'Marketing's dead, and I can back this s**t up': Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director says players 'just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled'

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 287 points –
'Marketing's dead, and I can back this s**t up': Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director says players 'just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled'
pcgamer.com
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It doesn't help when so many "AAA" studios push out DOA products that take 5 patches and broken promises to finally get to a state that's playable. I could rattle off so many games in the last year that had so much hype and were almost unplayable by most of the people that preordered.

and the funny thing is that these games launch in such a bad state because the publisher paid for the marketing push to happen on a specific date, so come hell or high water, the game is gonna ship by that date

don't get me wrong, deadlines are extemely important or your project will just end up with infinite scope creep, but games are a massive artistic and technical endeavour, which are two things that can be extremely difficult to estimate

there's gotta be a better way

snorts line of coke

Ok, so the idea is, game make lots of money if people play it for a long time, so what we do is

sniff

We make an extremely flashy but mechanically very, veeery simple game, and we use big well known IPs, but make sure to hire writers off of Fiverr, that'll save on overhead, anyway, season pass, microtransactions, lots and lots of marketing and hype!

After Game Release

WTF nobody is playing after a botched buggy launch, and people didnt enjoy the gameplay, complained it was too simple and unrewarding when it even worked, and that the story was awful?

How could this have happened???

Anyway time to layoff 1/4 of our employees and randomly shuffle the other half around our giant array of various studios and projects, that'll shake things up and put the fear of God into our workforce.

What me? Oh no I'm retiring now with my golden parachute after my amazing work running thia department through a trainwreck

snort

I mean "guiding our team through a demanding development process". See you in Cabo!