The Little Raven
First Post
Scott_Rouse said:
You.
Me.
Bike Rack.
After School.
Be There.
*cracks his knuckles*
Love the Game, Hate the Marketing
- Thread starter Haffrung Helleyes
- Start date
You.
Me.
Bike Rack.
After School.
Be There.
*cracks his knuckles*
Haffrung Helleyes said:
Indeed, they probably did, but sadly, companies cannot run on goodwill alone. I work for a non-profit that helps teachers. We would love to give our books to teachers for free to help them teach kids to read...but we can't not make money. We need to cover costs, and that is harder and harder to do in print, with journals and magazines.
And if you think about it, the marketing has been pretty spot on from a marketing perspective. Posting little bits from the game over the last few months has been inexpensive (much cheaper to post the Pit Fiend on one page then print it on two in every copy of a magazine) and look how much talk time it gets! For free, from WotC's stand-point. The little films...not very expensive, but look how many people they reach.
From a marketing vantage, most of this publicity is cheap, cheap, cheap! Sure, not all of it has engendered the fanbase to the new product, but it has stirred interest and discussion about the product. They already have some of us excited about the new edition.
We know marketing alone cannot sell the product to gamers. We need to see rules, to hear about game play, about style, about how it fits what we want. The goal of the marketing of 4e is to get as many RPGers to pick up the PHB, DMG, and MM as possible to look through them. It's the goal of designers and publishers to make the books and the system good enough to make people want to buy that after perusing them in the store.
I would say WotC Marketing has done a great job so far, with little expenditure, to make the books visible, to keep up interest in the new developements (love 'em or hate 'em, look how many posts they get), and to get people wanting to see the books when they come out. We might not all be ready to scoop in and buy, but won't most of us at least take a look? Just to see what it's all about?
I know I will be.
JohnSnow said:
They are talking about it *on a dedicated fan site*. They have released only one significant bit of crunch (pit fiend). As such, one expects it to be a carefully chosen flagship bit of crunch. The response was mixed.
Maybe its just me, but given the setting, and the ability to choose the absolute *best* foot to put forward, I feel that anything short of overwhelming approval is a failure. I'd hesitate to call an overall forum tone of largely positive (and I might cavil on "largely") a success.
JDJblatherings
First Post
Kid Charlemagne said:
I'm figuring they rolled a 1, for initiative that is...haw haw. I've been seriously underwhelemd by the whole Digital Initiative so far.
This is hard because I see the marketing people trying to do what I think they should be doing but maybe not going far enough.
See, I have a problem with the Wizards Presents books. First up, they're advertizing pure and simple. When my group heard about the book, we were interested in what it has to say but none of us really wanted to pay full price for something that will be essentially useless after July. So we split the cost and are sharing the book. Since we've got it, we've found that we're really not interested in Worlds and Monsters, so we're passing that one over. After all, we don't pay for movie trailers, we pay enough for the movie. And, after July, it'll be useless and probably end up in the trash.
But this is hard because I have to recognize that I'm not in their target market. I'll buy the 4E core books as a given, my birthday's around then anyway. I like what I see in the sneak peeks on the site but I'm debating whether or not to subscribe. It's slightly cheaper than Dungeon and Dragon was but the magazines had several benefits. One, I could read them in bed. Two, I could choose not to buy an issue that I didn't like and thus save my money. With a Gleemax account I have to accept all the fluff articles and pages of discorse on the history of DnD every anniversary and the months were the articles aren't really very interesting... yes, I know they can't all be winners, but with an online subscription I can't 'vote with my wallet'. Maybe the MMO players are desensitized to the monthly fees, but they are one of the reasons I don't play MMOs (the major ones are time and I prefer having friends around).
As I said, I like the sneak peeks, I just wish they'd let us in behind the whys a bit more, maybe explain their thinking a bit better. Races and Classes did this a little but the 'net articles are a little on the confusing side. Letting us in and explaining why they felt they had to do things this way, I think, would help avoid alot of the kneejerk reactions. For example, the Spellplague. We know the fluff, but where's the dev explaining why he chose to do it that way? Another movie example, people love director's commentaries (thanks to DVDs). What was the basis of that design decision?
Contrary to popular belief, audiences do not have the mentality of 8 year olds. We understand the concepts behind games design, we understand that compromises sometimes have to be made. As it is, we're getting fragments of the picture without any explaination of how they fit into the big picture, cast adrift and left to draw our own conclusions. As a result, alot of people's first feelings seem to be "AAARGH! They're destroying the game!" And they might well be, we don't have enough information to say that they're not definitively.
I can understand the doubters, it's only natural. I'm trying to maintain a healthy skepticism and detachment but it's hard. It seems strange to me when i think about it, but playing DnD defines part of my identity as much as my choice of music or reading material. It's my chosen form of entertainment, heck I grew up playing DnD, so it helped define major parts of my life. So how can I, or any of you who have similar experiences, detach myself?
To take the Spellplague as an example, even a paragraph saying something along the lines of: "Yes, we know this is jarring. We know that alot of you have emotional attachment to the setting as it has evolved over 20 years, after all we've worked hard developing that emotional attachment that you feel. But we felt we needed the Spellplague for these reasons:" might have gone down better. An acknowledgement of the audence rather than a faceless corporate fiat.
They don't have to give us crunch or examples necessarily. Just confide in us a little bit on the whys. People will complain for sure, but it's not our job to make 4E. In the end, we don't know all the facts, we don't really know what it's like working inside WOTC (well, alot of us), the pressures. I have an inkling because of my work, but my work's a separate field.
-sigh- I hope I'm making sense.
See, I have a problem with the Wizards Presents books. First up, they're advertizing pure and simple. When my group heard about the book, we were interested in what it has to say but none of us really wanted to pay full price for something that will be essentially useless after July. So we split the cost and are sharing the book. Since we've got it, we've found that we're really not interested in Worlds and Monsters, so we're passing that one over. After all, we don't pay for movie trailers, we pay enough for the movie. And, after July, it'll be useless and probably end up in the trash.
But this is hard because I have to recognize that I'm not in their target market. I'll buy the 4E core books as a given, my birthday's around then anyway. I like what I see in the sneak peeks on the site but I'm debating whether or not to subscribe. It's slightly cheaper than Dungeon and Dragon was but the magazines had several benefits. One, I could read them in bed. Two, I could choose not to buy an issue that I didn't like and thus save my money. With a Gleemax account I have to accept all the fluff articles and pages of discorse on the history of DnD every anniversary and the months were the articles aren't really very interesting... yes, I know they can't all be winners, but with an online subscription I can't 'vote with my wallet'. Maybe the MMO players are desensitized to the monthly fees, but they are one of the reasons I don't play MMOs (the major ones are time and I prefer having friends around).
As I said, I like the sneak peeks, I just wish they'd let us in behind the whys a bit more, maybe explain their thinking a bit better. Races and Classes did this a little but the 'net articles are a little on the confusing side. Letting us in and explaining why they felt they had to do things this way, I think, would help avoid alot of the kneejerk reactions. For example, the Spellplague. We know the fluff, but where's the dev explaining why he chose to do it that way? Another movie example, people love director's commentaries (thanks to DVDs). What was the basis of that design decision?
Contrary to popular belief, audiences do not have the mentality of 8 year olds. We understand the concepts behind games design, we understand that compromises sometimes have to be made. As it is, we're getting fragments of the picture without any explaination of how they fit into the big picture, cast adrift and left to draw our own conclusions. As a result, alot of people's first feelings seem to be "AAARGH! They're destroying the game!" And they might well be, we don't have enough information to say that they're not definitively.
I can understand the doubters, it's only natural. I'm trying to maintain a healthy skepticism and detachment but it's hard. It seems strange to me when i think about it, but playing DnD defines part of my identity as much as my choice of music or reading material. It's my chosen form of entertainment, heck I grew up playing DnD, so it helped define major parts of my life. So how can I, or any of you who have similar experiences, detach myself?
To take the Spellplague as an example, even a paragraph saying something along the lines of: "Yes, we know this is jarring. We know that alot of you have emotional attachment to the setting as it has evolved over 20 years, after all we've worked hard developing that emotional attachment that you feel. But we felt we needed the Spellplague for these reasons:" might have gone down better. An acknowledgement of the audence rather than a faceless corporate fiat.
They don't have to give us crunch or examples necessarily. Just confide in us a little bit on the whys. People will complain for sure, but it's not our job to make 4E. In the end, we don't know all the facts, we don't really know what it's like working inside WOTC (well, alot of us), the pressures. I have an inkling because of my work, but my work's a separate field.
-sigh- I hope I'm making sense.
Vayden
First Post
Hey, Le Rouse! Keep up the good work! It's very cool to see you, Sara, Rodney, Mearls and the rest on the boards. We really appreciate you guys being in contact and answering questions like this. Just recharge those +10 Flame Resistance rings (I'm assuming you're all Paragon-tier marketers and designers) and keep coming by.
Scott_Rouse said:
Quite right. However, aren't such flaps inevitable when you've successfully stirred up a lot interest, but have lagged behind on providing the "consequential" substance that would focus that interest in a productive direction? Not that there hasn't been a fair bit of substance, especially recently, but there's been a lot *more* "stirring-up-of-interest".
Similar Threads
