Immersive marketing

Though I haven't had the pleasure of actually playing the thing myself it's been great to hear all the rhetoric drummed up around 'Helldivers 2', particularly when it comes to the ways that it subverts what people expect from a game of it's ilk. A decent little follow-up to a stylish twin-stick turned into a surprise megahit beloved across the internet, and the devs- after some healthy crumbling under the weight of sudden success- have really risen to the task. Keeping the game feeling healthy and the players on their toes, but most interestingly from an outsider is the way in which the team are embarking on a very particular community strategy I rarely see employed by really anyone else these days- the good old Immersive Marketing.

Don't get me wrong, we've all lived through the age of community managers who treat their jobs like a larping session, which is... fun? I remember the awkward smile I got when I saw the first urgent Tweet on a recent Destiny debacle not that long after launch, and saw them refer to the audience as 'Guardians' and end every message with 'Pardon our dust.' (Still don't get what that second part was about, truth be told.) But what I'm talking about is a bit more, involved than that- whilst being a bit more laid back. I'm talking about the times when the developer bring the audience into the fiction of the world outside the confines of the magic box in a way that feels natural and additive to the experience. And of course I'm talking about the funny dialogue players have shared with the Helldivers developers.

When the Helldivers game started slowly introducing new enemy types into the mission roster, it was without fanfare and entirely to the surprise of fans. As such, a really organic movement of shared Twitter posts and screenshots detailing the new flying bugs began popping up online- mimicking the threadbare way such news would spread in a propaganda controlled militarist fascistic faux utopia like the one depicted on Super Earth in Helldivers 2. And true to his role, the game director took to his account to frankly denounce the rumours of the new flying bugs with the pithy quote "Everyone knows bugs can't fly." Until someone directly tweeted a picture to him which broke the play of ignorance in a smart back and forth.

In a much different way Elite Dangerous had a play at this kind of guerrilla marketing with the way that they introduced Thargoids back into the series lore. As Elite Dangerous kind of plays like an online ecosystem somewhat like a Live Service, only a lot more natural and less predatory. You might think of it more like an MMO of a type- players just go about living their space lives, hunting pirates or running trade routes across the stars for pocket change. This kind of easy living is helped by the fact that the universe of the game really happens around players. Events that shift the lines of the various world factions spread on ingame news sites, but outside of that we are just the people inhabiting the stars- the machinations of the politically inclined hold little affect on our day to day. Or at least, they did until the Thargoids returned.

What little there was in the way of lead-up was portrayed entirely within in-universe snippets of stories and bizarreries. Things going missing, signals heading nowhere- nothing significant enough to be even called preludes to an impending event. No one was actively looking to try and trigger anything hidden within the code. Which is what made it such a special moment when a player, seemingly by accident, stumbled upon an encounter with a fully modelled alien Thargoid ship which appeared, scanned the onlooker and then fled, kicking off a wave of speculation across the community regarding what this could mean and what it portended. Of course, that could eventually become the Thargoid war and there on.

The excitement of that event alone sparked a gold rush of interest surrounding the game and the natural way it was discovered reinvigorated a sense of exploration in a people who suddenly remembered 'oh yeah, this game has an entire Universe- I wonder what else there is hidden away in the stars!' (See, that's what space games like Elite have that space games like Starfield need- wonder.) Now you can argue whether or not the team lived up to that excitement with the following events and how they affected the game world, the new weapon types and the new Thargoid ship combat metas- but that important thing is they got eyes on them. Even if it was a dud- that is an example anyone else can look at, emulate and get right with their own iteration. Out of the box immersive marketing- it works!

There is a time and place for stuff like this, of course. When a game is in dire need of repairs and the community is waiting around with the hands on their ass wondering when it's safe to log into a game- no one wants to play games figuring out an RNG to know what fixes and updates are coming. You really have to be able to read the mood of your players to know when you are comfortable enough to play a few games with them. If Starfield's team came around tomorrow to slyly tease about upcoming content, that might drum up a bit of hype around those that are waiting- but if they did that nearer to release, in the height of the discourse around the design problems of the game- it would have caused an uproar. It's all about reading the room and timing- just like comedy.

I'm all for thinking outside the box and using one's creativity to achieve what others cannot. No one likes a corporate account that acts just like everyone else on social media only with a decade old meme vault to lug around. Being original, finding ways to connect directly with your audience and simply shirking the artificial nature of communication helps distinguish immersive marketing from bland 'hello fellow kids' style social media work. With enough effort we could really see a wide spread evolution of the way that people communicate with their customers, and from that will spawn much more natural growing audiences. Perhaps that is the future of marketing that the indie market can hope to grow from, who can say?