Demographic projections. Drip-feed PR. Invoking the name of popular, established games to create interest in new ones. It's the cold calculus of marketing, also known as everything you hate about modern day video games. Want to know how it works? Here's a leaked marketing plan from Sega that lays bare the marketing strategy for a recent, terrible release.
Last year when I was still freelancing, I took a demo for Rise of Nightmares and hated nearly every minute of it. I hated how glitchy the experience was, how slow the progression moved and how my arms ached for nothing at the end of it all. I wondered how Sega thought they were ever going to get people to write about or buy this colossal waste of time. The document at this link appears to be an internal Sega marketing run-down of how and when the House of Sonic planned to squirt out information about
Interesting things to note include the hoped-for first-party support from Microsoft—which never seemed to materialize in any great form—and the Reasons to Believe section, filled with thoughts about why Rise of Nightmares might be a success.
The game flopped, of course. No amount of leveraging is going to make a horrible game look good.
Rise of Nightmares proposition document [via Twitter]