Marketing

Going to talk about two games: Titanium Court and Highguard.

I learned about Titanium Court via two people I know were blogging about doing IGF Judging and mentioning this mysterious game that they couldn't reveal the name of or anything about, other than it was made by AP Thompson who is a name that is synonamous with mysterious IGF Games - or your favorite indie game designer's favorite designer - that kind of thing.

Anyway this little bit kind of annoyed me, and it also annoyed me that the game got revealed by getting nominated for the IGF. Shortly after this happened the steam page went up. Demo keys would only get released to certain people, and all of them were raving about the game that I couldn't play. This created a certain level of mystique for me but I was still annoyed that the game's marketing insisted on the game being mysterious. The word of mouth marketing was working.

Ulimately this is going to be a footnote in the game's marketing story because after playing the demo I was then annoyed that I couldn't play the full game already. I suspect it will be released after winning some award at the IGF since it seems like every judge in the program was pretty positive on it. I used to think that the IGF was some secret cabal trying to hype their small circle of friends up but really it's a bunch of people who I personally know trying to bring attention to videogames that would otherwise disappear into the ether. 

So Highguard.

Highguard has the dubious honor of having "core gamers" being the demographic it's aiming for. Highguard is also made exclusively by former TitanFall and Apex Legends developers. Originally the plan was to "shadow drop" the game, by releasing it the moment it's announced, and get ahead of "The Gamers" from making endless youtube videos about how the game has already failed. Then Geoff Keighly came by and offered a free spot in his game trailers show called "The game awards" at a value of1.5 million dollars. Highguards developers threw a trailer together, and Geoff put the trailer at the every end of the show. Because Highguard is not Half Life 3, Highguard is now enemy #1 among gamers. 

Then nothing about the game is talked about until release. I played a bit of it, I even camped out on the steam page waiting for the game to unlock, and I went in with pretty open expectations. The game isn't bad. the 3v3 format means that you can't afford to be bad at the game lest your team crumble, and pretty much everyone agreed that adding more players to each team would help the game appeal to more people. 5v5 mode was added. I think the game will find it's audience of mostly people who play Apex Legends and want something else. This is counter to what everyone else is saying in that the game is already dead, just look at the steam charts. 

I don't think we've reckoned with how Steam's presence as a game monopoly has poisioned the market. People look at playercounts as a sign of success or failure. Game marketers used Steam review numbers to guesstimate sales numbers and then make actual actionable suggestions based on that. Steam reviews themselves are an ideological battleground. Games live or die based on appealing to the most reactionary and entitled users on the platform. There is no viable alternative, and 30% of your sales are gobbled up by the platform. 

I think it was the right call to put Highguard in the Game Awards, despite the fact that the game became a target for Gamer Hate, because I don't think the game would have gotten enough people to try it despite coming from former Titanfall and Apex developers. I think shadowdropping this would have led to the game folding in 2 weeks instead of launching a 5v5 mode. Shadowdropping Apex Legends worked because when you advertise a game that's "from the creators of Titanfall" and it is not titanfall, people are going to hate the game before they get a chance to play it, so the only other option is to not give people the time to form an opinion. 

How do you market a game? I have no idea.