On the marketing of 4E

[thecasualoblivion]

If you prefer the mechanics and design philosophies of a game that is being replaced by a new edition, any promotion of that new edition, its mechanics, and its design philosophies is likely to be distasteful to you.

 

[The Little Raven]

And no...patches are NOT promoted. Expansions are, on occasion, but not patches.

Blizzard has been making trailers for their patches since 2007, some of which are incredibly awesome (Black Temple trailer, Zul'Aman trailer). While they don't get TV air play, they do get released to gaming community sites. On the Lich King behind the scenes DVD, they indicate that their patch trailers are their machinima team's primary purpose.

 

[Freakohollik]

Count me in as one who thought Wizards was trashing 3.5.

Looking back, I believe the problem was that the designers would talk about parts of 3.5 that they claimed weren't fun. They would then go on to explain how the faulty mechanic in question would be better in 4e. This approach backfired on them because for a long time after the 4e announcement and certainly during most of these previews, we didn't really know what 4e was going to be like or how big of change 4e was going to be. They were trying to explain the new system to us, but were only giving us small details rather than the big picture. So we weren't really getting a sense of how 4e was going to be better. All we were getting was a sense that the 4e designers didn't like 3.5.

I bet if we went back and read those previews now, they'd make a lot more sense and would seem less insulting to 3.5.

 

[Primal]

That's how some 2e fans I knew felt about 3e's marketing.

I didn't; I liked 2E a lot, but I felt it wasn't a coherent, unified system at all. For example, Initiative was D10 - minus modifiers, skill checks D20 under your stat minus/plus the proficiency value, save categories were weird ("Wait, this trap uses the Rod/Staff/Wands save? Why?"), Thac0 minus AC to hit, odd bonuses from stats (e.g. Dex 16 vs. Str 16), percentile rolls for Thief Skills, and so on.

Just my opinion, but I think they did a great job with 3E by eliminating all those weird subsystems from the mechanics. In any case I think they didn't use the same kind of condescending tone WoTC used in 4E marketing. YMMV, of course.

 

[The Little Raven]

Just my opinion, but I think they did a great job with 3E by eliminating all those weird subsystems from the mechanics.

This was called homogenization by 3e detractors at the time.

The more things change, and all that...

 

[Primal]

This was called homogenization by 3e detractors at the time.

The more things change, and all that...

NOOooo, it wasn't! You're misremembering it all now!

(Yeah, I guess it was... I don't think the changes were marketed as aggressively as "bigger, better and more cool" back then, meaning that the designers knew they were taking huge risks by those changes and tried to point out why the changes made playing easier; with 4E, they really went out of their way to make certain 3E mechanics look like a pile of lame houserules that resulted in nobody having fun)

 

[billd91]

A lot of anecdotal reports said that people were getting shouted down for that sort of thing.

If they were, I didn't see it. There were a lot of cases in which someone would post their suggestion and a bunch of people would disagree or relate the Paizo line that skill points wouldn't be changed. I've seen that called "shouting down" plenty often on the internet, but that's the result of someone being WAY over-sensitive to not winning the debate.

Any "shouting down" was no worse than 4e fan attempts to bat back the homogeneity claim in this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/264420-removing-homogenity-d-d-4th-edition.html. And it was certainly no worse than your average message board full of gamers - for better or for worse.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm not going to go back and fourth with you when your argument is absurd and clearly untrue.

By what measure? How am I being untruthful? What backpedaling?

Remember, you opened this can of worms with:

…could WotC have marketed or promoted 4E in a way that would have led to a different perception/opinion than what has come to pass?

The answer is an unequivocal "yes"- and the first step is not throwing your own product under the bus.

You're just drawing arbitary lines and creating a set of contrived rules in order to juge WOTC a failure while, for instance, denying that Pazio falls under the same criticism even though it obviously should.

No, I'm not.

I'm not calling WotC a failure- its clearly not. They have multiple successful product of which 4Ed is one.

I'm saying they used a flawed advertising campaign in the launch of a single product line, and it cost them customers & sales.

And I'm dead on about Paizo.

They don't own D&D, and never did. At most, they held a license to produce certain supplementary material. That license was not renewed.

Now they have released an RPG based on elements of a discontinued RPG, but containing certain changes that distinguish it. That makes them a competitor to WotC.

Pathfinder is competing in the same market as 4Ed, and it means different rules apply. The kid gloves are off. They can get away with the advertising equivalent of bloody murder and they won't engender the same kind of backlash as WotC did. By making fewer mechanical changes, the baseline perception will be that they didn't "hurt poor 3Ed" as much as WotC did. That the game they're using as their inspiration was one of the most popular in RPG history gives them a further pass.

It is not a faux pass from a marketing perspective to claim the new model is better than the old model.

It is if you don't have hard data to back it up. And in certain markets- not the RPG game market- it may even get you sued.

If you're just relying on subjective standards to make such a claim, you're playing with fire.

It is certainly not considered bad form for RPGs and similar games to talk about how they've improved from edition to edition

Again, it depends on how that critique is done. Claims that it takes less time to stat out a monster is potential gold and is pretty easy to verify. Claims that combats will be more fun is subjective and shouldn't be made.

the retro faction of an edition war is not the majority vote it pretends to be, and it's not going to be mollified by 'different not better'.

That isn't what I suggested at all. I said:

First, we have to stop using the word "better" in this context. Your "better" is someone else's "different" and another's "ruined."

You don't tout your new game mechanic as "better." You don't say its "different, not better." You present the new mechanic neutrally, and talk what positives it brings to the table, not how it compares to the previous way of doing things.

IOW, imply, don't preach; flies & honey, and all that.

By telling people in your ad campaign that the new way is "better," you're asking others to respond "no, its not- I LOVE that way of doing things." By avoiding value-laden language in the press releases, you invite the customers to try things out and decide based on their experience with the game rather than trying to fight past their (possibly erroneous) ideas about the game based on your tone.

*Advertising relies on subjective factors at least as much as objective data, and frankly it tends to rely on non-objective data a great deal more. If you aren't aware of that, welcome to planet earth, where you need to drink coke to enjoy life and 'life' is a synonym for 'carbon'.

Yes, advertising relies on subjective factors- I never denied that.

What I'm saying is you generally avoid the subjective when you're rolling out a product designed to replace your own product.

That's part of how Coke (since you bring it up) got into a world of hurt with New Coke. They had objective data: the New Coke recipe beat both the original Coke and hard-charging market competitor Pepsi in taste test after taste test.

However, their ad campaign talked about how much "better" New Coke tasted than the original recipe...and their installed base said "#%$#@^, no it doesn't!"...even with years of research data showing that it did. Calls for boycotts popped up. Their customers had been told what they should enjoy and that the old stuff just wasn't up to snuff anymore... and they weren't having it.

Coke badmouthed their own product and paid for it with lost market share. New Coke was fine as another Coke product, but it wasn't acceptable as a replacement. (BTW, its still in production as Coca-Cola C2.)

Had Coke instead said New Coke beat Pepsi in taste test after taste test- as Pepsi had said of their product vs original Coke- and completely avoided that it also KO'ed original Coke as well, the story would have ended much differently.

*Oh, and patches are increasingly promoted and certainly advertised. For instance Valve promotes it's updates to tf2, going as far as to release short animated films and using other promotional methods to raise awareness of the product, such as splash pages on a part of steam normally used only to advertise upcoming products.

On this, I stand corrected.

So, a better marketing strategy would have been, "Here's 4e, it might not be better than what you're playing right now but, please buy it anyway"?

Hey, I know I don't have a marketing degree, but, that doesn't sound right to me.

No, that's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying you promote it by saying "Here's 4Ed! Please notice that we're doing _______, which means you can now do _______!!! And the new _________ rules means that __________ never happens. Isn't that great?"

You stay positive and don't badmouth your own product. You get one type of psychological reaction if you point out the really cool consequences of a new rule mechanism. You get an entirely different one when you denigrate prior product explicitly and directly. Even if you're slaughtering a sacred cow, you don't highlight that fact- you let the consumer figure it out for himself after he's purchased the product.

When 3Ed press releases talked about certain mechanics being counterintuitive- which they did...because some were- I heard constant complaints about "needless changes dumbing down the system" from gamers in the stores I frequented. One even went so far as to point out how the unification of the stats system (very intuitively and intelligently bringing the bonuses from Str in line with other stats) changed the math of combat...with a spreadsheet. He didn't buy a 3Ed book until early 2006, and his first 3.5 product in mid 2007.

 

[Fifth Element]

Craft skills are lame, talking to villagers is lame, lawful good paladins are lame, aasimar are lame, gnomes are lame, the Great Wheel is lame.

I believe the request was for actual quotes as to what was said, not for your recollection or interpretation of what was said.

 

[Fifth Element]

Listen to any podcast featuring Erik Mona. And then (re)read Dan Noonan's old "The clouds are moving, 4E is coming, and you fans can do NOTHING about it! Wuhahahaha!"-blog entry.

Spot the difference?

As pointed out earlier in the thread, I think a re-read of that blog post is in order for a lot of people, in the "why was this supposed to be such a horrible thing to say again?" kind of way.