Son Of Sparda
Member
To be fair, these situations are nowhere near identical. Dreams is something that definitely requires showing it off to a new audience to get it. It's like the Wii in this sense; you can't really talk about it, you have to see it. In contrast, Persona 5 is not only an established genre but also an established franchise. What's important is how you get people to talk about it, and in this case the livestreams have actually worked out pretty well for Atlus.
Well, Dreams was just an example. You could take Dreams out of my post and replace it with any other sequel and the point still stands the same. When you want to get more attention from people outside of your fanbase you should showcase your game in big events.
Yes, right now we are talking about it but we are already fans so of course we do. What's important is getting people outside of Persona fanbase to talk about P5 and that's something that Atlus has failed in achieving. I know this cause almost none of my friends talk about Persona 5 and they are just as much into gaming as I am.
Yeah, it's been pretty awful for sure. There's this rhythm to game marketing that usually goes like this:
Game is announced ---> Light marketing ---> More Marketing (release date?) ---> Repeat of 2 or 3 ---> Heavy Marketing ---> Game releases
But P5's marketing has been sterile and disjointed. There has been no energy or enthusiasm outside of the PVs(the second of which wasn't even officially released worldwide). Nothing to consistently keep us excited or thrilled. The only thing driving us right now is our faith in P-studio's ability to deliver a terrific game, but you know what? It's not enough. It's not enough to just have a "great" game. Having a "great" pre-release is extremely important as well. Games like Super Smash Bros excel at this; the turnover between Smash Bros's announcement and release is usually pretty long, but the actual process of waiting wasn't too bad. In fact, it was fun. It was fun partaking in all those discussions, theories, fanart, personal stories, etc. It was really fun, and it's a damn shame there's been none of that with P5.
"But Smash is a fighting game not an RPG!"
Yes, but that shouldn't preclude P5 from having decent marketing. Catherine got it right. Persona Q got it right. Persona 5 didn't get it right.
I respect the people who prefer this strategy, but I emphatically disagree with the idea that P5's marketing has been good in any way. The only upside is that when AtlusUSA enters marketing phase, I know for a fact that it'll be awesome (I still remember those awesome Ultimax emails from Atlus Faithful).
I completely agree with everything you said here.