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Card-Based Marvel's Midnight Suns - Marvel universe card-based tactical RPG from Firaxis

Grunker

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A lot of elements definitely scream "microtransactions", but I assumed that either those were fortunately cut or AAA devs don't know how to design a game without lootboxes anymore.

Marvel Midnight Suns Official Q&A said:
Q: Does Marvel's Midnight Suns feature microtransactions?

A: There are no lootboxes in Marvel's Midnight Suns and players cannot purchase new Gamma Coils to get more cards. Players can purchase Eclipse Credits, which are only used to buy cosmetic skins in the in-game store.
 

Jaedar

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A lot of elements definitely scream "microtransactions", but I assumed that either those were fortunately cut or AAA devs don't know how to design a game without lootboxes anymore.

Marvel Midnight Suns Official Q&A said:
Q: Does Marvel's Midnight Suns feature microtransactions?

A: There are no lootboxes in Marvel's Midnight Suns and players cannot purchase new Gamma Coils to get more cards. Players can purchase Eclipse Credits, which are only used to buy cosmetic skins in the in-game store.
After being reminded of it, I recall that each of the characters has something like 4 special outfits that can only be purchased with real money. Wouldn't surprise me that much if you just get them for free with enough deluxe edition upgrades.
 

J1M

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Apparently microtransactions and DLC are "free" now when bundled into a season pass. Jesus.
 
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I don't think the game looked great, but I doubt very much that that was the main reason it flopped; as far as AAA games go both nuXComs look pretty crappy too, and they were both smash-hits.

Bluntly Grunker I think you're delusional to argue this wasn't a massive cock-up on the part of the marketing department. It was perhaps unlikely to sell 15 million copies regardless, but as I keep returning to: I like Marvel, I like card games, I like nuXCom, I ended up really liking this game once I played it, and yet, based on what was shown in the lead-up to the release I had zero interest in this game and zero intention of purchasing it. That's fucking insane, and making the argument that it was a niche product made with a AAA budget in no way explains that.

Now I'm not saying this was the game's only launch flaw. The social sim, the nakedly cynical monetization scheme, and the bizarre decision to largely focus on fairly niche and non MCU-headlining characters were all unforced errors that undoubtedly lowered the title's commercial ceiling. But I'm convinced the marketing effort was what made this game DOA.

Bluntly Richard, I think you suffer from a most traditional case of gamer brain when you blame marketing for failing to market such a paradoxical title. This game is the definition of a product with an undefined, vague target audience. It is hard to think of an example of a game more incongruent and more at odds with itself, from its budget to its contradictory designs.

Everyone in this thread has ackknowledged this to varying degrees. Yet lack of sales was due to poor marketing? How can it both be true that the game is full of fundamentally incoherent design choices that makes its audience incredibly hard to define, yet its sales are reflective only of the marketing?

Reminds me of when a politician hands me a shitty proposal that they recognize is subpar and rote, and expects me to sell it to the press. Somehow when no journalist is interested, they’re surprised. Motherfucker how is the correlation between product strength and marketability such a mystery to you
I think I'm doing a bad job of making my point.

You can definitely argue that this game didn't have a large enough target demographic to break even (I would agree with that). But the thing is that apparently I (and mediocrepoet by his admission?) was/were the actual target demographic, and neither of us knew what the fuck this game was until we were gifted it/bought it on sale. That seems like a marketing fuck-up, and it seems like, possibly, the difference between a product somewhat underperforming and a product being a massive flop.
 

Grunker

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I don't think the game looked great, but I doubt very much that that was the main reason it flopped; as far as AAA games go both nuXComs look pretty crappy too, and they were both smash-hits.

Bluntly Grunker I think you're delusional to argue this wasn't a massive cock-up on the part of the marketing department. It was perhaps unlikely to sell 15 million copies regardless, but as I keep returning to: I like Marvel, I like card games, I like nuXCom, I ended up really liking this game once I played it, and yet, based on what was shown in the lead-up to the release I had zero interest in this game and zero intention of purchasing it. That's fucking insane, and making the argument that it was a niche product made with a AAA budget in no way explains that.

Now I'm not saying this was the game's only launch flaw. The social sim, the nakedly cynical monetization scheme, and the bizarre decision to largely focus on fairly niche and non MCU-headlining characters were all unforced errors that undoubtedly lowered the title's commercial ceiling. But I'm convinced the marketing effort was what made this game DOA.

Bluntly Richard, I think you suffer from a most traditional case of gamer brain when you blame marketing for failing to market such a paradoxical title. This game is the definition of a product with an undefined, vague target audience. It is hard to think of an example of a game more incongruent and more at odds with itself, from its budget to its contradictory designs.

Everyone in this thread has ackknowledged this to varying degrees. Yet lack of sales was due to poor marketing? How can it both be true that the game is full of fundamentally incoherent design choices that makes its audience incredibly hard to define, yet its sales are reflective only of the marketing?

Reminds me of when a politician hands me a shitty proposal that they recognize is subpar and rote, and expects me to sell it to the press. Somehow when no journalist is interested, they’re surprised. Motherfucker how is the correlation between product strength and marketability such a mystery to you
I think I'm doing a bad job of making my point.

You can definitely argue that this game didn't have a large enough target demographic to break even (I would agree with that). But the thing is that apparently I (and mediocrepoet by his admission?) was/were the actual target demographic, and neither of us knew what the fuck this game was until we were gifted it/bought it on sale. That seems like a marketing fuck-up, and it seems like, possibly, the difference between a product somewhat underperforming and a product being a massive flop.

You weren't though. You were the target audience for the combat. Or maybe the super hero stuff. But this game had to be marketed to relationship simulator people, cozygamers with a fetish for cosmetics, gacha gamers and even a broader mainstream of variety gamers (those were the people that made XCOM a hit, after all, and this game, unlike XCOM, had to bank on a broad audience from the get-go).

You and mediocrepoet are an even smaller audience than the one they ended up aiming at. I don't think this game would have suffered less by hard targeting the tactical crowd - I think it would have suffered more.
 

abija

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They're supposed to target all those audiences, not just some and definetly not just the intersection.
You seem very confused about what marketing should do. Making target audiences aware of the product is the BARE MINIMUM and they failed at it.
 

Lacrymas

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I was aware it was a card-based tactical game before it came out. What I wasn't aware of is how good the combat is. I thought it's going to be some AAA shovelware they put out in the trough and I didn't think twice about it. It being an AAA game hurt it due to the target audience for the combat being extremely cynical and distrustful of AAA games (with good reason).
 

Grunker

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Making target audiences aware of the product is the BARE MINIMUM and they failed at it.

This game doesn't have a target audience, that's my whole point. Various parts of it has appeal to some audiences, but no audience is going to feel this is a game "for them." I loved the combat so much it's one of the best experiences I had in 2023 - yet even I will plainly say more than 50% of the game's content was simply not made for me.

You seem very confused about what marketing should do.

I essentially work in marketing (selling stories to the press). You guys seem to believe that marketing is a magical fairy land where the ability to target an audience is independent of that product's merits, notably whether it even has a coherent target audience in the first place.

Hence my comparison to a politician handing me a shit proposal with no news value and expecting the same result as a when I'm handed a proposal by a shrewd politician who has sculpted the proposal with news value in mind. If you honestly believe that the job is identical in those two instances, you are suffering from gooey gamer brain.

It being an AAA game hurt it due to the target audience for the combat being extremely cynical and distrustful of AAA games (with good reason).

DING DING DING

(And the AAA audience not giving a shit about crunchy combat mechanics and slow-moving, pondrous turn-based gameplay in their game about action heroes)

The game desperately needed a lower budget for a more mission-based experience focusing on the game's strengths rather than the mess that it is.
 
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abija

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This game doesn't have a target audience, that's my whole point. Various parts of it has appeal to some audiences, but no audience is going to feel this is a game "for them." I loved the combat so much it's one of the best experiences I had in 2023 - yet even I will plainly say more than 50% of the game's content was simply not made for me.

"Various parts of it has appeal to some audiences"
-> a) this game doesn't have a target audience
-> b) this game appeals to multiple audiences

You say you work in marketing... why the fuck would you ever go with option a? The job of marketing is to make all those audiences feel it could be a game for them. Why do you even focus so much on what the game IS? Big part of my job is cutting through marketing bullshit, but that is MY part of the dance, not what marketing should do.

DING DING DING
Yes, but not in the way you mean it. As in marketing failed to do their job. How about releasing a combat demo and launch it with some dev stream that highlights the best parts?

IF (and yes, it's a big if) funds weren't pulled to cut losses before release, marketing dug the grave for this game.
 

Grunker

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This game doesn't have a target audience, that's my whole point. Various parts of it has appeal to some audiences, but no audience is going to feel this is a game "for them." I loved the combat so much it's one of the best experiences I had in 2023 - yet even I will plainly say more than 50% of the game's content was simply not made for me.

"Various parts of it has appeal to some audiences"
-> a) this game doesn't have a target audience
-> b) this game appeals to multiple audiences

You say you work in marketing... why the fuck would you ever go with option a?

How is this simple shit so complicated. If your game costs a gazillion to make, successfully marketing it to an audience that will sell a niche amount of copies is not an option. You are caught between the rock - has to market to a broad audience - and the hard place - can only be kind of succesfully marketed to a couple of niche ones.

It is, by definition, an unsolvable equation unless you lie through your teeth which can sometimes work, but is very, very hard to do succesfully and depends a lot on the kind of product you're selling. In this case, even if the marketing team was willing to tell a lie a la "hard hitting action game where you romance all of your favourite super heroes" or whatever, it's just hypotethical - making that sort of material from Marvel Midnight Suns Footage isn't exactly great.

I'm not saying marketing did the best possible job. However if your argument about why marketing failed doesn't recognize the complexity of their task you are literally doing a "hurr durr marketing should have sold it" line without any measure of substantive argument behind your position.
 

abija

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The only niche audience is maybe tactical combat. Marvel, card games, sims or w/e the other part is are certainly NOT niche.
 
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I was aware it was a card-based tactical game before it came out. What I wasn't aware of is how good the combat is. I thought it's going to be some AAA shovelware they put out in the trough and I didn't think twice about it. It being an AAA game hurt it due to the target audience for the combat being extremely cynical and distrustful of AAA games (with good reason).

This is kind of hilarious. Doesn’t even make sense. It’s not a AAA. It don’t even look like a big budget AAA. Yet you ignored the game because you thought it looked like the XCOM team got some money to make a game this time. It’s also pretty cheap looking, but you think it was hurt by not looking cheap enough.
 

Lacrymas

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It looked (still looks) like an AAA game to me, a person who doesn't play AAA games, so it's close enough for the target audience who will turn their noses up at it.
 

Grunker

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The only niche audience is maybe tactical combat. Marvel, card games, sims or w/e the other part is are certainly NOT niche.

Yes, you're right. Slap the Batman-trademark on Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar and that bad boy suddenly has mass market appeal!

You guys are fucking nuts
 

Jaedar

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(And the AAA audience not giving a shit about crunchy combat mechanics and slow-moving, pondrous turn-based gameplay in their game about action heroes)
And yet BG3 is a thing that happened.

If I understand your argument, you say that the marketing team had an impossible task. They could either market to niches, and be guaranteed to fail to make back the budget (because the niches aren't big enough), or go for broke and probably fail to sell anything but also maybe succeed at selling to mainstream and actually make the product a commercial success.

This may be true, but it also doesn't quite contradict the statement that the marketing of this game failed. It might have been their best strategy at the time: sometimes your only chance to win is to roll 3 sixes in a row and then you throw those dice. But when one of them turns up a 2, you still failed.
 

Grunker

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(And the AAA audience not giving a shit about crunchy combat mechanics and slow-moving, pondrous turn-based gameplay in their game about action heroes)
If I understand your argument, you say that the marketing team had an impossible task.

unless you lie through your teeth which can sometimes work, but is very, very hard to do succesfully

This may be true, but it also doesn't quite contradict the statement that the marketing of this game failed.

No, it just contradicts that the game's failure is a result of its marketing, which is the only statement I've put forward.

And yet BG3 is a thing that happened.

Civilization too has a pretty broad target audience despite being turn-based. A lot of other games do too. Marvel Midnight Suns does not - though clearly they thought many of the mechanics would have that appeal, such as the environmental interactions. Or do we disagree about that as well? Do you think this game has mass appeal? If so I would understand your position that marketing failed more - I'd just disagree with you. Vehemently, in fact.
 
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Galdred

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
(And the AAA audience not giving a shit about crunchy combat mechanics and slow-moving, pondrous turn-based gameplay in their game about action heroes)
If I understand your argument, you say that the marketing team had an impossible task.

unless you lie through your teeth which can sometimes work, but is very, very hard to do succesfully

This may be true, but it also doesn't quite contradict the statement that the marketing of this game failed.

No, it just contradicts that the game's failure is a result of its marketing, which is the only statement I've put forward.

There is definitely something to it, in that the low quality of quite a few elements made it incredibly harder to market.
Among these, I'd say they went with a "video game" instead of comic books aesthetic.
In comparison, good old Freedom Force was oozing with comic bookness
14653-freedom.jpg


deadman+walking.jpg


while Midnight Suns had this:
hunter-and-the-international-womens-day-photobooth-cover-v0-u3jxvhf53kma1.jpg


The weakness of the abbey parts made it all the more harder to appeal to the audience of this kind of games. Unlike XCOM and its base building, this made a huge part of the overall experience, and was sub par compared to games of the same genre.
To me, this was more of a game design shortcoming than a marketing issue.
Actually, it even contradicted Sid Meier principle:

One Good Game Is Better Than Two Great Ones Sid liked to call this one the "Covert Action Rule," a reference to a not-altogether-successful spy game he made in the early ’90s: The mistake I made was actually having two games competing with each other. There was an action game where you break into a building and do all sorts of picking up clues and things like that, and then there was the story which involved a plot where you had to figure out who the mastermind was and what cities they were in, and it was an involved mystery-type plot. Individually, each part could have been a good game. Together, they fought with each other. You would have this mystery that you were trying to solve, then you would be facing this action sequence, and you’d do this cool action thing, and you’d get out of the building, and you’d say, "What was the mystery I was trying to solve?"

And to make matters worse, the abbey part is not even good.
Of course, this design principle would seem to also contradict X[-]COM, but there are also key differences here: the geoscape is a thin layer over the tactical battles, and both are tightly coupled, while walking around the abbey and browsing a guide to choose the most appropriate conversation answers don't really mesh with the tactical combat of Midnight Suns.

So I'll have to agree that the game failed mostly because the non combat parts were too weak, making marketing much harder.
 

destinae vomitus

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The "aesthetic" (if you can call it one) that they went with is extra baffling seeing as they had pre-release promo videos that looked like this.
 

J1M

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To guys who think broad AAA audience aka normies are literal zombies look at the Starfield reception.
Normies are allergic to sci-fi, and they will use any excuse, including legitimate complaints and complaints about things they ignored in the 5 previous entries they purchased, to rationalize that.

The only way to sell sci-fi to soy and female consumers is to say the space ship is a magic squid and have a character fight it with a sword.
 

jackofshadows

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To guys who think broad AAA audience aka normies are literal zombies look at the Starfield reception.
Normies are allergic to sci-fi, and they will use any excuse, including legitimate complaints and complaints about things they ignored in the 5 previous entries they purchased, to rationalize that.

The only way to sell sci-fi to soy and female consumers is to say the space ship is a magic squid and have a character fight it with a sword.
What about mass effect?
 

J1M

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To guys who think broad AAA audience aka normies are literal zombies look at the Starfield reception.
Normies are allergic to sci-fi, and they will use any excuse, including legitimate complaints and complaints about things they ignored in the 5 previous entries they purchased, to rationalize that.

The only way to sell sci-fi to soy and female consumers is to say the space ship is a magic squid and have a character fight it with a sword.
What about mass effect?
The enemy is a magic squid space ship. That you can fight 1-on-1 at the end of the game. With a shotgun called Katana X. :smug:
 

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