but anything you can get for "free" like Panel from Hell now, you take it
Except it’s not for free, though – in fact, I recall them spending bonkers amounts of cash on the set pieces for these events. These are very pricey affairs, and that money, IMO, could be better spent.
There’s only so many of these extravagant set pieces you can finance, even if you’re a ‘successful’ company like Larian. If you’re looking at a Jan or Feb release date – and why not? – then this anniversary event would be the last bit of extravagance, with the rest of the budget going on the more traditional marketing of trailers and whatnot.
The quotation mark's on "free" was intentional - as the majority of most marketing costs tend to be buying media space (i.e. YouTube pre-rolls, TV commercials, etc, which are exorbitantly expensive for the global market), as opposed to the production costs of filming a commercial or conducting a live stream.
Yes, setting up livestreams, building a set and hiring a production crew does cost money - can easily be 100k+ USD per production (especially if they're fancy about it), but that's a small portion in a triple AAA marketing budget (for comparison, Witcher 3 was estimated at 30+ million). The fact that we're not seeing some high-cost indicators - i.e. talent usage (i.e. actors / high-tier influencers) and the general mid-tier production value of the streams do seem to imply they aren't going all out in terms of expenditure.
Now, I don't have access to Larian's marketing analytics, strategy, and full budget, so I can't make a judgement call on whether they're spending their marketing dollar efficiently. But the general viewership count and watch time (on a stream fully dedicated to your product) does look pretty impressive (there are brands that can't even get this much attention spending way more). And the biggest indicator that the PFHs are doing at least okay for Larian is that they've kept doing it over 2 years. And ultimately, not spending money on marketing is not an option.
Also, I'm not sure why you think the game is being released in Jan or Feb. All we know is that it's being released in 2023 and assuming it will be the 1st two months is extremely optimistic.
Originally Posted by konmehn
While I don’t have stats, my money would be on the PFHs having more of a niche appeal to Larian’s core audience of fellow goofs. Reactions I’ve read on PFH tend to be withering to all-out scathing in some cases. Do they do more harm than good, in other words? Especially for the expenditure.
For sure, the PFHs are definitely not aimed at the hardcore RPG population (a lot of people here on the forums, or some dedicated RPG forums where "RPG = serious business" like RPGCodex). But bringing awareness of BG3 to that population has never been an issue for Larian. For people within that group, their stance on BG3 are probably pretty rooted, and regardless of how they feel about the game - they KNOW about the game. They are a loud minority, but represents a relatively small fraction of sales.
Larian's core audience is definitely one of the target for the PFHs - and they're a pretty big audience, as proven by the success of DOS2. The DOS audience have a lot more "casual" players that probably don't even follow the RPG world closely, never mind the Early Access of a game. They're also likely way more valuable to Larian as they're the ones that will advocate for the game, and draw their friends in via multiplayer. Any other people they can drag into this is just icing on the cake.
In terms of gauging the sentiment of the more general gaming public (which Larian needs to target to get into AAA territory) - we can look at the top voted YT comments and Reddit:
Overall, the top comments are pretty positive - and also show that the general public aren't really caught up with everything happening in the EA. Even comments that are "impatient for release" (i.e. PCGaming top comment: "I want to play this, but I also dont want to be bored of it by the time the full game releases. feelsbadman") is a pretty positive indicator as it acknowledges awareness and speaks to the desire to play the game.
Originally Posted by konmehn
The average of ‘average users’ on the Steam stats page indicates a fairly linear pattern of 1.5k with sporadic spikes around patch-time of the same 3-3.5k. Then they taper off back to 1.5 the next month. That still says burnout to me, since it’s only the addicted 1.5 who’ll always be playing it – while it’s natural a few will return to ‘dip in’ for a bit around a patch. They don’t stick around by the looks of it.
The spike during the month of the patch is all Larian needs. Their goal isn't to maintain an active playerbase right now outside of the patch cycle on an incomplete game. They just need enough people (new or old) to be playing the new content to provide feedback.
The spike in numbers for just 1 month is quite natural as the EA is only 20-30 hours at max. Also note, the 1.5k we see concurrently might not be the same people. Sales of the EA is still relatively good (Bronze tier in Steam's 2021 top sellers) and they're getting new people coming to the game all the time.
As for the 2nd part... I believe that was actually Flooter's quote and not mine.
