In retrospect, perhaps Respawn's choice to launch without marketing was really an attempt to avoid having the public's impression of it be crafted by EA's marketing department.
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What was EA thinking with that Knockout City ad?
- Thread starter Camjo-Z
- Start date
In retrospect, perhaps Respawn's choice to launch without marketing was really an attempt to avoid having the public's impression of it be crafted by EA's marketing department.
You know those mobile game ads that present completely different gameplay from the actual game? It's like they accidentally made one of those.
It felt like a pretty typical trailer you see for a variety of mobile games roll as ads on YouTube. We're not the target audience for the trailer's format, I suspect.
I don't think it's really worth wasting your time thinking about it.
I don't think it's really worth wasting your time thinking about it.
The thing is, I think it's the other way around.
WE aren't the target audience of the game, but the trailer looks much more interesting than the thing it's suppoesd to advertise.
It's as if they were showing a nice Steak, but then when you get to the actual thing it's just a patty they took off of a Big Mac.
oh, and the game has a closed beta running 10am-11pm ET this Saturday Feb 20 and Sunday Feb 21 (same hours, both days). I'm hopeful that Velan has an actual good game here, even if EA is steering the publishing ship. more info:
www.ea.com
Knockout City | Welcome to Knockout City
www.ea.com
I haven't seen this ad in like a decade, lol - and it's pretty obvious why it's using the conflicting artstyles so I feel it works even if it's taking the piss
says a lot about the game itself unfortunately
it's one of those cases where it only works if you hit. cause you look real dumb when you don't. and they didn't. shame we never got Blur 2
I wasn't really excited about this game either way, but I at least *got* how the premise of a bunch of parody characters could make an interesting cast for an online hero shooter setup... then they show the actual characters in the game and they're just generic humans? It was such a weird choice.
This would be a much more interesting game if they just had the Drawn Together style cast from the ad. I mean, it's not out yet, so maybe it'll still be good, but just seems like a missed opportunity.
This would be a much more interesting game if they just had the Drawn Together style cast from the ad. I mean, it's not out yet, so maybe it'll still be good, but just seems like a missed opportunity.
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The trailer would've been fine if the characters were actually in the game.
Such a bizarre strategy knowing they arent though.
As someone who has done marketing I'd love to have been in the room when this decision was made.
Such a bizarre strategy knowing they arent though.
As someone who has done marketing I'd love to have been in the room when this decision was made.
"A game we paid for is too boring. What can we do to remedy this?"
"Pay for an ad that has absolutely nothing to do with the game"
"BRILLIANT"
Give me a game about the princess, not whatever that genericassed, F2P, battle-royale looking mess was.
I feel like I'm backwards compared to most of this thread. As soon as the trailer started and I saw super generic video game soldier sitting down for an interview with Fortnite-looking text describing his super generic name, followed by super generic WoW orc, my brain entirely tuned out. It wasn't until they actually started showing the gameplay and hinting at some of the mechanics that I actually woke up a bit and realized there could be sonething interesting there.
I don't particularly like the art style for the actual ingame characters either, but the idea of a wild team dodgeball combat game with fake-outs and trick shots sounds cool on paper to me. I want to try out the beta this weekend at least.
I think I get what they were going for with the trailer in trying to show it's a game with wide appeal and not quite like other common multiplayer games, but they spent so much time on the unrelated, bad humor compared to pitching the game's unique qualities that it all feels like EA stepped on its own feet here. The characters became the main focus of the trailer, which means you either like the characters and lose interest in the game for not actually including them, or you dislike the characters that by the time the game is actually shown, you're primed for it to be boring or generic. It's a loss either way.
If the problem was that the ingame characters look boring, then fix that and focus there instead of trying (badly) to distract and wallpaper over it. Knockout City has a neat concept that it feels EA lacks confidence in for what it is.
I don't particularly like the art style for the actual ingame characters either, but the idea of a wild team dodgeball combat game with fake-outs and trick shots sounds cool on paper to me. I want to try out the beta this weekend at least.
I think I get what they were going for with the trailer in trying to show it's a game with wide appeal and not quite like other common multiplayer games, but they spent so much time on the unrelated, bad humor compared to pitching the game's unique qualities that it all feels like EA stepped on its own feet here. The characters became the main focus of the trailer, which means you either like the characters and lose interest in the game for not actually including them, or you dislike the characters that by the time the game is actually shown, you're primed for it to be boring or generic. It's a loss either way.
If the problem was that the ingame characters look boring, then fix that and focus there instead of trying (badly) to distract and wallpaper over it. Knockout City has a neat concept that it feels EA lacks confidence in for what it is.
Weeeell, its not an EA game, its an indie game EA picked up, big difference.
And yeah, watching it, it seemed obvious that the marketing team and the game team had nothing to do with each other, at all. This happens a lot with big studios and even more with EA where the game team is making the, you know, game and the marketing team, which is a whole other division within EA, does whatever they think they need to do to market the game.
And yeah, watching it, it seemed obvious that the marketing team and the game team had nothing to do with each other, at all. This happens a lot with big studios and even more with EA where the game team is making the, you know, game and the marketing team, which is a whole other division within EA, does whatever they think they need to do to market the game.
I too was expecting some kind of Drawn-Together mashup of wildly different games and art styles. The game itself seems like it could be fine, but pretty straightforward.
The marketing team did a good job, I guess! That aspect caught my attention.
The marketing team did a good job, I guess! That aspect caught my attention.
They thought: " let's make something that will getting people talking about the game that is pretty generic all things considered"
And guess what...
And guess what...
Ninjala is extremely downloaded cause it's free. Pretty sure a large chunck of players abandoned it and there's at best a pretty core audience still playing. Just checked my followings on Twitter and all humans talking about it have abandoned it.
So just for fun and because why not, I decided to comb back through the trailer, and divided up the time in seconds to see how much time is spent in the trailer featuring the interview characters compared to how much time is spent actually showing the game and its mechanics.
Turns out, if you leave off the 9-ish seconds off at the end of the trailer that just shows the logo and platform availabilities and such, the trailer spends about 65 seconds on the interviews, and 45 seconds showing actual gameplay or even the game at all. So we have a 59-41% split.
The trailer spends more of its time focusing on things that have literally nothing to do with the actual game, be it in terms of gameplay, art style, or characters. How could they have ever thought this would be a good way to pitch the game to people when the marketing team itself doesn't seem like it has confidence in what Knockout City actually is? It'd be like advertising a new game about golfing in space by making a trailer that focuses on a spy driving a sports car around a winding mountain road while speaking in the vaguest of terms about space travel. Who the hell greenlit this?
It also continues to surprise me how many people I've seen saying they'd rather be more interested in a game about the interview characters, since outside of Princess Charm's nice pixel animations all of the rest of them are literally just as generic as the style that actual Knockout City is being criticized for. If they used a wider variety of lighting styles or polygon counts or whatnot then the idea of a "style mashup" might be interesting, but again it feels like Charm was the only character that had any kind of a style that I'd consider unique from the rest.
(I will give them credit for the name "Max Splints" getting a chuckle out of me though.)
Turns out, if you leave off the 9-ish seconds off at the end of the trailer that just shows the logo and platform availabilities and such, the trailer spends about 65 seconds on the interviews, and 45 seconds showing actual gameplay or even the game at all. So we have a 59-41% split.
The trailer spends more of its time focusing on things that have literally nothing to do with the actual game, be it in terms of gameplay, art style, or characters. How could they have ever thought this would be a good way to pitch the game to people when the marketing team itself doesn't seem like it has confidence in what Knockout City actually is? It'd be like advertising a new game about golfing in space by making a trailer that focuses on a spy driving a sports car around a winding mountain road while speaking in the vaguest of terms about space travel. Who the hell greenlit this?
It also continues to surprise me how many people I've seen saying they'd rather be more interested in a game about the interview characters, since outside of Princess Charm's nice pixel animations all of the rest of them are literally just as generic as the style that actual Knockout City is being criticized for. If they used a wider variety of lighting styles or polygon counts or whatnot then the idea of a "style mashup" might be interesting, but again it feels like Charm was the only character that had any kind of a style that I'd consider unique from the rest.
(I will give them credit for the name "Max Splints" getting a chuckle out of me though.)
it's not surprising at all. when our options are poop and shiner poop, people are gonna pick the shinier poop
Now that's a solid concept for a game reveal trailer, generating some conversation around a new IP, especially on a Nintendo platform during a Nintendo event, and standing out
the ad worked wonderfully. people are talking about the game, theres fanart about the misplaced character, people remember that an otherwise easily skippable dodgeball battle royale that would be glossed over exists and are talking about it. will it last? probably not, but it will surely last longer than any straight ad they attempted
don't think this is gonna count as any exposure is good exposure. this primarily creates negative discourse, and not even the "just how bad is the game" kinda discourse that would motivate some to try it.
I'm not seeing any negative discourse outside of here. And this isn't a "better to be hated than being forgotten" scenario, it's a "people know what i am instead of lumping me with all the other thousand of battle royale games nobody gives a second glance". There was another BR-esque game in the same direct nobody is even mentioning
OP
OP
Like you said, they spent well over half the runtime of the trailer introducing us to a bunch of intentionally generic parodies who display well-defined personalities and some amusing camaraderie, meanwhile the gameplay for Knockout City featured a bunch of unintentionally generic avatars displaying no personality whatsoever. It's no surprise that people are going to get more attached to the more interesting concept, especially since the princess character failed at her job of being generic and ended up being the most memorable part of the ad.
a quick twitter search gives me a lot of fan art of the princess character and relatively little of the game itself. though it also seems like the beta is just now starting
I didn't care for the set up commercial or the actual game but I also agree the actual game looked way worse than the premise. The difference kind of bothered me.
I was so confused by that trailer at first.
When he game started I thought "wait, you you play as a generic video game character (COD guy, Orc, Princess, etc), but that character is then playing as ANOTHER character playing dodge ball?!"
Like video game Inception or something, haha.
When he game started I thought "wait, you you play as a generic video game character (COD guy, Orc, Princess, etc), but that character is then playing as ANOTHER character playing dodge ball?!"
Like video game Inception or something, haha.
This more or less encapsulates how I felt about it, whether I've been effective in conveying that, who knows. From what I've seen of the actual game the art style is indeed pretty forgettable but the win/loss animations and some of the outfits had a bit of a "futurepunk greaser" kinda vibe, which probably could have been leaned into more heavily to make it stand out a little better. But I don't think the idea of a team dodgeball game with heavy mobility and trick-throws and balls with special effects like moon gravity etc is a bad one on paper. Emphasize the team passing plays, using each other as balls, curve shots to get around terrain, fake-out throws to mess up opponents' timing in trying to catch a ball...focusing on the potential of what you can actually do in the game itself would have, I think, still allowed it to stand out enough in people's minds especially when it's being featured in the middle of the first Nintendo Direct in a year and a half. Leading in with a collection of generic game characters (again, Princess Charm notwithstanding as the one thing that stood out most of all about the whole trailer), to then quick-cut to a seemingly unrelated but equally generic-looking multiplayer game with little to no real explanation of what it is, you're just asking people to dismiss the whole thing without much further look.
I wouldn't say a barely 2-page thread on game enthusiast forum ResetEra is indicative of any widespread disinterest or negative sentiment towards the reveal. There was a decent chunk of gameplay in there showing a match and character customisation too. It's not as if they hid what the game was from people lol