Marketing in gaming

A game needs good marketing to actually be good. When games have bad merketing this can lead to bad sales and the game being left behind for the devolpers to work on something else.

A game I think had pretty bad marketing was Plants Vs Zombies: Battle For Neighborville. This game was the third shooter game in the franchise and was highly anticpated. The game was first announced on the 4th of September on the official Plants Vs Zombies Youtube channel with a short overview video on the gameplay and features. It was also marketed on their socials with teasers leading up to the premire.

It was also announced that on the same day you could buy and play the game as an early version and that they would release more content for the game over the month until the actual release in mid October. If you bought the early version of the game not only would you get to keep it and your progress, but you would also be able to buy it for cheaper so this was a very good deal. The only things missing from the early game were a few gamemodes and maps so this wasn't very different from the October release. However I think what led to this games downfall was the fact they could have annouced it at E3 which was only a few months earlier in June. Both previous shooter games in this franchise were announced at E3s in the past as well as having playable demos. The branding of this new game was a problem too. Popcap studios knew that the fans wanted a "Garden Warfare 3" but they chose to rebrand this new game to be called "Battle for Neighborville" instead which is trying to be different for the sake of being different which confused fans and made them think it was a completely different game when it was quite similar to the games prior. Having the game release on the same day as its announcement may sound like a really good thing to do but the problem with this is that it doesn't give fans enough time to get the hype up. These flaws in the marketing eventually led the game to stop getting updates in 2020 (only a year into its life). They even had lots planned for this game with more characters and maps that were leaked that never saw the light of day due to this bad marketing.