I didn't mean to. All EA games are marketed similarly from what it seems like to me - with some getting more attention than others of course. Whether the game's good or bad, it works. I'm sure someone knowledgeable on marketing would be able to speak to this subject a lot better. I was alluding to the contradiction I see in the forums. "Nothing's going to touch Madden's sales, nothing's going to impact Madden", etc. Okay, then why expect the same? People seem to want to make this a direct competition when it isn't. It's a generic game compared to a licensed game. It's a 3rd year game compared to a 1st year game. It's a game from a large developer compared to a game from a smaller dev. So imo expectations shouldn't be the same either. If direct comparisions are going to be made, those are things that should be taken into account - imo.
Is anyone still buzzing over the ton of draft day pics EA released? How many people made the decision to purchase then and there? It's hard to say. I see people see nothing more than a game announcement with a paragraph of info and immediately they say "must buy". It varies. VC put out tons of gameplay movies for NBA2k7 last year starting from E3 - put out a demo early. The previous year's game was mostly good. Very little info for Live, other than a weekly dev blog talking up the game. People still jumped on Live, and convinced themselves the game wasn't that bad and tried to sell others on it.
I'm just throwing random thoughts out - I don't think it's an exact science because there are a ton of factors at work. I do know that pics and movies and such are for us - those that will likely buy/not buy the game regardless of how "late" information comes. Side note - I heard from two separate people yesterday asking me about APF2K8. One was just asking what I knew (he's a Madden current gen fan but we hadn't talked in a while), the other said her son had seen the Gamespot email. I think they could utilize their options more efficiently myself. But I don't think what they do with us, as fickle as we [collectively] are, makes a huge difference. Unfortunately. We've shown we'll buy bad games in droves for whatever reason. We'll buy games with a lot of info, we'll buy games with little info. That's why I say ultimately we as consumers are to blame for this current situation.
Fearing an investor conference call? *sigh*. More marketing for Table Tennis? I think there's FAR more buzz for this game - and I think it's remarkable given this is a generic game. Why is that? Hard to say. I don't know how far away from release Take Two began pushing Table Tennis, but I'd guess given it's limited appeal and smaller stature they didn't shove out tons of info weekly for two months. I think a lot of what's going on is frustration for not knowing solid details. But as I said, I don't think some are taking the situation into consideration. If we're sitting here on July 13th with very little info then I'd agree. If they fired up Football Fridays a month ago, how much would they be able to talk about before it got redundant? Before we tuned out?
I know my thoughts are all over the place and I apologize. As someone else [essentially] said, we're in the speculation business - it helps the day go by. We like taking sides and speculating on what's what. But we've collectively shown that regardless of what a dev does or doesn't do, there's no blueprint to marketing to [this group]