Can't talk about the Outer Worlds as much as his other titles because a lot of that work also involves talking about stuff going on with Outer Worlds 2 and that would hit NDA problems.
5 million TOW sales doesn't include game pass, Outer Worlds is easily his best selling game ever. Made him decide to talk about marketing today.
For early games, particularly in 80s/early 90s had relatively little marketing. Maybe an ad in Byte magazine, there wasn't really a computer gaming specific magazine. Then came along CGW, Bard's Tale Construction probably got an ad, Cain has a copy of the Dragon Magazine 5 star review. Fallout got two or three ads.
Cain's role was pretty much just signing off on whatever marketing came up with in a separate meeting. Mainly there for accuracy and just to say it's OK.
Outer Worlds was very different, marketing budget was enormous. Private Division being part of take two gave them a dedicated team that involved the ToW team in marketing. Sometimes tele conferenced, other times the marketing team would meet them for a one on one meeting to see what they felt was important about the game.
People from marketing noticed the Moonman mascot and corporate slogans and and wanted to use them in the ads for the game. Lots of meetings involving the marketers pulling stuff from the game instead of creating their own
A company in LA called Buddha Jones was involved and Cain has a very positive impression of their team, one of the marketers had played their older titles (Cains, Obsidians, he doesn't specify) and specifically asked to be involved in the campaign. Cain assumed they were there to pitch ideas to them, they mainly wanted to talk about the ideas behind the game. They made the trailers for the game. They picked the music, Cain liked their choices. Cain liked that they understood the humor of the game.
Cain was surprised by this level of coherence , his impression of marketing was that would go in and tell him what they were doing, these marketers wanted to know what he was doing and how they could use that, was impressed by the 15/30/60 second trailers they made.
Never been easier to make games then right now, "If you're not making a game right now, you don't want to, you just want to talk about making one." But now it is harder then ever to find a game.
Outer World's marketing campaign did a good job of showing the essence of the game without misleading anyone and making it easy to find in Cain's opinion.
Really good game goes hand in hand with having really good marketing, many games have development/marketing budgets of similar levels and Cain knows several where the marketing budget was bigger than the game budget.