How Ubisoft spent $2.1M on influencers to secure the launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows
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You could cry couldnt you, what a colossal waste of money. Just make a good game, spend the cash there, word will get around.
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Schedule 1 paid...
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I know it's cool to hate on this game, especially with it being so mediocre, but to me the number is fairly meaningless by itself. I wonder how that 2 million budget compares to other large releases ( say Starfield, since it's pretty clear that bethesda also pumped a lot of money into the "gaming press")
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You could cry couldnt you, what a colossal waste of money. Just make a good game, spend the cash there, word will get around.
The industry is full of dead studios that made good games. Marketing does work and is necessary, but I'm not sure much you can say this marketing campaign was successful given the heavy lifting Assassin's Creed as a brand was already doing.
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You could cry couldnt you, what a colossal waste of money. Just make a good game, spend the cash there, word will get around.
Really good games flopped before because they weren't marketed well. Marketing is budgeted for productions of any size, and influencer marketing in general is very effective for something like videogames. Larger amounts were spent on TV ads, or printing campaigns.
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I know it's cool to hate on this game, especially with it being so mediocre, but to me the number is fairly meaningless by itself. I wonder how that 2 million budget compares to other large releases ( say Starfield, since it's pretty clear that bethesda also pumped a lot of money into the "gaming press")
I believe its production budget was pegged at between $250m and $350m.
So this particular item in the marketing budget is less than 1% of the development costs.
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So they spent advertising money on freelance shills. Ok.
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You could cry couldnt you, what a colossal waste of money. Just make a good game, spend the cash there, word will get around.
Good games can still fail, great games can have the luxury of let people do the marketing for them.
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So they spent advertising money on freelance shills. Ok.
Sponsoring streams isn't even close to the same thing as hiring shills
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Really good games flopped before because they weren't marketed well. Marketing is budgeted for productions of any size, and influencer marketing in general is very effective for something like videogames. Larger amounts were spent on TV ads, or printing campaigns.
Such as…?
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Such as…?
Prey (2017)
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There are some confused people in the comments, it's industry standard to sponsor streams/have brand collaboration/twitch drops. Every company does it, and 2 million dollars is not much at all. their advertising budget is at least 20x that much, probably more.
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Such as…?
I guess modern examples are Psychonauts or Prey (2017). Hundreds of games are released every week. There will be some gems, we'll just never know. Among Us was one of those games before it got successfull by pure chance.
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You could cry couldnt you, what a colossal waste of money. Just make a good game, spend the cash there, word will get around.
Given the vitriol against Ubisoft (I'm not commenting on how justified it is), obviously they need to do something to counter it. The anti-woke crowd are an incredibly noisy minority.
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I believe its production budget was pegged at between $250m and $350m.
So this particular item in the marketing budget is less than 1% of the development costs.
I haven't found a source for this number when I looked for it. The best I got was a finance blog saying "experts say" without saying that they were progenitors of the reporting or not. Valhalla had a budget about half of this, so it would surprise me if Shadows was that much more expensive.
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There are some confused people in the comments, it's industry standard to sponsor streams/have brand collaboration/twitch drops. Every company does it, and 2 million dollars is not much at all. their advertising budget is at least 20x that much, probably more.
For real. EA spent north of $10M on streamer sponsorships for the Apex Legends launch and that was like 7 years ago.
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I just wish companies would stop releasing games to streamers only. It does nothing but piss me off when I see someone playing a game, find it interesting then find out it doesn't even exist to buy yet .. no demos, no test play versions no nothing..just coming soon.
Makes me not want to play it anymore
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I guess modern examples are Psychonauts or Prey (2017). Hundreds of games are released every week. There will be some gems, we'll just never know. Among Us was one of those games before it got successfull by pure chance.
I really don't think Ubisoft needs to advertise a new Assassins Creed game beyond a few ads here and there, and chatting with some journalists. Spending a ton of money to allow people to play it ahead of time on stream just dilutes the experience for anyone that intends on buying the game.
Seriously, the last thing I want is for the start of a new game to be spoiled for me by some streamer.
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I really don't think Ubisoft needs to advertise a new Assassins Creed game beyond a few ads here and there, and chatting with some journalists. Spending a ton of money to allow people to play it ahead of time on stream just dilutes the experience for anyone that intends on buying the game.
Seriously, the last thing I want is for the start of a new game to be spoiled for me by some streamer.
Then avoid the streamers? I'm sure the marketing experts employed by Ubi know what they're doing. I'm also done defending that crappy company.
