One argument I made during my lecture at GDC this year (video of a nearly identical lecture available here) was that downloadable game developers and publishers need to start putting much more energy into marketing and PR way earlier in the development cycle of their games. I was talking about XBLA, PSN and Wiiware, but you could apply this to any video game ecosystem, really. As I was catching up with developers and publishers over the course of last week, this issue came up over and over again (i.e. they were on the verge of launching a game that hadn’t been promoted in any significant way) so I thought it worth writing about.
I have no way to incontrovertibly prove that I’m right about the importance of long-lead PR, but I believe that plenty of public information is available to back up my assertion. For example, the large majority of really big, known hits on XBLA: Braid, Castle Crashers, Worms, both Street Fighter games, etc, are games that were revealed to the public well over a year before they were launched (well over two years, in the case of some games.) They were covered by the press and discussed on active consumer forums repeatedly before their release. Very few big hits were announced in just the few months (or worse yet, weeks) leading up to the game’s release, with a couple of notable exceptions that Microsoft put some big PR and marketing muscle behind and/or were released back in the “golden days” of XBLA (when every game was doing quite well.) More importantly, some very good XBLA games that received absolutely zero advance promotion have failed to meet their developers’ expectations.
