For as much as I like to expound on the virtues of gaming as an artistic medium, I am aware that it is, first and foremost, a business. Artistic they may be, games are products that are meant to be bought and sold. That’s not a bad thing; in fact, a good marketing push can ensure that a game makes it to its best possible audience, one that will appreciate it on its intended merits. Heck, there have been plenty of underwhelming games over the years that still did well thanks to strong marketing.
Unfortunately, not every game gets strong marketing. As with any other business, the process of advertising can be confusing and volatile. Audience mismatches are made, money is wasted on half-baked publicity stunts, or a game might just not receive any marketing at all. This has resulted in more than a few games that we recognize today as slam dunks, but went completely under the radar in their eras due to consistent marketing failures.
10 Yakuza (2006)
GTA, It Was Not
Way back in the early-to-mid-2000s, Grand Theft Auto was the undisputed king of PS2 games. As a side effect of this, if you released a game with crime as a central theme, it was going to draw comparisons automatically. The very first Yakuza game released in Japan around this time in 2005, where it was a smash hit. Following this, Sega tried to bring it west the following year, and given the aforementioned automatic response, tried to lean into the GTA comparisons. This was a bad idea.
While Yakuza did well in Japan, it was because the game’s central conceit was well-understood on its home turf. Japanese people know about the yakuza and what they’re about. On this side of the pond, though, people were expecting car chases and bank robberies a la GTA, and very much did not get that. The game didn’t do terribly, garnering modest praise from critics, but it certainly didn’t move the needle.
With the benefit of hindsight, we understand what went wrong here, because nowadays, Yakuza, or rather, Like a Dragon, is a hot-ticket IP in both the U.S. and Japan. It was mostly the release of Yakuza 0 really leaning into the franchise’s distinctive vibe that finally broke the GTA curse.
9 Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE
The Crossover Nobody Asked For
Making a standalone crossover game can be exceptionally tricky because it has to hit the middle of a very particular Venn diagram of interests. For instance, I don’t know where the crossover is between fans of Fire Emblem and fans of Shin Megami Tensei, and if you add idol culture on top of that, you have quite possibly the most pinpoint niche product ever devised. That’s what happened with Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE which, by the way, was also a Wii U exclusive, which narrowed its scope even further.
I don’t know for certain how well the game was marketed in Japan, but here in the U.S., it got maybe one, extremely vague announcement trailer, and a promotional poster showing a spattering of Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei characters alongside the game’s cast. The game didn’t even get its actual title until about two years after its initial announcement, and by then, nobody could even recognize it as a crossover game anymore.
Tokyo Mirage Sessions is retroactively recognized as one of the Wii U’s better games, and the release of the Switch remaster helped to get a few more eyes on it. Though, thinking about it, the marketing wasn’t particularly good for that remaster either…
8 Custom Robo
Any Marketing At All Would’ve Been Nice
The Custom Robo franchise is another example of an IP with street cred in Japan, yet nothing to speak of out west. Technically, the series started on the N64, and I only had passing knowledge of it thanks to the inclusion of a couple of Custom Robo trophies in Super Smash Bros. Melee. When I spotted the GameCube Custom Robo on the shelf at my local Blockbuster in 2004, it was thanks only to that passing knowledge that I thought to give it a try.
The 2004 Custom Robo, known as Custom Robo Battle Revolution in Japan, was the first game in the series to have an English release. If there was any particular advertising for this game, I was not made privy to it. No commercials, no general magazine ads; according to my research, there were some spreads in Nintendo Power, but neither I nor anyone I knew had a Nintendo Power subscription, so clearly that didn’t help.
To this day, I am the only person I personally know who has ever played Custom Robo, and that’s a shame, because it’s a lot of fun. I guess it could’ve been worse, though; from what I hear, the only other western release, Custom Robo Arena on the DS, somehow got even less advertising.
7 Titanfall 2
Squeezed By Multiple Factors
The original Titanfall was reasonably well-received for its cool FPS giant robot gameplay, though certainly not to the extent of the biggest franchises in the sector like Call of Duty and Battlefield. If EA wanted Titanfall 2 to really stand out amongst the crowd, it would need to double up on its marketing efforts. Instead of doubling up, though, EA opted to half-ass.
Titanfall 2 made a few good moves in its advertising, particularly releasing gameplay trailers that properly showcased the high-flying, frenetic pace that made the game fun. However, a handful of good trailers unfortunately don’t make up for the general lack of presence the game had in the zeitgeist at the time. This was particularly disastrous because the game was slated to release between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, which completely muscled it out of the FPS scene.
Let me put it like this: one of the best things about Titanfall 2 is its short, yet snappy single-player campaign. Titanfall 2’s presence was so miniscule, I didn’t even know the game had a campaign until years after the fact.
6 DmC: Devil May Cry
Didn’t Endear Itself To Fans
A reboot or reimagining of pretty much any established gaming IP is already a hard sell from the jump. DmC: Devil May Cry, edgy reimagining of everyone’s favorite wacky woohoo pizza uncle that it was, had its work cut out for it, but with a gentle touch, fans could see that it was still the kind of high-flying action gameplay the series was known for. We did not get that.
One of the most infamous bits of pre-release buzz around this game came during GDC 2013, where Ninja Theory Visual Art Director Alessandro Taini showed a presentation detailing how they decided on their new design for Dante. The slides felt rather condescending in tone, decrying everything he thought Dante “was not” while showing a bunch of pretty generic designs for what Dante “is.”
DmC’s iffy sell was a combination of this condescending design sensibility mixed with similar vibes in advertising, like they were “fixing” a series that wasn’t actually broken. It’s a fun game, but it’s not Devil May Cry, and fans still choose not to acknowledge it as one.
5 Earthbound
Nintendo Of America Didn’t Get It
Earthbound is very much one of those games you have to “get” to enjoy. It’s incredibly strange and quirky, mixing humble suburban locales with off-beat sci-fi, but there’s a lot to love about it if you’re in that particular strike zone. Apparently, whoever was in charge of marketing the game in the west was not in that strike zone, because it’s clear they didn’t know what to do with it.
Earthbound didn’t have much in the way of western marketing prior to its release, with its only major magazine spread in Nintendo Power being a large scratch-and-sniff image of the character Master Belch with the caption “because this game stinks.” I guess the idea was that they were trying to lean into gross-out humor, but putting aside the fact that that humor isn’t really indicative of Earthbound’s overall tone, in what universe does telling your readers a game stinks make them excited about it?
Earthbound was a huge hit in Japan, the tenth bestseller of 1994, but in the States, it came and went with the fanfare of a wet fart. Maybe it’s unreasonable for me to lay the blame for our lack of English Mother 3 on that magazine ad, but I’m gonna do it anyway.
4 Beyond Good & Evil
Ubisoft Had Bigger Fish To Fry
2003’s Beyond Good & Evil is still frequently cited as one of the most tragic commercial failures in gaming history. Most people who have played the game love it, but it just never found its way to a proper audience. Some gaming marketing failures can be attributed to external factors, but in this game’s case, the blame lies solely at Ubisoft’s feet.
Ubisoft employees and execs of the time have gone on record saying that they simply didn’t know what to do with Beyond Good & Evil, marketing wise. It was a good-looking game, and it was fun to play, but they didn’t have a good grasp on whom the intended audience was and couldn’t get a central game plan together. They might’ve thought harder about it, but the game was sandwiched between two of Ubisoft’s biggest releases of the time, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the latter of which was getting a monumental marketing push that sucked up all of the company’s time and resources.
Rather than a great game with its own merits, Beyond Good & Evil largely persists as that one thing Ubisoft wishes we’d stop bothering it about. Or at least that’s the impression I get, and the reason Beyond Good & Evil 2 still hasn’t manifested.
3 Prey (2017)
Mismatched Tone
Within a large gaming company, moreso if the developer and publisher are separate, there can be severe disconnects between a game’s actual development team and the marketing department. What the developers wanted to highlight about a particular game’s mechanics and tone may go by the wayside if sales feels like sticking to tried and true strategies, which is what ultimately fried 2017’s Prey.
Anyone who has played this exceptionally good immersive sim shooter can tell you that it’s generally a very quiet, methodical affair, encouraging open-ended exploration rather than pitched combat. However, just about all of the game’s trailers and marketing presented it as a bombastic sci-fi shooter in a similar vein to something like Halo. All the marketing focus was on action setpieces, of which there were actually very few in the real game.
It didn’t help that this action-focused drive extended to pre-release preview builds sent to critics and influencers, all of whom went in expecting high-octane action and came out lukewarm. The sales department wanted so badly to capitalize on current gaming trends that they completely shirked what was actually good and novel about Prey.
2 Psychonauts
I Was The Only One Who Knew About It
2005’s Psychonauts was the very first game produced by Double Fine, the company Tim Schafer established following his departure from LucasArts. I still vividly remember catching a commercial for this game while watching TV on vacation with my parents late one night. I was instantly captivated and knew I had to play it, but apparently, I was the only kid watching at the time, because no one else knew about it.
It’s no secret that the behind-the-scenes process of Psychonauts was fraught with disagreements and disconnects, from the team working in a rented warehouse to the ill-fated partnership with Majesco for publishing rights. I can’t find much in the way of concrete details on the game’s advertising, or indeed, any details, which leads me to believe that the game’s only consistent means of marketing were those aforementioned late-night commercials.
The game was received very well critically, and it still maintains a place of honor in my heart if not one else’s, but for the vast majority of players at the time, it just… wasn’t on their radar. I guess nobody can remember to build a grand opening sign on a restaurant when half of the inside is on fire.
1 Brutal Legend
EA And Schafer At Odds
Speaking of Double Fine, perhaps one of the most infamous instances of game/marketing mismatch came about prior to the release of its heavy-metal inspired RTS, Brutal Legend. Notice how I specifically pointed out that the game is an RTS in that sentence; that’s more than EA bothered to do.
In pretty much all of the game’s advertising, including the demo released on Xbox Live, it was shown as a traditional hack and slash game with a heavy metal aesthetic. All you’d be doing is pummeling enemies with a giant battleaxe and zapping them with guitar solos, at least as far as any of us were led to believe by literally every piece of marketing. You can imagine our collective surprise, then, when everyone bought the game, only to discover an hour in that you had to command units and attack enemy encampments.
The way I’ve heard it, Tim Schafer wanted to be upfront about the RTS stuff in the hopes of fostering a competitive scene for the game, but EA insisted that doing that would kill the game’s sales and went for the action angle instead. Yeah, because nothing endears a game to its audience like full-on false advertising.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
