Interesting article

[Toozer]

Thought I would share this article I came across, it is an interesting read.

 

http://whatculture.com/gaming/gta-v-the-silent-treatment.php

[Hvitdverg]

indeed it was

[dinoSAUR230]

Hmm, yes. Thanks for sharing.

[theworldfamous]

yeah pretty good.. guy has been reading this forum

[Kipsta]

Great article

 

We're only getting closer.

[Dragonjack]

Very interesting indeed.

[Hvitdverg]

I still believe 2012 is possible, but If they do not announce the release date within 20-30 September. There is absolutely no chance.

If they do announce it on the 20th-30th of September, they could theoretically release the game two months later.

September 20-30, release Nov 20-30. It's possible in my head

[saintsrow]

"As simple as it appears, getting fans and the media hyped about a product involves a complicated and well thought out marketing strategy."

 

He's giving Rockstar marketing waaaaay too much credit for knowing what they are doing.

 

My version: ""As simple as it appears, this approach to marketing has alienated and enraged millions of GTA fans globally, and made the entire fanbase question the competence of a company that, until now, they considered one of the greatest institutions in the history of mankind."

[CookPassBabtridge]

I remain unconvinced there is any particular strategy or secret hype weapon at work here. The MP3 thing was surely responsible for the lack of info for a good chunk of the time we waited, and it probably resulted in the disjointed info release we are seeing now. Even the Epsilon thing, which granted isnt a big deal, seems to have run of steam quick, and didnt gain many followers.

 

EDIT: Agree with Saintsrow - something went massively tits up with this whole thing, and people are coming out the woodwork saying its some wonderful new marketing system.

Edited September 8, 2012 by CookPassBabtridge

[saintsrow]

Thanks to the OP for bringing this to us. Interestingly the author of the article is based in Edinburgh. He only has one article (this one) credited in WhatCulture. Is it too transparent and obvious to imagine that this is a press release from Rockstar Marketing, beating their chest about their marketing genius (fail)?

[Mig10]

They are, just as usual, running late and that's why we lived this period between the first trailer and now, now it's going to get as loud as a whisper and continue the marketing a couple more screens every month or so before something bigger but never 8 month of complete silence i don't think that was planned.

[skyfamster]

whether R* is silient or loudly promote GTA5, we-----people here,hardcore gta fans!!! will still buy it.

so ,this silience of marketing is not target to us

 

R* is aiming to those casual gamers,who will buy gta game and only spend 1-2days playing it and threw it away.

 

yesterday,there are 500 people waiting for a cover.I don't think this silence stretagy is meant to them

Edited September 8, 2012 by skyfamster

[DlZZEE]

Well I think they're just far from finishing the game and reavealing us only a small pieces of info just to gain attention and promote other games.

[jdrandall38]

You know what I thought while reading this? I think at some point we will see the Rockstar Website homepage become just an image of the GTA V logo with a countdown timer. The timer will not indicate what it is counting down for which will build to the anticipation even more so. Is it a release date? New Info? Cover Art? You won't know until the timer has reached 0.

[Deffpony]

Im sure its coincidence but the "non-believers" part made me think of the epsilon twitter

[Adriaan]

Has it ever occurred to some of you as well that maybe they're taking a different approach? Look at the screenshots. Look at the low field of view on a lot of those screenshots, revealing only a small amount in every scene (as opposed to the more wider shots in previous GTA games' screens).

 

They want it to be special and are taking an approach whereby they still tease people from here onto release day, but very minimalistically.

 

All the speculation of how a company with such a large publishing and marketing team somehow screwed up is sort of ridiculous, no?

 

 

It will be interesting going into GTAV and having it be very fresh. Rockstar knows the GTA fan base can't stay away from every little update, so they have to rethink if they want to take an approach whereby they want the game to feel as fresh as can be when people start playing it.

 

Other games like Max Payne 3 and Red Dead Redemption which didn't have as large of an already established fan base of course needed heavy marketing and game asset releases. GTAV only needs that much for both a core fan base and the wider mainstream prospective consumer.

 

Certainly, the TV ads, the billboards etc. will probably be displayed the most ever.

[CookPassBabtridge]

Adriaan, no its not ridiculous because it happens all the time. Movies, games, and other creative projects arent infallible to screw ups. Max Payne ended up mistimed and too expensive, and this kind of thing gets studios shut down in many cases. Perhaps I should have geared my comments toward development to be clearer. Marketing really can only react to where development is at.

 

As for taking a new approach, there is little different in what theyre releasing to any other GTA. Are casual consumers going to get all hyped up because the screens are vague? Probably not. We can feast on screens for a few weeks on here.

Edited September 8, 2012 by CookPassBabtridge

[MosquitoSmasher]

Rather good article.

 

And even though i'm very hungry for information, well mostly release date information i DO agree with this part

 

Before you write off Rockstar’s strategy, I ask you to think about the last game you bought. With so much information now available, by the time you finally buy the game, it can feel as though you have already played through it. What Rockstar is doing doing is keeping an air of mystery and magic around V, something that certainly seems to be lacking today. Would you really prefer GTA V to be mass marketed like every other big release? Or does the silence and mystery add to what will undoubtedly be another groundbreakingly brilliant title?

 

Lots of games actually have done that for me. Sure they don't force you to watch dev diary 1 to 5 or more, and multiple trailers and the previews and so on, but a person is curious and starts to check it out. So i can apreciate this approach, but at the same time i can understand frustration from others.

 

Even though this article talks that something big is probably going to happen soon, fact is, none of us knows. We don't know how far along they are in development. Last year Gamespot reported that GTA V was apparently in its last stages of development, but i'm not sure where they got that from. This year in July Rockstar told us that they had not been in a position to say or show much, something like that. Alot of us started to think they were just messing with us, but maybe it IS true and it's far from finished. Then you got Strauss Zelnick from Take Two who only said the development is making substantial progress.

 

Let's hope it's true what we and the writer of this article expect, that we'll soon finally get some bigger things, something more than screenshots. Maybe a bit of info, that info being a releasedate, probably put at the end of the second trailer. Could be that they;ll wait till November to release the second trailer, so that it has been a year since the debut trailer.

[Adriaan]

So the III era GTAs started to show things on the game six months before planned release date.

 

GTAIV started showing things on the game seven months before initial planned release date.

 

If true, going by the whole "it's out by March 2013", that means we're pretty much just under seven months away from GTAV's release.

 

If you compare V to other GTA games, so far it has pretty much a similar amount of media assets.

 

 

I think some people like CookPassBabtridge are going crazy because it seems like they're behind because they decided that this time they'll release a full trailer so far in advance before release. If anything, their performance is actually faaar better than any previous GTA release by giving us a pretty good look of the game so far in advance before release.

Edited September 8, 2012 by Adriaan

[CookPassBabtridge]

They released the trailer when they did because shares were about to drop because of the MP3 delay. Which is my point, Max Payne was probably more responsible for the long wait rather than any new marketing scheme. We saw that on Newswire too, fans getting literally told to shut up about V until they got MP out the door.

 

Im not getting crazy, I just dont put on the rose tinted glasses.

[LewisMiller]

Nice read, thank you for posting.

[Nun0567]

I hope the waiting is worth it.

[Adriaan]

 

They released the trailer when they did because shares were about to drop because of the MP3 delay. Which is my point, Max Payne was probably more responsible for the long wait rather than any new marketing scheme. We saw that on Newswire too, fans getting literally told to shut up about V until they got MP out the door.

 

Im not getting crazy, I just dont put on the rose tinted glasses.

I don't like to make a habit of entering into any debates or arguments with someone that makes unfounded claims. But I'll make an exception. I don't want to say too much, but trust me when I say they started work on GTAV's 1st trailer way before the January 2012 announcement of Max Payne 3's delay.

 

The idea that somehow they'll divert development resources away from working on the game to working on a trailer for the sole purpose of preventing a slight dip in their parent company's share price is sort of ridiculous. Stocks rise and fall of their parent company, so the idea that the people at Rockstar Games somehow keep the share price in mind of their parent when deciding game asset releases is sort of ridiculous.

 

If that was true, don't you think they'd have released more GTAV screens etc. throughout the year when Take-Two's share price was falling dramatically? Or heck, even given a rough release date.

 

When Max Payne 3 was delayed, by the way, the share price went up, and stayed at the same levels for the next three months thereafter.

 

 

As for "fans getting told to shut up about V" on the newswire, I think it only makes sense to keep things on topic within Max Payne 3 news posts, don't you think? There actually was a lot of continious GTAV comments still going on within the featured GTAV announcement news post at the time. Rockstar didn't really, at all, tell people to shut up in any way about GTAV.

Edited September 8, 2012 by Adriaan

[Deffpony]

I agree with Adriaan in some regard. It's definitely a new approach. Any information given has been so ambiguous. They aren't giving too much away and I like it. I only want a concept of the game to be known before play, not every aspect.

 

Where I think they went wrong was by releasing the trailer so far in advance and not leveling with us. 9 months of silence is absurd an it would not have hurt anyone to just say "hey there isn't gonna be any info for a while" back in January. Sure people were super hyped about the game but we were also getting very frustrated. They don't owe the fans anything but there's a bit of decency in managing your consumers expectations

[CookPassBabtridge]

Of course they were working on the trailer long before the delay...Im talking quite clearly about the timing of its release. That's why the shares rose and stayed afloat thereafter, instead of continuing to fall. Do you think that would have happened without something big like the first V trailer? I dont suggest it was 'custom made' whatsoever.

 

Plus as you said yourself, T2 is the parent company. They can make moves to stay healthy if they need to. Youre making it sound like the two parties dont interact.

 

On the Newswire point, yes they were getting bombarded with V questions. But that kind of pre-empted what MP3 was up against. It became clear that R* werent going to say a word on V until T2 had squeezed any possible returns out of it.

 

Which is the more plausible point: Early trailer release to salvage something out of the MP3 mess, or is it part of a new strategy where not marketing your game increases hype to people who may have lost interest 5 years ago?

Edited September 8, 2012 by CookPassBabtridge

[MosquitoSmasher]

So the III era GTAs started to show things on the game six months before planned release date.

 

GTAIV started showing things on the game seven months before initial planned release date.

 

If true, going by the whole "it's out by March 2013", that means we're pretty much just under seven months away from GTAV's release.

 

If you compare V to other GTA games, so far it has pretty much a similar amount of media assets.

 

 

I think some people like CookPassBabtridge are going crazy because it seems like they're behind because they decided that this time they'll release a full trailer so far in advance before release. If anything, their performance is actually faaar better than any previous GTA release by giving us a pretty good look of the game so far in advance before release.

Yeah strange ain't it? It really isn't all that different, it actually is probably better. But for alot of people, including me..it just feels so long and different. I wonder why that is.

[jamieleng]

 

R* is aiming to those casual gamers,who will buy gta game and only spend 1-2days playing it and threw it away.

Those people should be pistol whipped. Mmmm Pistol Whip

*img macro removed*

Edited September 8, 2012 by Adriaan

[MosquitoSmasher]

 

R* is aiming to those casual gamers,who will buy gta game and only spend 1-2days playing it and threw it away.

Those people should be pistol whipped. Mmmm Pistol Whip

*img macro removed*

If that was Rockstar's plan, they wouldn't do their very best and make this their biggest open world game yet. Neither would they make it their most ambitious project. They are doing it for several reasons. For themselves, for money, for the hardcore fans and sure also to appeal to a wider audience. But i have all the faith in the world that we are going to be blown away.

Edited September 8, 2012 by Adriaan

[Adriaan]

@CookPassBabtridge

The differential in Take-Two's share price had there not been a GTAV trailer in November the preceding year would not have changed anything as far as their profits are concerned that fiscal year. Again, I ask, if you think somehow they are always so concerned about their share price don't you think they would have performed more actions to instill more confidence in shareholders following the drastic drop the past year? Like, I dunno, being more open about GTAV's release date. If what you say is true then I certainly think they would have given some sort of rough estimate on the release date like "this fiscal year" instead of not saying anything at all - causing low confidence as is evidenced by the drop in share price.

 

@deffpony

Yeah, I definitely understand the frustration which came about following that big period of silence - when we are so used to having info soon after a first GTA trailer.

Edited September 8, 2012 by Adriaan

[JeteaFive]

If at September we don't have the release date, 2012 isn't possible anymore.