Mass Effect: Andromeda Marketing

Well, to be on point, the movie's been out since Thursday and overselling is what Marketing does. It's their life-blood. It's up to the Director/Producer to live up to the promises made by Marketing. Now, this is difficult with movies since, unless they follow recipe, they're hit and miss. Games are too, to an extent, but the qualities they embue into the game is still tangible – facial expressions, game hours – so the upper-management know what's going in and, accordingly, can tell Marketing what they can and cannot promise. Not that Marketing will listen 100% of the time but at least they can make the prospects of marketing and reality meet feasible.

Not oversell, but mislead and emphasize aspects of the game that don't play to its strengths. That's what they did for ME2 and DA2, to some extent also ME1.

Mass Effect 3 had the most accurate marketing until Casey lied about the content of the endgame and give or take a trailer or two with a vastly different tone than the final product to emphasize coolness for CoD players.

I've already seen a couple of things that raises some alarm bells, like them talking about, what, "100s of different planets you can go to?"

That sounds so incredible if it wasn't for the fact that this would be out of their league if we're talking about 100 maps with incredible landmarks and attention to detail. I'm not expecting more than a dozen planets I can actually land on unless we're talking about places as small as the maps in ME2, and I also have concerns with BioWare emphasizing the openness of the game if it turns out to have uninspired objectives or a heavy handed narrative that detracts from the openness.

I also think the notions that they are going back to roots is a dangerous one to claim. People should not expect a new game in 2016 to evoke the same nostalgia they have for ME1. that is simply not going to happen, aside from a superficial resemblance of the ME1 roots.

And last concern is that I felt DAI was heavily undermarketed and where the flying fuck is the actual marketing for this game even? It has close to no promotional trailers or concept videos that actually give us an idea of how it plays aside from a suggestion that we'll have a jet pack and a more seamless transition when warping from planet to planet.

Well, to be completely fair, BioWare has TV commercials to worry about, too.  I can almost 100% guarantee you that BioWare knows what it's doing.  As far as your 100's of planets thing...   They had to cut several zones from DA:I.  They had plenty of zones.  Nothing for you to do in those zones, but they had them.  I heard about it in a BioFan youtube video with a writer?  Producer?  Ugh.  I'm so bad at this.  Anyway, go to his youtube, click on interviews, it's a female.  So, I think that he's only done like two interviews with females, but I could be completely wrong.  The Storm Coast almost got cut.

Well regardless of one's feelings on the actual movie, the marketing for Suicide Squad was very well done and did exactly what marketing was supposed to do: Sell the product being advertised as something amazing that you should purchase.

That is why I inherently don't trust advertising, because I know it's just doing whatever it feels is best to try and sell me something.

With Bioware and Andromeda given that they're taking the Fallout 4 approach of tell us virtually nothing until it's much closer to release I don't think they're going to oversell anything. I imagine that they're going to push the angle of "It's the Mass Effect that everybody loved, but in a new story".

I have come to the conclusion that cynicism is the way to go when it comes to BioWare's marketing. When they write "this game will be focused on exploration", all I read is "this game won't have city hubs".

I find it a bit harder to see the outright lies coming though. My favorite example is still the "by PC gamers for PC gamers" video - not only was Inquisition a low effort, low quality PC port, but the control scheme made it abundantly clear that the developers likely haven't played anything on a PC for a long, long time.

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Lol, Comtesse,
You need to be able to detect "disturbances in the Force"

I often ignore the marketing.
I just search for the informations I want to know (if they are revealed) before a game will be onsale, but I often try to not spoil myself too much.
It's like movies : I watch the first teaser and skip all the trailers that come after.

For MEA, there are things I would like to see/know before the game will be onsale BUT at a certain point, if they show too much (strangely, I doubt they will), I will stop reading the news. I'll buy it anyway, day 1.

It's a new galaxy so I believe that there's going to be 100s of new planets but the majority are going to be codex entries and a mix of ME2's mineral gathering and ME3's resources/missions the pc gets a report about.

The bigger the hype the lower I try to keep my expectations.

I am little surprised if there's people around nowadays, who aren't at least partially if not totally cynical about all marketing. I've sometimes known to get hyped about a game/movie/book/etc, but it's more to do about being a fan or enthusiastic about something I really like, rather than being affected by marketing. Sometimes marketing can feed that, but it's more a conscious choice to get excited about something I am awaiting, since otherwise I deem pretty much all marketing untrustworthy in my decision making. Luckily nowadays there's alternatives for getting information and overall I am probably 90% less exposed to a direct marketing than I was 10-15 years ago. I am not particularly excited about ME:A, so I am going to ignore whatever marketing strategy they are pushing this time, and I am skeptical whatever it truly makes any difference (mostly comparisons about different marketing strategies I've read, are all just post hoc rationalizations why something was more successful than something else, riddled with narrative fallacies).

I have quite negative stance on marketing and advertising overall. Partly due obvious manipulative and deceitful nature of the business (a merchant morale), but in a larger perspective I also believe that marketing overall does more harm than good for a society as whole (at least in its current form, although restrictions have not yielded particularly good results either). In short I believe, that value gained from marketing is insufficient compared to resources put into it (not for any individual actor, but for a whole collective). This is especially bad in the big budget creative industries such as movies and video games, because it considerably raises cost of making products, while budgets are already soaring high because of other factors. It's larger tangent, but humongous budgets as the norm forms wrong kind of incentives for the field, which to some degree relies on genuine artistic expression and creativity.

Yah, no.  I'm with Ryan on The Patch (a youtube series) about No Man's Sky.  "Watch you guys, I'll be a part of CmdrDikNose's or TeaBagginU's galaxy, and there will be nothing left for me to discover."

As far as ME goes, I'm just excited to see where the story takes us.  I would miss the combat/action if it wasn't there, but it's not the main reason I'm buying this game.  I've gotta get my ME story on, and see where they're gonna take us.

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Good news on the deceptive ads/marketing practices, brought to you directly from the FTC.

Last month the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a settlement with Warner Bros over a complaint that the company paid online influencers to promote 2014 game Shadow of Mordor. While such a practice isn’t illegal, the problem was that many reviewers failed to disclose that it was sponsored content. Now, the FTC has told Bloomberg that it plans to crack down on similar posts.

“We’ve been interested in deceptive endorsements for decades and this is a new way in which they are appearing,” said FTC Ad Practices Division Deputy Michael Ostheimer “We believe consumers put stock in endorsements and we want to make sure they are not being deceived.”

1. I'm wondering if this crack down will apply to overseas gaming articles.
2. I definite hope that US gaming magazines are scrutinized and punishment applied where necessary.

I just want game awards to be handed out in a fair manner.