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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bishmon" data-source="post: 4125215" data-attributes="member: 56176">But building and timing the buzz is necessary marketing to the mass market crowd, not the hardcore crowd.The largest entertainment product launch in recent memory would have to be Halo 3. It was absolutely huge, and the marketing push in the month before the game was released was ridiculous. Memorable commercials, a dozen different product tie-ins, various launch events with celebrities, etc. But the developers of the game actually let their hardcore fans play the game six months before that. And not just a one-off tutorial level which would be the equivalent of the first-level delve experience, where you've kinda got an idea how the game plays, but there's just too much of the unknown to know what to expect. Instead, they let people play a substantial chunk of the multiplayer portion of the game for a month. Those people then knew with near certainty what the game was like. And they loved it. And they helped build the buzz for the actual product launch with strong word-of-mouth, which was smart because a lot of those people were people who played multiplayer shooters a lot, so they were constantly talking with other people who played multiplayer shooters a lot who might not have been as automatically sold on Halo.That's why I don't understand what WotC is doing. They could be building buzz among the hardcore crowd right now and let them disseminate seeds of buzz to their game-playing friends who might not be as hardcore, which will only strengthen WotC's big marketing push leading up to release with the more mass market crowd. Instead, they're leaving their hardcore crowd in the dark about some major changes to the game, changes some people didn't even think were needed, and are letting a large part of their hardcore crowd go around speculating to their game-playing friends about how bad 4E is looking or how it doesn't seem like it's anything to get excited about. It's poor fan-service, and it's counter-productive marketing.</blockquote>

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