Probably genre.
I love Darksiders since it's a really great take on the Zelda style action adventure game. The marketing for Darksiders 2 was terrible though. The ridiculously intensive advertising was kind of understandable, THQ really needed Darksiders 2 to do well (I wonder whether that worked out for them actually, I haven't seen any sales figures), but some of the adverts they did which were just stupid monosyllabic verbal ejaculations by random people on the internet was a really bas idea. I'm sure that turned some people away who perhaps hadn't heard of the game before and might have really enjoyed it if they actually played the game.
It even extends to the blurb on the back of the case. There's a quote by some random journalist which simply says "bad a**!". There was a sticker on the front saying it got a 9/10 from OXM or something, but they decided that the permanent mark they wanted on the back was "bad a**". It really stunk of them trying to pander to the lowest common denominator and throwing around meaningless buzz words. They could have put a few quoted sentences on the game explaining the game in more detail, nothing major though. Maybe they could find a quote from someone saying things like "a rich and deep adventure", but instead they went for "bad a**". That word doesn't even mean anything anyway. How many games can you think of that are, or try to be "bad ass" nowadays. A pretty large chunk, if not even a majority. "Bad ass" means nothing now, everything is "bad ass". There's so much other better things they could have said, but they didn't.
Adverts on TV for games are generally pretty crap, too. In the UK we don't get them often, and when we do they aren't very communicative. They are usually nothing more than a short montage of gameplay from a trailer that's over before you know what's happened. Only Nintendo seems to put any effort in to it, and most of them tend to be something like this. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7fESTwGwP8] Not bad, just... yeah. No thanks. From what I've seen of video game advertising on TV in America, they tend to be pretty bad. Although granted, they seem better than they used to be. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yduc3xJknhg] Jeez, the 90s...
So yeah, I guess since I know what I'm talking about with games adverts don't really appeal to me, and maybe they're not really supposed to. I look for preview articles, gameplay videos, and reviews. Adverts that just say "Wooooah look at this! It's really cool!" don't interest me at all. They don't tell me what I want to know.
