Square-Enix, WORST MARKETING EVER... For the love of God, WHY?!

[Lux_Rayna]

Didn't you once claim it was "ludicrously expensive" for SE to advertise overseas? I'm not sure if you're from the United States, but SE commercials play all the time in the weeks leading up to and after big releases. Games like FFXIII and it's sequel, anything Kingdom Hearts, Deus Ex, yadda yadda, are staples of networks like USA, SyFy and Spike TV, and SE has gone as far as actually being the primary sponsor for major sports events and pro wrestling PPVs.

Maybe it's different in Europe, but here? You see SE all the time on TV, it's probably one of the more common gaming companies you see advertising. Additionally, SE made a significant profit last year; they're not in any sort of dire straights, and in fact are doing quite while right now. I'm just not sure where you have this idea that SE can't afford to advertise, or why you think it's prohibitively expensive to advertise.

*sigh* Because they are making XXIV 2.0 "in the hole". Let's look at XIV first. XIV had so much devoted to development, so much devoted to advertising, and so much in sales. It flopped. So basically most of those advertising dollars went down the drain, and even worse, the negative PR can hurt future sales. Now to remedy this, they more or less had to build a new game from the ground up. That is a LOOOOOOT of money. Period. SE has more to make than just MMORPGS you know? Their company is rather humongous after all. Now when FFXI flopped SE's share prices dropped a LOT, relatively speaking. And they've yet to recover from that btw. Now when share prices drop like that its bad, because that means investors are taking their money out of your company. And that sucks. You need them, thats how capitalism works.

Now understanding this situation, what sense does it make to dump a whole bunch of money into recreating the same game..only to pump just as much money into advertising? Not a lot, considering you're already in negative dollar territory from the last failure of a launch. The goal is to make your profit margin as wide as possible after all. FFXIV 2.0 is already going to have to do pretty phenomenally well to make up for those huge losses. Dumping a bunch into an ad campaign will only make it more difficult for 2.0 to turn green (make up all that lost ground). Especially when your audience doesn't trust you anyway, that means the ads will be less effective.

Clearly the best thing for 2.0 is word of mouth. One, people will believe word of mouth over any ad. Two, word of mouth happens to be free. Three, word of mouth is easy to generate when you already have a core playerbase. Four, small-scale gaming conventions are huuuuge because they are relatively inexpensive, feature quite a lot of people, and any gaming mag/website worth their salt will probably cover it. In other words, they can generate quite the worldwide buzz without having to run overpriced 30-sec spots on international television.

And yes, advertising in the US is very expensive. Obviously Square Enix can afford to do it, but from a business standpoint it wouldn't make much sense in all cases. As far as 2.0 goes, it doesn't make any damn sense at all, which is why they aren't doing it. They will probably run some ads, but not until word of mouth has done its job..and even when it has I highly doubt it will be extensive. It would just be a waste of money, which they definitely do NOT want to do considering how much money XIV lost the company as a whole. I know I sound like SE is some poor little bankrupt company, but that is how they will look at it...every dollar spent needs to have a very definite purpose. If you don't need to spend the money on an ad campaign, don't. The less you advertise, the wider your potential profit margins. Course you need advertising to meet those margins. The best compromise is to use the best advertising available for the cheapest price possible. And here we have word of mouth (best) for absolutely free (or rather cheap). Word?

EDIT: Long story short, they will have to run some ads for the casual disconnected gamer. Obviously. I'm just arguing it does not need to be extensive, and most of their advertising will not come from that.

EDIT2: And honestly I can count the number of SE ads i've seen on one hand. For comparison, I've seen more Star Wars The Old Republic adds in one year than I have seen of SE in my lifetime. Course its probably just the channels im watching. Relatively speaking, SE does not advertise in the US much at all. Just before and after big releases sounds about right to me, which is what I expect for XIV 2.0. But that's not very much, relatively speaking.