For Stormgate, Where Does The Marketing Start - And Where Does It End?
Maybe the better question is whether anyone wants to know
Back in 2018, I was invited to the StarCraft II community summit at Blizzard headquarters over in Los Angeles. As part of that invitation I received a free ticket to Blizzcon and a press pass, which enabled me to sit in the press room and attend private developer discussions. One of the discussions I participated in was a sparsely attended deep dive into the upcoming remaster of Warcraft III, where I was able to ask a number of questions and take word-for-word quotes.
After Blizzcon, I went home and published an analysis video. This turned out to be one of the best videos I’ve ever done - it immediately went viral. To date, it sits at 263,000 views, an enormous number for a small content creator like myself.
At the time, I was really happy about the views and new subscribers. And I was even happier to see lots of positive comments about the video, both on YouTube and on other social channels. But in retrospect, I realized that the virality was in part due to the insider nature of the video. I had a bunch of information directly from the developer that wasn’t easily available anywhere else, for a game that a lot of people were very interested in. And so, irrespective of whatever value I added through my analysis, a large number of people were watching my video simply because I had access that they didn’t.
This was a win-win arrangement, at least for me and Blizzard. I did all the legwork of attending Blizzcon and writing and creating a YouTube video. The developers gave me access that allowed me to generate a ton of engagement for my channel, and I presented that information to potential customers through the platform of an ostensible third party; someone who’s less biased and less likely to intentionally mislead. (For a game that would ultimately mislead, well, everyone.)
I used my press pass to provide coverage of an upcoming game - nothing malicious. And after my panel, a kindly Blizzard staff member sat next to me while I played and answered my questions about the cutscenes and the engine and so forth - seems reasonable. But the end result was to promote Blizzard’s marketing message (it’s called reforged because it’s all about the fans and doing this thing right, not just porting it) rather than some objective overview of what Blizzard was actually doing (just porting it, in a very bad way). And to be honest, in retrospect, I think Blizzard was very conscious about scheduling meetings like that one as insider events where you could hobnob with the game director, instead of public panel discussions with a public Q&A.
And I have mixed feelings about that.
Stormgate
Recently, Neuro, a prominent StarCraft II content creator, had the chance to playtest an early internal build of Stormgate. He discussed his impressions with another community member, BeoMulf, which was promptly promoted by Stormgate:
I have mixed feelings about this arrangement, too. On the one hand, I - like the hundreds of thousands of people who watched my Warcraft III preview video - am excited to learn more about an upcoming game. On the other hand, it feels like the game’s marketing is being laundered through a prominent community member.
To use a simple example, “this game is fast and crisp” has a different meaning to me when it’s stated by the developer - who’s of course going to market their game in a positive way - than when it’s stated by a community member, who I’ll usually take more seriously. And drawing this distinction is hard when Frost Giant has an intentional strategy of blurring the lines around their marketing:
“We’re a small team, we don’t have a massive marketing department or budget here. We rely on the community for their support.” - Tim Morten, CEO of Frost Giant, in PC Gamer
Maybe you’ll ask what the difference is between this and a closed beta, aside from the difference in intent. Well, I’m sure Neuro will laugh when I describe this as being “wined and dined”, but that is literally what happened - a development company invited him to a private dinner alongside other influencers, then invited him to stop by the office when he was in town, at which point he was walked through an internal build, participated in a social event with staff members, and then had his impressions put on full blast by their social media team. This isn’t the sort of thing that just accidentally happens, and I think you’d be naive to think Frost Giant didn’t have particular business outcomes in mind when they set all this up.
I don’t think there’s some secret arrangement between Neuro and Frost Giant, other than a standard NDA. And I don’t think they told him what to say, or even asked him to be nice to them. What I do think that is that, even when everyone has good intentions, developers can influence community members in order to influence the narrative around their games, thereby promoting their own perspective through ostensible third parties, in a way that’s not always transparent to people just watching a YouTube video. And I think even the simple act of sitting down next to Neuro and talking to him about his experience while he plays will have a material influence on how he experiences the game. And this is true even when they’re engaged in plain old fashioned community management, rather than the more intentional “this is actually our marketing strategy” community management.
And I think this approach is interesting to think about in light of what happened with Age of Empires IV.
Age of Empires IV
Age of Empires IV launched in October 2021 with a curious mechanical problem. It was very difficult to click on things! If you’re interested in what that looked like, I did a 30 second summary on this issue in my review of the game (19:59, in case the embed misses it):
I was surprised to see a major RTS title launch with such a critical interface problem. But what really shocked me about it is that Relic intentionally nurtured a close collaboration with community members, and featured it in their marketing materials. They even created a term for it, calling them the “community council”, and showing a video of prominent Age players and content creators visiting Relic’s office. If anyone was going to notice this kind of glaring interface issue, it’s a professional Age player.
And yet, when Age 4 launched, there was a noticeable lack of complaining about this issue. The only prominent Age streamer I know of that consistently complained about it was someone who had not participated in the council. Folks that did participate, when the issue was raised in their chat, would usually explain that Age 4 wasn’t really intended to be a micro-heavy game.
(For context, this issue was very painful in the single-player campaigns. It was often super hard just to get villagers to gather resources, especially with a waypoint and especially on wood. It had nothing to do with micro.)
To me, this is a great example of developers influencing the narrative. Did Relic tell community members not to complain about click targeting? Probably not. What I would guess happened is that players tried the game out and noticed the issue - because it’s impossible not to - and asked about it. Relic offered some reasonable explanations as to why it’s not fixed yet and how the game is supposed to be more casual and this or that and hey, don’t worry, we’ll fix it. Community members found those explanations reasonable and repeated them on stream when asked about it. And in-aggregate this created a weird Twilight Zone effect where a bunch of otherwise smart people promoted the same painfully wrong perspective that clicking on things is not an important component of real-time strategy.
When all your favorite Twitch streamers explain away a problem you have with a game you purchased, is that just content on Twitch? If the streamers arrived at that explanation based on private discussions with the developer, does it change how much you trust it? What if the developer had gone out of their way to give them insider access and opportunities? What if the developer’s stated intention was to rely on the community for support? If you make a purchasing decision based in part on what you hear on a stream, would you feel manipulated if you discovered this arrangement?
I mean - maybe, maybe not, right? It’s a bit of a mixed bag. The developers proactively and privately driving the narrative behind problems in their game with prominent community members is not necessarily innocuous. Twitch streamers talking to the developers and agreeing with their conclusions is not necessarily nefarious. You can’t call it pure marketing, but you can’t call it purely independent content, either. It’s a little bit of both.
We all want Stormgate to be successful
A good friend and I like to play 2v2 in StarCraft II; we’ve been doing so since Legacy of the Void first launched. We haven’t played as much since I moved back to New York, since there’s timezone and latency issues. But he recently did a long trip back home, and we had a chance to play a lot of team games. And as part of that I discovered that team game leagues are totally busted - and that they haven’t worked properly since the tail end of 2020, more than two years ago.
It’s sad to see that Blizzard has essentially abandoned the most successful real time strategy game of all time. It’s a bummer to contrast what it felt like to be at Blizzcon 2018 with where the game has gone since then. And in light of all that, many people, myself included, are eager to see a company passionate about RTS put out another big RTS title.
We all want Stormgate to be successful.
So it’s easy to look the other way when the company behind that game invites a single content creator to do a single private playtest, then promotes that person’s discussion of that playtest as though it’s just two community members chatting, and not, essentially, native advertising.
But it is, effectively, native advertising. And this blurring of the line of what’s marketing and what isn’t is concerning to me. It also gives me parasocial vibes - honestly, it just doesn’t seem healthy for the game. It certainly wasn’t healthy for Age of Empires IV. I hope Frost Giant will adopt a more forthright approach going forward.
I’d be happy to offer some suggestions - privately, of course. :-)
Until next time,
brownbear
If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.
P.S. I am of course meme’ing about offering suggestions privately. I think transparency would go a long way here - make public the NDAs that folks are signing. Ask content creators to be transparent about their relationship with you and what they have access to - including whether or not they signed an NDA. Do developer interviews with community members instead of pretending you’re just another guy in the chat. Describe invite-only playtests as invite-only playtests; better yet, frame them as press events, and invite actual press members instead of just community members.