Lunchtime Discussion: Advertising

Recently I’ve had a few people talk to me about the new Final Fantasy XIII TV advert, and the use of the Leona Lewis track in it. The ad itself is pretty good I feel, although it seems to consist entirely of cutscenes rather than any gameplay. The thing people are complaining about is the Leona Lewis track. It was kind of an odd choice for the games official song anyway, but it really doesn’t work in the advert. The song is pretty slow paced and soft, by contrast the scenes picked for the ad are action packed and quickly paced. The contrasting styles just don’t mesh very well, and I half feel sorry for some poor video editor who did the best with the orders he was given from marketing.

For a while game advertising seems to have focused largely on the cutscenes, often overlooking and ignoring the actual gameplay presented in the title. Sure it sort of works for titles that generate cutscenes using the game engine, but you still don’t get any real feel for what the game is like. Given that the trailer, particularly the TV advert, is all that a large proportion of consumers will know about the game it seems hugely unfair to misrepresent a game like this. It may seem odd to think that most people will buy a game based solely on seeing it on TV, but how many movies have you seen based on a 2 minute trailer? Most of them? That’s what I thought.

Personally I’d love TV spots for games to show off more of the in-game content, although I don’t know how well you could represent a titles gameplay in such a short segment. If trailers were more representative it might lead to less purchases leading to an ultimate disappointment. When it gets really bad is when almost everything released about a game, not just the the ‘mainstream’ advertising, is not in-game. Not many games have gone this way yet, but advertising in general does seem to be leaning this way. Thinking back Metal Gear Solid 4 was hugely culpable of this, showing a lot of cutscenes and very few scenes of gameplay.

So am I wrong? Is game advertising fair, or it misrepresenting titles? Would you like to see more of a games content?