Jimquisition: How To Sell Games Without Being A Lying Dick

[LoneWolf83]

Sadly Jim the guys with the advertising and PR degrees will not agree with you. As long as you pour money into advertising you'll be fine regardless of how much you lied.

The problem with that is is leads to The Boy who Cried Wolf issue. They lie and over hype their game, the games come out good or mediocre then people call them crap because they didn't get what the expected then the people get cynical and any marketing stops working on them. The problem is marketers have no clue what they are doing, Joe Blow off the street would be a better marketer than anyone with a masters degree in marketing. What they learn in marketing courses is all out of date and was bullshit when it was though up and then reinforce their the bullshit with focus groups designed to tell them what they want to hear.

If anyone reading this is going for a marketing degree, here is a tip: When you get your degree delete everything you learned about marketing from your brain, it's all bullshit.

 

[Something Amyss]

You would think the industry would have learned by now, after so many years. But who are we kidding, this is the videogame industry, they will never learn a goddamn thing. Thank god for Jim!

The awful truth is that they don't need to learn this lesson as long as we keep giving them money.

 

[coheedswicked]

great episode. it is such a burden to always be right

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Digging the new intro Jim!

Also liars and marketers pretty much go hand in hand for most things these days...

 

[Mikeyfell]

This sort of circles back to what that idiot Phil Fish said about Let's Play videos.

it's called advertizing, that you don't even have to pay for.

The fact that some game devs and publishers think that people seeing their games being played will hurt their bottom line is so telling about how much faith they have in their products.

Banning preorders all together would be the cure for all that. not that that'll ever happen.

The fact that it's almost impossible to go to a retail store and buy a game on Day 1 with out having preordered just leads to more preorders and it is reinforces that self perpetuating circle of lies and misinformation.

Kind of like how #1 at the box office is not a comment on the movies quality it's a comment on the quality of the movie's marketing. then that gets used in the marketing to convince more people to go see the movie.

 

[Deimir]

Half expected Jim to just shout "WORDS!" at the end there.

 

[crazyburnerboy8]

jim have you lost weight ?? you look thin!, thank god for game related stress, lord knows thats the only exercise i get !

 

[truckspond]

A good aesthetic can make any game look good no matter how little raw graphics horsepower you actually have.

For instance: Take a look at the image below

Notice how despite the obviously low resolution textures the game still looks rather decent (IMHO) - That is the aesthetic of the game at work.

And again with this one

You have jagged lines all over the place due to a lack of raw graphical horsepower but the aesthetic makes it still look good.

Now if you want a challange then without cheating guess which console generation the game that those two screenshots come from is from

 

[Ninmecu]

A good aesthetic can make any game look good no matter how little raw graphics horsepower you actually have.

For instance: Take a look at the image below

Notice how despite the obviously low resolution textures the game still looks rather decent (IMHO) - That is the aesthetic of the game at work.

And again with this one

You have jagged lines all over the place due to a lack of raw graphical horsepower but the aesthetic makes it still look good.

Now if you want a challange then without cheating guess which console generation the game that those two screenshots come from is from

They look to be N64/PsONE Era graphics.

OT: I already decided to get a WiiU next month(assuming I don't find a place to move to.) but this last E3 made it cemented. Lots of cool looking experiences in the coming months. Looking forward to it.

 

[Darkmantle]

I was bored by the E3 this year. Nintendo was the one company that showed interesting stuff, the rest was boring ass crap seen hundreds of times before.

Spoiler: something unrelated

Well, how long will it take for the usual suspects to come and defend the poor, afraid companies against the bad 'SJW' and their unfair attacks and treatment...

Why would they do that? Are you saying that people who dislike lying corporations are social justice warriors? I'm confused by your weird insertion of SJWs into this topic.

 

[CaitSeith]

But I'm curious as to what the take on the supposedly "in engine" obviously scripted and edited (cause ya know, that slow-mo complete camera shift is blatantly obviously not an ingame thing and I don't know how anyones expected to believe it is) Zelda Wii-U thing is.

Well noticed. Nintendo doesn't have a clean record when it comes to E3 Zelda games. Wind Waker was bashed when it came out for the Gamecube because it looked nothing like the Zelda they showed up in the E3 a couple of years before.

 

[AJ_Lethal]

Spoiler: something unrelated

Well, how long will it take for the usual suspects to come and defend the poor, afraid companies against the bad 'SJW' and their unfair attacks and treatment...

Are you trying to create the Nth Escapist's Here-We-Go-Again Shitstorm, by any chance?

OT: Jim hits it again, as usual. Bullshitting your audience with scripted CGI bullfilms shows your lack of confidence of your product as-is.

captcha: play it again, sam

are you challenging me, captcha? and my name ain't Sam.

 

[truckspond]

...

They look to be N64/PsONE Era graphics...

You honestly think that this would run on consoles with less that 50 MHz of CPU speed and equally low power graphics and stay at 60 FPS despite all of the particle effects going on?

 

[Saviordd1]

Sadly Jim the guys with the advertising and PR degrees will not agree with you. As long as you pour money into advertising you'll be fine regardless of how much you lied.

As a guy who's currently actually earning a degree in Advertising and PR I gotta say that's not what we're taught. Maybe when I actually enter the industry that'll change but for the most part I'm being taught that goodwill isn't something advertising can buy and it is THE most valuable thing a company can have.

 

[daxterx2005]

I really can't wait for Hyrule warriors.
Also, I like how Bayonette 2 video had her dressed as Link, that looks cool

 

[Brian Tams]

But I'm curious as to what the take on the supposedly "in engine" obviously scripted and edited (cause ya know, that slow-mo complete camera shift is blatantly obviously not an ingame thing and I don't know how anyones expected to believe it is) Zelda Wii-U thing is.

Well noticed. Nintendo doesn't have a clean record when it comes to E3 Zelda games. Wind Waker was bashed when it came out for the Gamecube because it looked nothing like the Zelda they showed up in the E3 a couple of years before.

They were honest from the get-go about the Zelda U trailer, though. They said it was in-engine, and made it clear it wasn't in-game.

It was the Escapist who fucked up and misquoted them as saying it was "in-game" because, you know, this site kinda sucks ass when it comes to getting the information correct the first time.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

I do wonder if Jim's magnificent ego won't eventually upset the planet's route around the sun, or if he won't just turn into a glory-sucking black hole, Large Hadron Collider Apocalypse style.

Jokes aside, I have to agree, as always. What's so hard about being honest? What's so hard in having some confidence in your product, such as it is? I know budgets are being inflated and I know studios tend to desperately cling to pre-order money to finance their next bloated pseudo-epic - but there has got to be a way for them to break that culture, right?

I mean, not so long ago, games used to have close to no publicity at all, outside of the super rad Saturday morning SNES cartridge ads that dominated my childhood's commercial breaks. You had to pick around channels in the hopes of finding a gaming-related show, and that was literally all you were going to get!

Now, it feels as though a game can't survive on the market if it doesn't generate hype two fricking years before its release. It's just sad.

 

[Something Amyss]

They were honest from the get-go about the Zelda U trailer, though. They said it was in-engine, and made it clear it wasn't in-game.

This is something other companies get crap for, though.

They look to be N64/PsONE Era graphics...

You honestly think that this would run on consoles with less that 50 MHz of CPU speed and equally low power graphics and stay at 60 FPS despite all of the particle effects going on?[/quote]

People are super quick to throw around the "two gens ago" card. Though that would be three gens, but people usually go back two.

I wouldn't concern myself with that sort of thing. People will go hyperbolic to the point of absurdity.

Bullshitting your audience with scripted CGI bullfilms shows your lack of confidence of your product as-is.

Or pattern recognition.

Why would they do that? Are you saying that people who dislike lying corporations are social justice warriors? I'm confused by your weird insertion of SJWs into this topic.

Because "Social Justice Warrior" basically means "anyone who has a position I disagree with" in the way it's thrown around.

The fact that it's almost impossible to go to a retail store and buy a game on Day 1 with out having preordered just leads to more preorders and it is reinforces that self perpetuating circle of lies and misinformation.

I haven't run into this problem before. Well, not since like, the PS2 days. I think the last time I actually had to pre-order a game was Burnout 3, which is a decade old. Game stores seem to overstock at launch in most cases.

Unless you're talking limited editions and the like, but that would strike me as the point.

 

[Kenneth Leider]

Jim suffers for their sins. Oh why won't they stop their sinful ways!

 

[Brian Tams]

*snip*

Usually (but not always) companies get crap for it not because they're using in-engine footage in place of in-game footage, but because they're being dishonest about it. They'll try and sell the idea that what we're watching is actual gameplay, when its really just in-engine footage cut to look like gameplay. Or they'll dodge the question about whether its gameplay.

Nintendo did not do this. They were honest up front, and that's why they "got away with it." Any company that follows suit will usually not draw the ire of gamers.