Coming back to the marketing:
Question:
Who writes the descriptions (both blurb and feature overview) for games (used in the trailers and the store)?
It seems the author provides some lines in regards to the game and CoG will be the one who will handle the full description. This was according to Sera of TWC. I asked her about it because one of the complaints of some reviewers that the description for TWC was misleading. They expect a full fledged detective story but was treated to a romance story.
Upon re-reading the description on Steam, character relationships were mentioned a couple of times so I don’t get why they are complaining about it.
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I don’t know how it’s done for HG, and it may be different for other CoG authors, but with Blood Money I wrote a million different one-sentence blurbs, lots of slightly longer ones for the different stores, and the more paragraphed plus bullet points that you see on the first page of the game. The CoG folks edited them into the Blood Money descriptive text that you see online.
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I’m wondering cause a couple of descriptions can be… misleading (or at least give people a very different idea of what to expect), which, even outside of the whole gender part might affect how well people received the game.
Examples:
Hero Unmasked’s (which I love to bits) trailer/description still manages to mildly throw me off at the line
“rescue the REAL Swashbuckler and marry the mayor before superpowered criminals take over the city”
Because… trying to stop the superpowered criminals, including the big bad Matriarch/Patriarch from taking over the city is not really something that happens. This was weird. I mean if you fail, the King of Diamonds, the only criminal without powers pretty much takes over the city, but…
Or Baroques’
‘You must fight to stay alive long enough hunt down your killers, avenge yourself, and protect the ones you love.’
I betaed this and I was constantly worried about the stats tracking my electricity, assuming that a good part of the game would be little sidequests to recharge. But… nothing like that happens. I’m not even certain if the electricity stat ever actually comes into play
Or Open Season’s
‘Can you win the [show]’ and ‘Enter into one of a ten different romantic relationships!’
You get kicked from the show within the demo and people are still baffled as to who these TEN options are supposed to be.
Now, sure, the first two are subjective, but it might be enough to leave a bad taste in some people’s mouth.
The latter, however, is more on the side of blatant lies, which might piss people off genuinely, and leave a bad impression concerning CoG as a whole (and the less said about the outright scams in Open Season the better)
In short: The descriptions and their bullet points can be weird and misleading, albeit usually not intentionally. But I would not be surprised if a number of people (again, concerning marketing in general) got (rightfully) miffed cause they did not get what they expected.
NOTE: Apologies if this shows up twice, the forum gave me a server error and said I can’t post this cause it is too similar to something I… didn’t post /shrug)
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I think we’re getting off topic–discussions of marketing should probably be moved to their own thread. (Not sure there’s a thread specifically about CoG marketing? There was one a little while back about how to advertise the romance content specifically, but a thread for marketing in general seems like it’d be worth making.)
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Agreed.
Going through a quick check through the forum there have been a couple of threads brushing marketing elements (game length, representatiob, customizability etc), but nothing focused on marketing.
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