How to easily get the attention (and respect) of gamers

In the short span of just a couple of decades, the video game industry has expanded to become a titanic force that could rival even the movie industry. As a result of this, there are now countless game developers, publishers, and personalities that can trace their origins back to something that was once thought to incite extreme violence in children.

However, this means that everyone has to fight to make their brand or product recognized in such a crowded marketplace, leading to some very clever and innovative tactics to get people talking about them. Here are some of the best ways by which certain entities in the gaming industry have attracted everyone’s attention, and possibly even respect. 

Stealing trademarking anything and everything that isn’t nailed down!

Have you ever been bored out of your mind, when all of a sudden you have a burning desire to trademark common words? If so, then you may have more in common with Sony and King (the developers of Candy Crush Saga) than you thought. And everyone loves a game developer that they can relate to.

After all, who can forget how ecstatic people were when King and Sony tried to trademark the words “candy”, “saga”, and “let’s play“. Virtually every forum, video, and news source was filled with people praising King and Sony for being so smart and accommodating to people who simply want to use words and phrases that have existed for hundreds of years.

Microtransactions for everyone!

The moment a game reaches the shelves or digital marketplace of your preference, most people would consider that game to be finished. Sure, maybe there’s a glitch or two, but for the most part that game is done.

But what if players could make their game even more complete by paying small amounts of money? That’s right — for small payments of a couple of dollars here and there, the game becomes more finished, like reaching it’s final form. And everybody loves a finished game.

For example, take a look at Payday 2 and how active the community was when it was announced that certain rewards, which also affected gameplay, could only be unlocked with real money. The Payday 2 community loved it so much that they practically rioted until they could have a direct conversation with the producer of the game to express their feelings.

It’s not just special…it’s exclusive!

Generally speaking, most games are available to anyone regardless of what you chose to play on. Then there are first-party exclusives that are only available to certain consoles. And then there are exclusives that are seemingly exclusive for the sole purpose of being something that you rub in someone’s face. Of the three, the last one always gets people talking.

Take a look at Destiny; every DLC that is associated with the game has content that is exclusive to the PlayStation platforms for a year, whether it be a set of guns or multiplayer maps. Then there’s Rise of the Tomb Raider, a full game that is exclusive to the Xbox for a whole year. Naturally, this causes people to talk about your product, and if there’s anything that can be learned from the internet, it’s that people just love waiting for an arbitrarily long time for something.

But what if none of those work?

In the off chance that such stellar examples don’t lead to the outcome that you want, remember that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. After all, games like Superman 64 and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial have persisted through the ages for some reason or other, so clearly they did something right.