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#Community

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Edited by Legionnaire_501: 3/24/2014 3:24:32 AM
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Will Bungie's marketing strategy for Destiny be a detriment to sales from casual gamers?

Yes

8

No

24

Maybe...

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Scarcity. Drip feeding. Sparse. Words that describe the Destiny marketing scheme. Information on Destiny has been released at an agonizingly slow pace, with little more than hints that lead to more questions than answers. We all know it. We've all been dealing with it since the game was announced. The question I am posing is this: [b]How does the community feel about this form of marketing and why? In addition I would like to know your opinions on whether or not this type of marketing will be a detriment to sales or a boon. [/b] [b][u]Warning: Wall of Text/Rant feel free to skip my opinions and just answer the questions yourself .[/u] [/b] My thoughts... Personally I think that it will hurt them in the long run. Unless they have a mega marketing campaign planned for the coming months there are simply too many unknown factors about this game to make it appeal to the masses. When trying to explain Destiny to a casual gamer friend I find it next to impossible, filling my sales pitch with more of my hope and dreams for the game, than actual known facts, simply because there aren't many. Releasing a game without spoiling its content is extremely admirable and a practice more companies should be pursuing. But there is a limit to that. Unless you are Rockstar releasing a GTA game it is necessary for you to market your game pretty heavily. Just slapping (from the Makers of Halo) on some posters and the box art isn't going to cut it. I fear that without enough press, vidocs, gameplay, trailers, etc people will just assume its just another corridor shooter. Obviously we know better since were big enough bungie fans to sign up and post on their forums. But we scrape and scratch and dig and peel for every single microbial bit of information. Most people don't do that. So while the drip feed approach may work well for obsessed fans I fear they are in danger of underexposing their title to casual gamers. Games are pricey and people tend to want to know what it is they are buying before they make their purchase. Final thought, you don't need to try and sell me the game Bungie. I preordered the day you announced. Im anxiously awaiting the opportunity to upgrade my preorder to whatever stupidly overpriced special edition you release. The people visiting The Bungie site and forums aren't the people you should be marketing to. The snarky little weekly updates will tide us over and we'll buy regardless, albeit very frustrated from the lack of attention. And with the release date rapidly closing in I think now is the time to switch from the word of mouth marketing to the full on hype train. I want people to know what Destiny is. I want it to become legend.

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  • Edited by Birdman: 3/26/2014 9:23:20 PM
    See, you don't need a degree in business marketing to understand the simple fact that advertisements in this day and age cost money, and lots of it. Even TV and radio ads at o-dark-thirty in the morning still is quite a price tag. There's also magazine ads, which is a toss up because you want gamers to buy the game, so it would be kind of funny to drop an ad in [i]Cooking Mama and Papa Weekly[/i] and expect sales to soar. There's also time. If they did this stuff in August, it would make sense because then the game would be fresh/ingrained in casual people's heads, whereas if they did stuff now, it would get stale by launch. In my opinion, you're overreacting. We're slightly less than six months away, with [b][u]Plenty[/u][/b] of opportunities for Bungie to hand out more info to us heavy gamers, and start planning the battle of attrition for casual gamers.

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  • I think that the lack of information is a good thing. It alows the "casual gamers" to say, ok this game looks pretty good I think I'll get it and when they get the final product be blown away, while it allows "heavy gamers" to ponder on Bungie's every word and analyze every aspect, searching for more information that we might have missed. So far it serms to be working. Bungie says that they've never had a community this big for a game that hasn't released yet and with people like bungie thats saying something.

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  • Edited by JWilson: 3/26/2014 7:46:28 PM
    Ummm... Bungie has released a lot of information about Destiny. If it were anyone else, we would only know the name and maybe the classes.

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  • I don't necessarily agree with you, but either way this was a well thought out post. The dance of keeping people excited about the game while also not spoiling it's goodness is tough to perform.

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  • Casuals don't even know who developed the game they're playing.

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  • It's not time for full blown add campaigns yet. They are a massive, successful company. They know what they are doing. I'm sure you will get plenty of TV adds later.

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  • The game isn't releasing until September, CoD doesn't show much until E3 each year.

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  • Edited by c4rnus: 3/25/2014 11:18:50 PM
    They haven't really started marketing to the general population yet. Really the only people who know about Destiny are people who are actively involved in the gaming community. Marketing for the casual market doesn't usually happen until a month or two prior to launch. The Beta will also be a good springboard for that, considering it'll probably happen right before the hardcore marketing phase starts.

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  • This has always been Bungies marketing "scheme". You should have been around in the H2 and H3 days. It was all very hush hush. As the game ramps up towards launch, which now is only half a year away you'll see more. Along with ads, vidocs, and if you pay attention enough small Easter eggs and tidbits in the weekly updates. Advertising people are pretty good at their jobs and the general public (outside of bnet) can't be saturated too much before or people lose interest. There is that special time frame at which people are most likely to be excited and willing to buy the game before it launches. We just haven't approached that point yet. But I do have to agree I'm hungry for more information. I recently started listening to the podcasts. They have some good stuff in there. I highly recommend it.

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    • I agree with you all the way!.

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      • I'd like to throw out there that when talking about sales I mean for the general public. It's safe to assume that everyone on the Bungie forums is already sold on the game. I am asking about whether or not the whole cagey, elusive, "We're not revealing anything because mystery...." marketing will hurt the sales with the average Joe (or Joanne, lets be gender equal here) who doesn't visit bungie.net and only hears about games from word of mouth or commercials. I personally like the mysterious nature of the game and how little we know, but I'm already sold on it. My fear is that people who aren't taking spare time to dig into every nugget and kernel that Bungie gives us will be utterly baffled by what Destiny is. So far they've released what... only a couple actual trailers? I was sitting down with some non gamer/ casual gamer friends when the sharing is caring ps4 trailer was on and they had no idea what Destiny was when they saw that. They said it looked interesting but unfortunately the trailer didn't do much to show how it was different from any other sci-fi shooter. One of them even thought it was a new Halo.

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