For a while, Diablo 4 was everywhere: on billboards, stages, even in a song by Halsey and SUGA. The marketing campaign was frantic, Blizzard spent a ton of money, but was it really getting the effect?
Popular YouTuber Legendary Drops thinks not. In the latest video, he goes into detail about the problem, saying that marketing can ruin games.
Using Diablo as an example, the author says that spending millions on promotion without understanding why and how to do it is pointless and even harmful. How effective are such campaigns in general? Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, was barely advertised (no pun intended), relying mostly on reviews from players and YouTubers. And so she took the Game of the Year award.
But Diablo 4, with its endless advertising, was quickly forgotten among the wide mass of gamers, says Legendary Drops. One of the reasons is that the company “didn’t know who to target the game at.” As a result, Blizzard is now imposing microtransactions to at least somehow compensate for the costs.
Legendary Drops believes that over-promotion dulls the effect on players.
Organic audience growth and engagement is what truly drives a game to success, making good games sell themselves.
I think one of the problems is that not only are they trying to attract the wrong audience, but they don’t realize that they could spend a lot less money by making a better game or more interesting marketing content for customers.
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