So marketing? What's the problem here? Should they have spent it advertising on radio?
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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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.
This is true, but one thing I noticed with AC Shadows is that there were a LOT of no-name streamers posting reels with fake hype over the game. It was a little egregious and came off as more than a little desperate.
Without seeing what you've seen, that honestly sounds more like a symptom of the platform, current internet trends, and algorithm gaming than it sounds like a cheesy viral marketing campaign
Generally speaking, algorithms on these sites don’t serve me a ton of videos with no views from creators with no followers, en masse. With AC shadows, I was suddenly inundated with these videos, on multiple sites, without ever having looked anything up about it, exclusively by streamers that nobody is watching.
Or just excitement at getting "exclusive" early access as a small streamer. If you don't know there are thousands of others, it'd feel like an opportunity to make it big.
My buddy is a little streamer (gets maybe a few dozen viewers) and he got early access to it as well. Although he doesn't add any fake hype, he's just a very good hype man.
For real. EA spent north of $10M on streamer sponsorships for the Apex Legends launch and that was like 7 years ago.
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
Money well spent: Grummz got told the fuck off on twitter lol
I think the only influencers that would matter in terms of direct sales would be Streamers and VTubers
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.
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.
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.
I agree! I mean why would coke still produce ads if they weren't working. Everyone knows about coke, but they still have ads everywhere
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.
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.
Good games can still fail, great games can have the luxury of let people do the marketing for them.
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