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Persona Community Thread |OT8| Coming Winter 2014

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.
 

VegiHam

Member
I actually really like the fact there's little stuff out there.

I really hate it when a game has, like, ten screenshots out but someone looks at them and figures out a pattern and before you know it people are posting in Persona threads like "well we've seen four of the total nine party members, who are the other five" and I'm like "I didn't want to know the total number of party members" and people are like "but it's public knowledge based on measuring the difference in spacing on two shots of the menu, it's not a spoiler." I'm worried that by the time we get a trailer people will be guessing correctly who the final boss is based on a french literature reference in the background and it will ruin it for me. I just wanna look at a trailer and go 'huh coool' and wait for release. :(

Smash is exactly what I don't want here. Knowing who's in Smash is the reason to buy; knowing who's in Persona 5 is spoilers.
 
P5 could be my favorite game of all time (and there's a good chance it will be) and I would still despise the marketing. The thing about P5's marketing is that it's also completely lacking in things that are seen as good as well.

That's true.

My hope right now is that they at least do some of the good stuff between now and release. It'd make up for a lot of their missteps these past couple months, at least to me.
 

Sophia

Member
That's the thing, though: Of course everyone likes a big ol' hype cycle where it feels like the thing they love is a huge event that everyone should care about. We crave validation for our hobbies and interests. What I'm arguing is that, outside of that validation, big marketing cycles for certain games have diminishing sales returns that aren't really calculated in marketing ROI.

There's outliers on both sides, of course. There's games were more marketing would have helped while there's games like Minecraft that basically needed no marketing to catch like wildfire. Problem is, most high-selling AAA games usually have equally large marketing budgets, so it's hard to separate the two and figure out how much it helped.

I've basically been fighting a 5 year campaign to change attitudes in my company about how, when, and where games are marketed. While I've been wrong in a lot of places, there's also been a lot of stuff that has helped my case. People just don't consume advertising in the way that we're used to or the way that we think it works.

Don't get me wrong. I agree with you on almost every count there. That's just personally what I'd like to see because I'm obsessive and compulsive about my hobbies, like most enthusiasts and early adopters. As far as actual marketing goes, I've become a big believer in word of mouth personally. I've seen a lot of cases that may be anecdotal, but suggest that getting people to talk about your product is a bigger influence on sales than anything. Even if that influence is negative, although obviously it's better if it's positive. I think back to things like the Wii, where my cousin was intrigued by my pre-order of it, where my family sat there and watched me play it for the first time., where guests came over and got to try it out personally.

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.

I don't really think you could take Dreams out of your post and repalce it with any old sequel, actually. It's a rather unique game rather different from something more established and putting it in a specific marketing setup could do wonders for word of mouth. Also, while I don't agree with the argument entirely, a big thing people were saying in other threads was that big media events like that weren't reaching out to the extended audience. :p
 

Theodoricos

Member
It's a shame that there's less excitement now, especially when you remember the Persona 5 announcement stream back in 2013 and how amazing that was. Atlus just hyped me up so much with the mere execution of that stream even if we didn't really get any actual footage of Persona 5.

Right now I'm not really feeling like we're anywhere closer to the release of the game than we did before due to the lack of info on the release date.
 

Lunar15

Member
It's a shame that there's less excitement now, especially when you remember the Persona 5 announcement stream back in 2013 and how amazing that was. Atlus just hyped me up so much with the mere execution of that stream even if we didn't really get any actual footage of Persona 5.

Right now I'm not really feeling like we're anywhere closer to the release of the game than we did before due to the lack of info on the release date.

I think that's kind of cool.

For some reason, I inadvertently ignored MGSV up until about a month before launch. Then, for whatever reason, I went buck wild and the hype leading up to it was no different than if I had been paying attention for years. Anecdotal for sure, but it sure was neat not really caring until only a month before.

I just think that the whole argument stems from the idea that "more marketing = wider audience" when I think that's often just a cover for being disappointed that we're not getting the validation and satisfaction we crave. I'm not saying that said viewpoint isn't valid, it's that I just don't think that's where all the anger and frustration is stemming from. The reality, in my opinion, is that we're junkies waiting for our fix, essentially. The fix will come, and when it does, I argue that it'll be just as potent as if it had hit half a year ago.
 
I don't really think you could take Dreams out of your post and repalce it with any old sequel, actually. It's a rather unique game rather different from something more established and putting it in a specific marketing setup could do wonders for word of mouth. Also, while I don't agree with the argument entirely, a big thing people were saying in other threads was that big media events like that weren't reaching out to the extended audience. :p

You get what I meant to say. Let's say Capcom decides to announce RE7. Obviously it would get more exposure if it were announced during Sony's Pre-TGS conference next week rather than announcing it in, say, some Resident Evil event that Capcom decided to do in January.

Anyway, we both said what we wanted to say so I see little point in continuing the discussion.

There is no Resident Evil event in January. That was just a hypothetical example.
 
Remember earlier this year people talked about how the Persona trailer ended up getting so many views and compared it to the newest Final Fantasy trailer, saying that Persona had a decent shot at overtaking FF's crown as the premier JRPG?
 

FluxWaveZ

Member
I really like the way Persona 5's been marketed and I think what they've done with it is going to pay off. Appealing to authority as if that's the only good way to market a game is, obviously, a fallacy, and I've always been a proponent for evidently hyped up and highly anticipated games (outside of the huge AAA machines) to show as little as possible before its release.

There's such a thing as showing too much, and the people who would be dissecting every little bit of regularly released information would be the kind of people who would buy the game anyways.
 

Lunar15

Member
I really like the way Persona 5's been marketed and I think what they've done with it is going to pay off.

I certainly hope it does, but I'm just unsure of whether or not it's intentional.

On FF vs. Persona: Only weird people who need constant validation would really argue about that. People I could care less about, to be honest.
 

Sophia

Member
Think it's irrelevant anyhow. Persona 5 doesn't have much in the way of competition within it's own genre. Other than Fallout 4, are there any RPGs as big name as Persona 5 coming out on the PS4?
 
Think it's irrelevant anyhow. Persona 5 doesn't have much in the way of competition within it's own genre. Other than Fallout 4, are there any RPGs as big name as Persona 5 coming out on the PS4?
Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness for Japan

Tales of Zestiria for USA
 

yami4ct

Member
Think it's irrelevant anyhow. Persona 5 doesn't have much in the way of competition within it's own genre. Other than Fallout 4, are there any RPGs as big name as Persona 5 coming out on the PS4?

PS4's got some RPGs, but nothing big. Star Ocean hits this year in Japan. We've also got Tales of Zestiria coming. Even if you expand out to all Sony platforms, the only other JRPGs hitting this year are Trails of Cold Steel and maybe Sky SC IIRC.

Persona is a long tail franchise which benefits massively from word of mouth anyway. Whether Atlus does a huge marketing push or not, I don't think it'll increase sales all that much long term. The Persona core base will buy it and gush about it and people will pick it up from there.
 

Setsu00

Member
I really like the way Persona 5's been marketed and I think what they've done with it is going to pay off. Appealing to authority as if that's the only good way to market a game is, obviously, a fallacy, and I've always been a proponent for evidently hyped up and highly anticipated games (outside of the huge AAA machines) to show as little as possible before its release.

There's such a thing as showing too much, and the people who would be dissecting every little bit of regularly released information would be the kind of people who would buy the game anyways.

I absolutely agree with this. Final Fantasy XV's new approach of showing seemingly every bit of development progress they've made on the game and the public (read: mainly negative) reception of the ATRs is an extremely good example for this.
 

Sophia

Member
I absolutely agree with this. Final Fantasy XV's new approach of showing seemingly every bit of development progress they've made on the game and the public (read: mainly negative) reception of the ATRs is an extremely good example for this.

I feel like Tabata got the idea from Yoshida's live letters for FFXIV.... and completely missed the point of them. Especially because you're not suppose to show every bit of the development process. Just inform your consumers of what's coming next. >_>;
 

Setsu00

Member
I feel like Tabata got the idea from Yoshida's live letters for FFXIV.... and completely missed the point of them. Especially because you're not suppose to show every bit of the development process. Just inform your consumers of what's coming next. >_>;

Absolutely, yes. The approach just doesn't really work for a single player game and having an entire forum dedicated to feedback before the game's launch is even more stupid.
 

Lunar15

Member
Appealing to authority as if that's the only good way to market a game is, obviously, a fallacy, and I've always been a proponent for evidently hyped up and highly anticipated games (outside of the huge AAA machines) to show as little as possible before its release.

This. So much this.

There's like, no available data on it though. That's what makes it a hard case. AAA games naturally come with AAA marketing budgets, so you can't prove that one really affected the other.

Another great example is the new star wars film. Sure, there's lots of "marketing" going on, what with all the toys and whatnot, but in terms of the actual film we've seen only the vaguest of clips and teasers. Now, of course, the idea here is that Star Wars is going to sell no matter what. But that's the thing, we've never really seen anyone actually act on that impulse. Even when we know a franchise is going to be big, we still market the shit out of it way too early. You get tons of trailers that explain everything and basically give away the whole plot, when it's just not necessary. That's actually antithesis to creating an "event". An event is born through anticipation, and sometimes you can ruin that. Disney has really surprised me with how they've handled Star Wars. I think they're doing a great job so far. Make no mistake, though, we'll get our deluge of marketing and trailers come the fall.

Of course, it differs on the product being sold, the market being targeted, the built-in popularity of the franchise, etc. But I think that when you have something that's already at least somewhat anticipated, less is more. And who knows, maybe i'm wrong. Some marketing guy who's been looking at the data far longer than me probably has the opposite opinion. But as someone who loves niche titles and smaller games, I'm always looking for a way to do more with less and I'm fighting for the concept. Despite working in marketing, I'd love to see more money be spent in innovation than in marketing, and I think the truly creative can find ways to do that.

P5 is a fascinating experiment. I want it to pay off so badly.
 
Absolutely, yes. The approach just doesn't really work for a single player game and having an entire forum dedicated to feedback before the game's launch is even more stupid.

Especially not one that's been in development hell, when your game has been in development for that long you should probably try to avoid giving any impressions that the game is still far from finished and that's the exact impression that people seem to have taken from the ATR stuff.
 
Heard you guys are making a bet on P5 releasing 2015 or getting delayed.
#Team2015

P5 has been marketed really well however I think they missed a massive chance by not appearing on Sony's stage at E3.

One final trailer with a release date and we are set.
 

Squire

Banned
People are way too invested in how P5 is marketed and how big an audience it can reach and whether or not Sony will push it like its this falls stand-in for Uncharted or something.

It's silly. I just want the game to come about and be good. I'm interested in the business of it all too, but ultimately only Atlus should be concerned with that.
 

FluxWaveZ

Member
People are way too invested in how P5 is marketed and how big an audience it can reach and whether or not Sony will push it like its this falls stand-in for Uncharted or something.

It's silly. I just want the game to come about and be good. I'm interested in the business of it all too, but ultimately only Atlus should be concerned with that.

Why? There's nothing silly about it. Discussing the business parts of the industry is just as prevalent in this forum as discussing the games themselves. They're both valid topics, and people will participate in the ones they feel inclined towards and ignore the ones they don't.
 
People are way too invested in how P5 is marketed and how big an audience it can reach and whether or not Sony will push it like its this falls stand-in for Uncharted or something.

It's silly. I just want the game to come about and be good. I'm interested in the business of it all too, but ultimately only Atlus should be concerned with that.

I don't think it's silly. People who are more obsessive/ compulsive will want to know more about specifics and details. Those who aren't will just wait for the game to come out

Only reason why i'm not obsessive over P5 is because i'm still obsessive over P3.
 

Squire

Banned
Why? There's nothing silly about it. Discussing the business parts of the industry is just as prevalent in this forum as discussing the games themselves. They're both valid topics, and people will participate in the ones they feel inclined towards and ignore the ones they don't.

Right, but I do think it's quite a bit silly when the first page of any P5 thread these past few months is almost immediately filled up with anxious posts about the lack of marketing.

I don't think it's silly. People who are more obsessive/ compulsive will want to know more about specifics and details. Those who aren't will just wait for the game to come out

Only reason why i'm not obsessive over P5 is because i'm still obsessive over P3.

Well, yeah? The obsession is what I'm talking about. I get having a healthy interest in the business of things (as I said, I do myself), but you have GAF posters that are probably more worried about how P5 is marketed than actual Sega/Atlus employees and shareholders are. It's a little much.
 
Was looking back at the Persona magazine interview from February and found this part amusing:

We still have a lot left to show, so hopefully people keep an eye on us and wait to see what’s coming up. Chief among those, in fact, are more allied characters that we have yet to show, but I’d say that we won’t be running out of new stuff to reveal anytime soon.

They've done a good job at not running out of things to show since then at least.
 

Sophia

Member
Right, but I do think it's quite a bit silly when the first page of any P5 thread these past few months is almost immediately filled up with anxious posts about the lack of marketing.

I feel like this is where the disconnect in what you're saying is. I look back at the posts on the previous page, and I don't really get the impression of anxiousness. On the contrary, I quite enjoyed the discussion that both Lunar and CrimsonFist brought to the table. Lunar even presented me with a different angle that I had only loosely considered until now.

That being said, I guess I can see how you'd get that impression from reading the main gaming forums here at GAF. There have been lots of criticisms, justified or not, in other threads.

I, myself, am actually pretty confident that Atlus will deliver at TGS now.

Well, yeah? The obsession is what I'm talking about. I get having a healthy interest in the business of things (as I said, I do myself), but you have GAF posters that are probably more worried about how P5 is marketed than actual Sega/Atlus employees and shareholders are. It's a little much.

To be fair, it's not really that different than other games either. We may look at them as GAF posters, but they are customers as well. They are probably worried about the state of the game that they are setting down money and time to enjoy, especially in regards to the release of the localized version. And Atlus has given them reason to worry about a 2015 release, again be it justified or not. :p
 

Lunar15

Member
You know who has really good marketing materials and research? Sony. Obviously I can't show 'em off, but I always find their stuff insightful and actually pretty keenly aware of the different groups within the gaming subculture beyond just "hardcore" and "casual". They somewhat hit on a few of the concepts I mentioned earlier.

I'll echo Inorigo and say that a lot of the worrying about how P5 is being marketed is unfounded and misguided. I'm interested because I want to see how it performs given the unorthodox "strategy", but from a personal standpoint I just want the game whenever they can give it to me. Getting emotionally invested in a company's marketing is really weird, and as I said before, is somewhat born of that big desire to have one's interests' validated. It's tempting, it really is. You want the big marketing push, you want the "event". It's the whole reason for NeoGAF. But sometimes we don't stop and consider all the variables in the equation and we think a game has to be "big" for it to be "important".

That said, I understand the worry as well. A lot of things don't add up. The game's already been pushed back before and we're coming out of several years of complete silence. It's not just the desire for a big event, it's that, in the absence of said event, we're left feeling like something's missing and really all we have to go on is the word of PR, which isn't always the most trustworthy thing. I get it, I really do.

But in looking back, I just don't think that what's going on will affect sales to the negative degree that people think it will, regardless of when it actually comes out.
 

Squire

Banned
I feel like this is where the disconnect in what you're saying is. I look back at the posts on the previous page, and I don't really get the impression of anxiousness. On the contrary, I quite enjoyed the discussion that both Lunar and CrimsonFist brought to the table. Lunar even presented me with a different angle that I had only loosely considered until now.

That being said, I guess I can see how you'd get that impression from reading the main gaming forums here at GAF. There have been lots of criticisms, justified or not, in other threads.

I, myself, am actually pretty confident that Atlus will deliver at TGS now.

To be fair, it's not really that different than other games either. We may look at them as GAF posters, but they are customers as well. They are probably worried about the state of the game that they are setting down money and time to enjoy, especially in regards to the release of the localized version. And Atlus has given them reason to worry about a 2015 release, again be it justified or not. :p

I'm definitely referring to the P5/Atlus threads that pop up on gaming side rather than here. There's a lot of silliness to those threads though (as I'm sure you know), that I don't think you find in the community thread.

And yeah, it's not much different from other games, that's true.

You know who has really good marketing materials and research? Sony. Obviously I can't show 'em off, but I always find their stuff insightful and actually pretty keenly aware of the different groups within the gaming subculture beyond just "hardcore" and "casual". They somewhat hit on a few of the concepts I mentioned earlier.

I'll echo Inorigo and say that a lot of the worrying about how P5 is being marketed is unfounded and misguided. I'm interested because I want to see how it performs given the unorthodox "strategy", but from a personal standpoint I just want the game whenever they can give it to me. Getting emotionally invested in a company's marketing is really weird, and as I said before, is somewhat born of that big desire to have one's interests' validated. It's tempting, it really is. You want the big marketing push, you want the "event". It's the whole reason for NeoGAF. But sometimes we don't stop and consider all the variables in the equation and we think a game has to be "big" for it to be "important".

That said, I understand the worry as well. A lot of things don't add up. The game's already been pushed back before and we're coming out of several years of complete silence. It's not just the desire for a big event, it's that, in the absence of said event, we're left feeling like something's missing and really all we have to go on is the word of PR, which isn't always the most trustworthy thing. I get it, I really do.

But in looking back, I just don't think that what's going on will affect sales to the negative degree that people think it will, regardless of when it actually comes out.

You worded this really well, but especially the bolder. This is what I think when posts about how Sony should be pushing P5 pop up. I disagree, but I get it. I like my "event" releases too. These days I'm content for that to consist of really only a dozen or so people I regularly communicate with online or off though.
 

arue

Member
BfvXnjM.jpg
.
 
Oh my god.

I was on the fourth floor of PQ's third dungeon, and having just saved, I decided to take on the floor's trademark asshole FOE, the
Old Doll.
I forgot
how easy it is to keep boosts going in that battle, because the thing is weak to Cut and Pierce, so I held out quite well--until it cast Mamudoon and killed everyone but Yu and Naoto. Even so, they held out very well, since Yu had Mediarama at the time and they kept getting free boosts every other turn. Then a combination of enemy attacks and Curse damage killed Yu and left Naoto with a boost and like 32 hit points. Obviously I was screwed, so I said "fuck it" and cast Mahamaon with her last breath. IT FUCKING LANDS, I revive everyone with items, and I go on to map the entire SE quadrant all the way up to the shortcut next to the stairs in relative safety and a giant fuck-you to the most obnoxious part of the whole dungeon and my most hated part of the whole game.

I would love to know what the odds of landing that there are, because even with Impure Reach, which I had, it's really, really low.
 
I suspect that the "video" logo means that something will have a trailer at a booth on the show floor, so not having one doesn't stop them from having footage during the presentation.

Although it does make me think that we might not get a trailer beforehand, if it's not going to be on the showfloor, so we might have to wait for the Persona stream rather than the Sony one.

and a few more livestream details: It will be streamed on niconico, there will be a countdown, and it's a three day thing again.
http://p-ch.jp/news/detail/?nid=363

schedule:

17th September:
20:00 Countdown start
21:00 Broadcast start with the stalker club hosts
22:00 Lotus Juice's Backside of the TV radio style show, with Persona music and viewers thoughts.

18th September:
A variety of Persona related content will be broadcast.

19th September
10:00 - 14:00 A countdown program from TGS
14:30 - 15:30 Persona Special Stage

So at least two more countdowns
 
I suspect that the "video" logo means that something will have a trailer at a booth on the show floor, so not having one doesn't stop them from having footage during the presentation.

Although it does make me think that we might not get a trailer beforehand, if it's not going to be on the showfloor, so we might have to wait for the Persona stream rather than the Sony one.

and a few more livestream details: It will be streamed on niconico, there will be a countdown, and it's a three day thing again.
http://p-ch.jp/news/detail/?nid=363

schedule:

17th September:
20:00 Countdown start
21:00 Broadcast start with the stalker club hosts
22:00 Lotus Juice's Backside of the TV radio style show, with Persona music and viewers thoughts.

18th September:
A variety of Persona related content will be broadcast.

19th September
10:00 - 14:00 A countdown program from TGS
14:30 - 15:30 Persona Special Stage

So at least two more countdowns

Here we go again
 
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