Has SEGA's marketing of their games been terrible lately?

[Rabbitearsblog]

So lately, it seems like SEGA has been marketing some of their games pretty badly, most notably, Sonic Frontiers.  So, what do you think?  Do you think that SEGA's marketing for their games has been terrible lately and that they need to improve their marketing strategies for their games?

I think that SEGA's marketing has been a bit poor in regard to Sonic Frontiers.  There's a lot of controversy surrounding Sonic Frontiers online because of how SEGA marketed the game.  First, they only showed a gameplay that was an early build of the game and they and IGN didn't mention this in the first gameplay and they didn't mention it until much later.  Also, the marketing hasn't been explaining what the game is all about.  Like, we still don't know what the actual story for Frontiers is or what other levels Sonic will be in in this game.  There are ways that SEGA could have handled the marketing for Sonic Frontiers better like actually wait to have finished gameplay before sending it out to IGN or any other media outlet or just explain the full story of the game in the trailers, so that viewers will know exactly what they are getting into.

An example of a trailer that I thought was done pretty well was the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie trailer where Paramount showed the viewers exactly what was going on with the movie and showed us some action pieces that looked pretty impressive.  Now, I know that this is a movie example and not a video game example, but it still shows that SEGA could make a trailer enticing for viewers by just adding in better gameplay and showing the audience what the story is overall.

[mayday2592]

Today's Sonic Central showed off how bad Sonic Team is marketing atleast, and not much else. IDK about anyone else, but still shots and a generic rolling teaser don't excite me in anyway for the upcoming animated content. 

[Solister]

I'd argue Sonic Forces marketing was even worse. I did end with the impression they teased nothing about the game, many people paid for the game, only to know how it looked like and were ultimately disappointed.

I believe much could have been solved if they went directly showing what the game was about, and didn't kept all that secret and little to no information. Also believe they hyped too much as "the next best game since Colors and Generations" to something like "Here's a mainline game until we have something better to show off".

Frontiers, at least, we have a solid look on what the game is about, and we can state "it's bad". I still think it lacked a more concrete trailer, I have the impression they are hiding a lot regarding it, and consequently, I've read many theories and people will start building hype for more, for something that's not true (We still haven't seen Eggman, we still haven't seen any Sonic friends (except for Knuckles which didn't tell us anything) and I've even seen people saying the field is only the first scenario of a much bigger game).

But yeah, I'd have taken much more a solid trailer today, and then let all this gameplay stuff for November/October.

However, I can't really think of a great trailer either. Sonic Mania perhaps? Even Sonic 1 movie trailers had its flaws, telling the entire movie in 5 minutes.

[Kuzu]

Actually I'm starting to think its just a Japanese thing.

 

Nintendo tend to also dripfeed their games too.

 

The only difference is that Nintendo has more goodwill on their side

 

[Rabbitearsblog]

43 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

Actually I'm starting to think its just a Japanese thing.

 

Nintendo tend to also dripfeed their games too.

 

The only difference is that Nintendo has more goodwill on their side

 

Did they also showed little trailers when Breath of the Wild came out?

[Kuzu]

Well, to give context. We still don't know shit about Breath of the Wild 2 and it's been announced for a few years now. 

 

That's an even longer time than Frontiers.

[Jay_Senju]

Sega's marketing has been trash for a while now.

[jungle_penguins]

I was like lol whatever until they mentioned a Tails costume in Fall Guys without showing the costume, now that's going too far.

[PC the Hedgehog]

Sonic's marketing has been bad for many years now, since at least Sonic 4: Episode I. Remember the hype they built up before revealing a friggin' tree?

[Rabbitearsblog]

Is SEGA's bad marketing just for the Sonic games or has it been this way for their other games like the Yakuza series?

[SIXTH-RATE SOMA]

To give them some credit, they DID just pay for a month of exclusive coverage by one of the bigger gaming outlets in the business. 

I think the answer, broadly, is that like the games themselves the results are varied and unpredictable. Generations and Mania really nailed their marketing push, Forces and Lost World less so. The armchair analyst in me would say their marketing gets worse for worse games because they have to sell you on a game they don’t have real confidence in, but still want to try to polish it as much as they can. A lot of the times developers and the like are painfully aware when they’ve made a subpar game, but everything is so far along that it’s impossible to do anything but try to sell what you have.

[Rabbitearsblog]

3 hours ago, SIXTH-RATE SOMA said:

To give them some credit, they DID just pay for a month of exclusive coverage by one of the bigger gaming outlets in the business. 

I think the answer, broadly, is that like the games themselves the results are varied and unpredictable. Generations and Mania really nailed their marketing push, Forces and Lost World less so. The armchair analyst in me would say their marketing gets worse for worse games because they have to sell you on a game they don’t have real confidence in, but still want to try to polish it as much as they can. A lot of the times developers and the like are painfully aware when they’ve made a subpar game, but everything is so far along that it’s impossible to do anything but try to sell what you have.

So in the case of Sonic Frontiers, them showing the early draft of the game in marketing instead of the full finished  product is a result of the game being bad?

[Zoomzeta]

To answer the post's question. Yeah, kind of. 

On 6/7/2022 at 9:07 PM, Kuzu said:

Well, to give context. We still don't know shit about Breath of the Wild 2 and it's been announced for a few years now. 

 

That's an even longer time than Frontiers.

But we have an idea of what the goal of the game is (Beat mummy Ganondorf I presume). And since it's the sequel to Breath of the Wild, we already have a basic idea of how it will generally play. 

[Zoomzeta]

19 hours ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

So in the case of Sonic Frontiers, them showing the early draft of the game in marketing instead of the full finished  product is a result of the game being bad?

Who knows? Even the best of games have failed making a profit cause marketing doesn't know how to best market and highlight their selling points. 

[Rabbitearsblog]

4 hours ago, Zoomzeta said:

Who knows? Even the best of games have failed making a profit cause marketing doesn't know how to best market and highlight their selling points. 

Do you think with the odd marketing of Sonic Frontiers, SEGA might change up their marketing team at some point?

[Zoomzeta]

57 minutes ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

Do you think with the odd marketing of Sonic Frontiers, SEGA might change up their marketing team at some point?

Hard to say with this company. 

[batson]

I honestly dont keep track modern video game marketing enough to know how things tend to be done, but specifically in the case of Frontiers I'd say it's pretty bad. Showing of those long ass sequences of Sonic fighting an enemy by doing the same attacks over and over... It just makes people yawn. It definitely made me yawn.

But then again, maybe that's just cause the game is genuinly boring to look at (thus probably also boring to play) no matter how you choose to show it of in marketing.

[GeAr-DX]

To be honest, I don't thing that it's horrible.

In Forces it was because they said that you would face Shadow and Chaos, and you never face then. But after that, it wasn't bad.

With the actual Frontiers polemic I need to say, it's just because it's Sonic, if it was one of the protected franchises everyone would be saying that the game still in production and stuff.

Almost nothing of the game was shown, people need to calm down and wait.

[sassytassie]

Absolutely. There was nothing about the Frontiers Teaser Trailer that got people excited for the game. They could've really wowed us I'm sure, but they chose to make it so slow and boring looking. Entire marketing team should be fired tbh lol.

[sassytassie]

On 6/10/2022 at 8:04 AM, batson said:

I honestly dont keep track modern video game marketing enough to know how things tend to be done, but specifically in the case of Frontiers I'd say it's pretty bad. Showing of those long ass sequences of Sonic fighting an enemy by doing the same attacks over and over... It just makes people yawn. It definitely made me yawn.

But then again, maybe that's just cause the game is genuinly boring to look at (thus probably also boring to play) no matter how you choose to show it of in marketing.

I legit almost fell asleep watching it. The music didn't help either.

[Rabbitearsblog]

On 6/13/2022 at 1:22 AM, ART-DX said:

To be honest, I don't thing that it's horrible.

In Forces it was because they said that you would face Shadow and Chaos, and you never face then. But after that, it wasn't bad.

With the actual Frontiers polemic I need to say, it's just because it's Sonic, if it was one of the protected franchises everyone would be saying that the game still in production and stuff.

Almost nothing of the game was shown, people need to calm down and wait.

Well, it seems that we saw a bit more from the Nintendo Direct of Sonic Frontiers than what SEGA showed us.  It's kind of sad that Nintendo has better advertising for Sonic than SEGA has.

[Kazhnuz]

Well, except the voiceover (which I'm annoyed there isn't a version without, I want to hear the music), most of the stuff we see in the trailer are stuff given by SEGA, so I'm not sure it's wasn't part of their weird plan of "let's just put more bits progressively". Just that we were finally getting somewhere where it was interesting. I mean, yes Nintendo showed us that, but the decision of what could be shown, and what was given by Nintendo was certainly by SEGA xD

The smaller "trailer" format was better than the big gameplay montage, tho.

[Rabbitearsblog]

6 minutes ago, Kazhnuz said:

Well, except the voiceover (which I'm annoyed there isn't a version without, I want to hear the music), most of the stuff we see in the trailer are stuff given by SEGA, so I'm not sure it's wasn't part of their weird plan of "let's just put more bits progressively". Just that we were finally getting somewhere where it was interesting. I mean, yes Nintendo showed us that, but the decision of what could be shown, and what was given by Nintendo was certainly by SEGA xD

The smaller "trailer" format was better than the big gameplay montage, tho.

Yeah, that's what upsets me a bit. SEGA should go all out with their trailers, not show so little at a time.  That's just going to cause the audience to not be so interested in the product.

[GeAr-DX]

3 hours ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

Well, it seems that we saw a bit more from the Nintendo Direct of Sonic Frontiers than what SEGA showed us.  It's kind of sad that Nintendo has better advertising for Sonic than SEGA has.

But who makes the trailer isn't Nintendo, it's Sega. They just comment and put it in the direct.

[Rabbitearsblog]

2 hours ago, ART-DX said:

But who makes the trailer isn't Nintendo, it's Sega. They just comment and put it in the direct.

I am a bit confused about why they just waited until now to put out the best clips for the game when they could have done that in the very beginning.