![]() ![]() Drew McCoy, the executive producer of the game, cautioned that this relationship can easily break down when the balance between marketing insight and development direction are out of balance. Having marketing embedded with the development team may not work in all instances, however. It also may set up future characters coming to the game. For the first time since the launch of the series, the team included a character reveal vignette as the main trailer which revealed that APEX has a story with mysteries that have not yet been solved by the community. McCord himself has commented that he couldn’t “…think of any other game that has gone through such hijinks,” and I think that statement is fairly accurate. ![]() In an interview with Dotesports, Respawn design director Jason McCord indicated that once players data-mined Revenant out of the game, they created Forge and left a trail for players to find as an exercise in misdirection. However, with this season, the team at Respawn surprised players by announcing a character (James “The Forge” McCormick, a cybernetically-enhanced MMA Fighter) that was immediately murdered by the season’s real new character, Revenant. For games like Rainbow Six Siege and Overwatch, the rollout consists of a trailer for new characters and/or a new season/year of content. In order to get me back into the game, it took some heavy subversion of the typical “hero shooter” or battle royale content marketing roll-out. The team at Scholarly Gamers recognized APEX Legends as a runner-up in their 2019 Game of the Year deliberations. I fell off after about a week, but tried the game despite not being a huge online shooter fan and left with a positive outlook: mission accomplished for the marketing team. It got me to try the game to see the its unique-at-the-time “pinging system”, solid networking and great core gameplay loop. The game’s marketing worked because it relied on showing, not telling. Outlets spoke highly of the game’s launch which relied on the element of surprise, good messaging in light of EA’s missteps with Star Wars Battlefront 2, and influencer/streamer marketing the team paid $1M to get Ninja to play the game on stream, for example. When the game launched as a free-to-play project in February 2019, APEX hit 50 million players within a month. It was a game that was started before Respawn’s acquisition by Electronic Arts, a game that no one expected from Respawn, and a game that started with an absolute bang right out of the gate. When the team’s take on the genre didn’t quite work with the speed and maneuverability of the player characters in Titanfall 2, the game was broken out into its own franchise with different movement and hero characters. The Launch of APEX LegendsĪPEX Legends, a game developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts began its life as a multiplayer mode for Titanfall 2 called Titanfall APEX. This feature breaks down Respawn’s marketing successes while speculating why their team has been so successful. Yet, APEX Legends breaks through, and has done so multiple times. ![]() My gaming echo chamber just doesn’t talk about them: I usually stick to a small set of outlets and podcasts to get news and never venture outside of it. In the past five years, the only shooter that I have engaged with heavily has been PUBG during the summer of 2017. ![]() I am typically a very solitary video game player most online and multiplayer games have never managed to grab me and keep me playing for long. To keep players coming in and coming back, you have to break through the noise. This applies to both in-game content and even subsequent marketing content. With this style of content rollout, your game risks going to the well in the same way for so long that it stops catering to a mass audience. Games in this style may not ask for an upfront investment, but a lot of them rely on a continuous cycle of new, sometimes paid content. Having consumers pay for your game is even tougher due to the advent of free-to-play games that offer a dearth of content for no pricetag. In 2020, purchasers of video games are among the savviest and most critical consumers out there, so getting them to pay attention to your game is a harrowing proposition. Marketing video games, like many other categories of products, used to be a much simpler proposition. ![]()
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