventually grew up.



As the gamers evolved, so did the marketing. Ads and trailers focused less on distraction and more on distinction. Game marketers focused on what set their gameplay apart from the competition’s, be it the latest graphics, more violence, intriguing narrative or a fresh game mechanic. A classic example of this is the original Half Life, which displayed the unprecedented scope of the terrain and wide range of enemies. Another is Duke Nukem 3D, which showcased the insane range of guns a player can frag people with, the ability to replay the last couple seconds or minutes before your last death and the range of unlockables a player can earn. American McGee’s Alice’s trailer intrigued gamers for taking the carefree, fantastical image of Wonderland and turning it on its head.

More recently, video game marketing for big budget games has closely resembled movie marketing. Their TV spots vied for placement in primetime spots. Ads for Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 even aired during the Super Bowl. Billboards advertising the games appeared over highways. Ads were taken out in magazines. Big game companies that have the money are pulling out all the stops to get their name out there.

But what about slightly smaller studios that have budgets for quality games but not widespread media campaigns? For them, video game ads and trailers are more of an art than a marketing ploy. Take Dead Island, an upcoming game about a more realistic zombie apocalypse. The trailer consisted of two halves. One half was that of a zombified girl and others attacking a couple, but all in reverse. The other half was that of the girl fleeing her zombie assailants, played forward. The two halves meet in the middle, where the couple (the parents of the girl) brings the bitten girl inside. The trailer was brilliantly edited, and the soft soundtrack playing throughout really makes it one of the most impactful short works of any media. Another example of a brilliant trailer is Brink, which I mentioned at the beginning of this article. The trailer features an epic cat-and-mouse game between the different classes in the game as they shoot, stab, think, run, vault and blast their way through a chaotic battle scene.

Are marketing and trailers the only way to generate buzz? Are they even significant? If one had the inclination to look at the best-selling video games in history, a common trend emerges. Most of the best-selling games, regardless of platform or genre, are sequels of critically acclaimed and popular games. As in movies, it’s hardly necessary to advertise the sequels of good games. They practically sell themselves. Another cause for this is that sequels to video games are typically better than the originals. Developers use the time in between sequels to improve graphics and tweak gameplay over their previous games due to a large amount of feedback.

The minority of games that cracked the top grossing lists but were not sequels had something else in common. These games took a radically new concept or took old concepts and utilized them exceedingly well. The Sims, for example, created a world where the player had an unprecedented amount of choices. Pokemon featured instantly and inherently addictive gameplay. Myst offered a seemingly unending array of frustrating puzzles like no other. It is also not surprising that all of the games of this nature spawned sequels without exception.

So, what does a developer need to do to make games sell? If a game is the sequel to a wildly popular and quality game, it’s probably going to break a million copies easily. If you’re a developer that has made quality games before, the game is probably going to garner a lot of attention. If a developer isn’t endowed with a sterling reputation, what then?

I would argue that the alternative method to marketing is to have an innovative, easily demonstrated gameplay mechanic that you can push. There are many examples of this being done successfully. Portal gained instant interest with a promised retooling of the puzzle genre by perforating the map with miniature wormholes. The cult classic time-bending Braid did much the same thing by hooking its audience in with the ability to reverse time for a wide range of applications. The original Battlefield: 1942 was a breakout hit for DICE as an unprecedentedly large-scale World War II class-based team FPS.

There are a lot of examples of good games that received a premature trip to the bargain bin because they failed to promote or have easily identifiable features. Psychonauts, for example, received wide critical acclaim for brilliant scripting, innovative artistic vision and a wide variety of settings and play styles. All of these were hard selling points for gamers, who had played a lot of artistic and humorous 3-D platformers, and couldn’t immediately see what made this different. Even brilliant, lesser known games can bomb if the studio can’t get gamers interested in the basic innovative gameplay.

I would argue that Rift could face this difficulty as well. It is unintentionally presenting itself through extensive media and trailers as just another MMORPG by neglecting to distinguish itself in its genre. It may have unique elements, creatures, story lines, fight mechanics or AI that can beat Watson at Jeopardy, but no one I know has heard anything about those. It is sad but true that what sells nowadays isn’t the game you make, but what the game looks like at its surface.