Market forces

Advertising is all about implying value. If some hot new game is splashed across the side of a double-decker bus, or teased on the big screen on a Hollywood blockbuster’s opening night, surely it must be something special? The reality, of course, is often anything but. A big marketing drive can be born of confidence, sure. Yet it can equally be done out of desperation.

There’s a hint of the former in how Sega is supporting Judgment (p102), though our happiness at seeing the publisher finally supporting a RGG Studio game is tempered somewhat by all those years it neglected the Yakuza series. This spinoff, a tale of a private detective set in the same fictional corner of Tokyo as its forebear, comes not only with the usual subtitled Japanese audio, but an Englishlanguage voice track too. The only previous RGG game to offer the same was the first Yakuza, back when Sega thought it had the Japanese GTA on its hands.

As Yakuza fans will know only too well, there’s little more frustrating than seeing a publisher hold back on promoting something that clearly deserves it. When we first saw Blood & Truth (p118) at Paris Games Week in 2017, we knew SIE London was onto something. Yet we’ve barely heard of nor seen the game since. An 11th hour promo blitz is deserved, but awareness is a long game, or should be.

Still, you can’t lay all of this at the marketing departments’ door. We’ve been struck by the online conversation around Outer Wilds (p116), a beguiling adventure about the neverending end of the world by which critics, commentators and consumers alike seem to have been taken by surprise, as if it emerged from the ether, fully formed. Perhaps those people should pay more attention – we first brought you word of it all the way back in 2015. And they say that print media can no longer keep up.