On the marketing of 4E

[Dannyalcatraz]

That's not what I said. I said your claim about advertising was rubbish, and it is. I'm not suprised you jumped to the wrong conclusion, because if it's one thing people in these arguments can't stand, it's the idea that 4e might be just plain better than 3e. Gasp! No! We must keep that idea taboo!

What wrong conclusion?

How does one measure and quantify the "objective betterness" of 4Ed vs 3Ed?

catastrophic's own words
I find it particularly contrived to decide there's some big faux pass involved in trying to improve the game, or daring to suggest that 4e is an improvement over 3e. Rubbish.

To which I responded that it is indeed a faux pas from a marketing perspective to suggest that "4E is an improvement over 3Ed."

Its not that making the effort is the problem- like many others, I was fine with the advent of 4Ed as an idea. I appreciated the effort- I just didn't care for the game's design in reality. I'm currently waiting to see what 5Ed looks like, and will be similarly optimistic and hopeful when 6, 7, and 8Ed revisions get announced in their time.

Its the argumentative and authoritarian tone of that assertion- 4Ed>3Ed- as a matter of fact that is the problem. 4Ed isn't better, its different. And continuing to assert 4Ed>3Ed as fact doesn't do WotC's marketing plan any good...nor this thread.

Are you saying advertisers don't compared their product favourable to competitors?

No. Not at all. That, in fact, is one of the primary ways of differentiating your product from the product of a competitor.

...And previous models of their own products? Don't be ridiculous, of course they do.

Yes they do, but they do so with caution and precision if they do it right.

Done poorly, not only do you damage sales of the product you're rolling out, but you risk damaging sales of entire product lines that may be related to that product.

And how this is done varies from product to product.

The American auto industry is currently criticizing their own past products in their ad campaigns...because historically speaking, they have been producing lower quality products than European and Japanese competitors. They're able to criticize themselves now because they've substantially closed the quality gap on many models, and they need to let the buying public know this. That's a selling point.

However, you won't see an insulation manufacturer talking about how their older products contained a lot of asbestos, and now they don't. The closest they'll get is saying their new stuff is asbestos-free...not that it used to contain the cancer-inducing fiber.

The tobacco companies only mention the cancer link because they have to.

Adversiting doesn't make subjective criticisms? Subjective claims? That's what adversiting is.

Some advertising does make subjective claims. And if one company makes a bold subjective claim that is objectively testable, you can bet that the competition will trot out commercials that show evidence to the contrary. That's how the whole Coke & Pepsi "taste test" advertising campaigns got started...which resulted in the creation of New Coke.

But an amazing amount of advertising is based on quantifiable data. The 2 main ways of competing in a market are with quality or price. Most advertising on price is obviously fact based. Something is either cheaper or not.

Quality gets more difficult. Depending on each product, certain characteristics are going to be objectively quantifiable and some will be subjective- known in the field as "fluff" or "puff" language.

But even the objectively quantifiable may be measured in many ways- and which way matters differently to different consumers.

You have created a fantasy world where advertisers work purely in terms of objective facts and that simply isn't true.

No- that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that its extremely bad advertising practice to criticize your own product on subjective grounds, not that advertisers never use subjective statements.

Snapple's current campaign subtly compares their new products to their old. "The best stuff on Earth just got better." is the tag-line.

"The best stuff on Earth" is clearly subjective. Its called "puff" or "adspeak" in the biz. But its also not a claim that can be objectively challenged...because its simply too vague. Its also their original tagline.

"just got better" isn't. Why? Because the "better" is referring to the quality of their new ingredients- fresher produce, better QC, and other objectively verifiable facts underly that claim...and they're only really explicitly emphasizing the quality of their ingredients.

It is obliquely critical of their own product, to be sure. But its done properly. They're not ticking off, point by point, how Snapple 2009 is better than Snapple 1999, and that the 1999 stuff wasn't good at all. Their ads just call out they're using superior ingredients to what they did in the past.

The patches for games address known issues- software conflicts, freezes, backdoors, bugs, etc.- or again add or improve the program's functionality in objective ways with increases in world size, more realistic & challenging AIs, smoother graphics and so forth...and are also rarely part of an actual advertising campaign.

Not only are many of these claims at least somewhat subjective, but they're obvious examples of where an improvement is made over a previous iteration, and these improvements are promoted.

Subjective how?

How are patches for bugs, conflicts etc. not objectively better? How is it subjective that a claiming its good that a MMORPG gets a size increase due to a patch?

Smoother graphics? That can be verified by direct comparison.

Realistic & challenging AI? You mean that its not objectively discernible that a new AIs for Commandos acts more like RW Commandos?

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

Do they get released? Yes. Do they get announced to the people who bought the software? Yes.

Do gaming or computer magazines talk about the patches? Sure.

But did WoW have Ozzy & Mr T talk on TV about the latest patch? No. Patches are like FAQ updates. The word gets out, but its not part of the advertising budget.

 

[catastrophic]

Admin note: this has been addressed. In the mean time, we're leaving this up as a good example of how not to post at ENW. Confrontative insults aren't a great way to get anyone to pay attention to you. ~ Piratecat

I'm not going to go back and fourth with you when your argument is absurd and clearly untrue. I see you're backpedalling a bit in your latest post, but it doesn't change the fact that your criticism of WOTC's marketing is absurd.

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.

*It is not a faux pass from a marketing perspective to claim the new model is better than the old model. It is certainly not considered bad form for RPGs and similar games to talk about how they've improved from edition to edition- some fans may disagree, but no matter what you may claim, 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'.

*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'.

*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. When DOW2 got a major overhaul of it's balance and gameplay, the developers advertised it with videos and branding and even gave it a fancy name based on the game's setting ("there is only war"). And no, you can't brush this aside by drawing yet another arbitary line between 'promotion' and 'awareness'.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

How come Paizo didn't get raked over the coals given that they EXPLICITLY said things like "The Bard sucks"?

Because it's objectively true.

 

[Cyronax]

Because it's objectively true.

Ah .. well bards only suck if you let yourself be pulled into the Stormwind Fallacy. A suboptimal choice shouldn't deter a truly good roleplayer


Anyway, Paizo hasn't been criticized as much because they're just the smaller companay in the mix. They aren't the ones forcing the change, and Paizo was merely doing what a lot of 3PP did when working on their own OGL games -- tinkering with the basics of 3.5.

C.I.D.

 

[DaveMage]

Honestly it was some of the designer comments that got under my skin w/ regards to what 4e was all about. Two quotes or series of quotes come to mind.

"Of course, these planes don't hold a candle to 2E's hilarious Plane of Vacuum, which is truly the antithesis of fun.)" - Chris Perkins

And from the D&D Podcast #16

"Guardinals - Bullet in the Head." - Mike Mearls
"What's a guardinal???" - Dave Noonan
"They're outsiders from the plane of neutral good!" - James Wyatt
"There's a plane of neutral good? Which one was that again?" - Dave Noonan
"...Bytopia? Maybe?" - James Wyatt (giving the wrong answer, which apparently none of the other guys knew was wrong)
"I'm probably going to offend a bunch of Planescape fans, but Bytopia sounds like a place where you'd go to buy a gimmicky hamburger..."
*insert laughter and jokes cracked about the plane*

What's funny is that the page for the podcast actually went back and added a printed correction for them botching what the NG plane in the Great Wheel was, and what Bytopia was.

That's...sad.

Oh, well. Those that agree with them can have what they deserve - 4E.

 

[roguerouge]

How come Paizo didn't get raked over the coals given that they EXPLICITLY said things like "The Bard sucks"?

Simple. MANY people got to playtest beta rules for a possible bard and debate changes in a public forum where the designers participated. Some of those changes were incorporated in the final product, but the most important impact was that core customers felt heard by the process of creating the revision. Contrast this with the closed system of playtesting that you had with 4E and you have a key difference.

 

[Hussar]

While I don't know if better marketting would've made 4e more played, I think it did contribute a lot to the edition wars.

WotC told me in no unkind terms that the way I liked to play was bad, that I didn't know what fun was, that my enjoyment of certain races was bad, that my enjoyment of certain classes was bad, that settings I liked were bad, that the fluff I enjoyed was bad, and that some of the things I've done while DMing is bad.

That's not how you foster a big welcoming community.

/snip

Look, every single one of those blogs and whatnot are still online. Can someone please show me where WOTC went out of their way to either be overly critical or insulting of anyone's playstyle OR 3e? Can anyone actually back that up with quotes other than "Oh, remember that thread?"

I mean, when we had that "cloud watching" blog post, people freaked. People went ballistic. How dare they say that we don't have the full picture.

Then cooler heads went back and read the blog and asked for exactly what was so bad about the blog post.

I remember the reply - critics actually accused WOTC of going back and revising the blog post - of editing the blog post after the fact. When it was proven to be DEMONSTRABLY false, people kind of slunk away and the issue died. (It was demonstrable due to Way Back Machine and the fact that the "objectionable" part of the blog was actually quoted on En World and then nothing objectionable was found.)

Critics of WOTC were going so far overboard as to claim that it was more likely that WOTC was editing its own blogs to change their message than perhaps people were being a tad thin skinned and reading things that weren't really there.

To which I responded that it is indeed a faux pas from a marketing perspective to suggest that "4E is an improvement over 3Ed."

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.

 

[Mallus]

That's...sad.

I think it's funny, though Bytopia is obviously the Elemental Plane of Rush Fans. To each is own, but the profusion of stuff in the Great Wheel --at the intersection the Para-elemental Planes of Salt, Smoke, and Tasty Peppers lies the Para-Elemental Demi-Plane of Paprika-- always struck me as a cosmology designed by a group of undergraduate engineering students sharing their first joint, which is to say, as lacking a certain mythic power and lyricism.

Oh, well. Those that agree with them can have what they deserve - 4E.

The 4e Cosmology is okay as a starting point. My friend and I improved it quite a bit for our homebrew (ah, modesty...).

As for the marketing of 4e... I thought it was fine. It created an awareness of and interest in the product in me. I didn't find it insulting in the slightest. What I did find was a surprising amount of thin-skinned response on the Internet (of all places), claiming the new design/marketing team wasn't showing the proper amount of deference for all that came before. Where they supposed to suggest the new product was wholly unnecessary? That no improvements were made? That so few changes were made that it's practically the same product users already owned --hmmm, it worked for Pathfinder, so maybe... Anyhow, color me confused.

 

[ggroy]

Simple. MANY people got to playtest beta rules for a possible bard and debate changes in a public forum where the designers participated. Some of those changes were incorporated in the final product, but the most important impact was that core customers felt heard by the process of creating the revision. Contrast this with the closed system of playtesting that you had with 4E and you have a key difference.

Wonder how 4E would have turned out if it had an open playtest similar to Pathfinder.

Or for that matter, would attitudes be different if WotC had said back in 2006 that the "Book of 9 Swords" was a possible design for 4E.

 

[Harlekin]

Where a lot of criticism of the marketing arose was really surprising to me. The designers did something pretty unprecedented in game design in blogging about, discussing, previewing, and explaining the changes and development of the edition in the months leading up to release. And this is where they took the most constant flak. Every word was analyzed, developers were attacked for perceived "trashing" of 3e (where explaining why a change was made amounted to crapping on 3e). I don't know how bad it was perceived from their end, if we won't see that level of openness with 5e. I think we might in that much of this openness has continued through DDI and all the preview articles and Design & Development articles.

I think this is the key point. Wizards were trying to communicate openly with us about their thoughts, goals and intentions. They did not add much filtering or other corporate BSing that is the hallmark of a "good" marketing campaign. Thus, there was enough honesty in their statements that readers who wanted to get offended had material, and, as Umbran mentioned, the Internet is the perfect place to amplify such perceived offense.

So for the next edition, we can expect corporate BS again, as we obviously cannot handle honesty. Yay.