A Tale of Two Trailers
The trailer is misleading. I know when Assassin’s Creed Unity is released, this isn’t the game I’ll get. It will be about movement and daring escapes and history and spectacular set pieces and drama. That’s the game I want to play.
But marketing plays a role in game development, especially at the level of multi-million dollar AAA games. And if the studio gets the sense that non-stop-bloodshed is what the audience wants, they will ensure that’s what it receives. Only if we speak up, will the studio look at its audience differently. Until then, they will act off the rapturous applause they receive at E3 when a someone’s head explodes like a watermelon thrown off a 7-story building.
If you’d like an example of a trailer that conveys a different marketing method, look no further than the history-focused vignette Ubisoft ran yesterday in Europe. It hints at fictional conspiracy theory near the end, but overall it’s a fine primer on the history of the French Revolution. Maybe Ubisoft has divided their marketing, targeting different audiences with different trailers. Maybe this is them having their cake and eating it, too. Marie Antoinette would be proud, even if she never said anything about cake and that idiom is English.
Fantastic piece by Plante.
The two trailers mentioned, in respective order:
Revolution Gameplay Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNfenWTCXg
Inside The Revoltion