Scott seems to think that the Call of Duty boys went a little too far.  Okay, so maybe “No Fear” and “No Rules” is a bit much.  That being said…

I’m an advertising major.  When I went to school, there were no game design degrees, and when I came out of school, We were still shaking off the Bush 41 recession (funny how history repeats itself). The first thing that happens in a recession is that companies cancel their advertising contracts, because then you can cut budget without laying people off.  So no ad companies were hiring junior guys, and through just plain blind luck I got into games for a living instead of writing toothpaste jingles.

That being said, I came into the games industry with a unique perspective -I had more advertising training than most people in the marketing departments of the companies I worked for.  Which was depressing.  And the state of advertising at the time was, to put it mildly, abhorrent.  As a reminder, here are the infamous latex ads for a game I worked on: Meridian 59. They haven’t gotten much better since.

The number one reason that advertising in the games industry sucks is because we lack at differentiation.  Flip through your PCGamer, and I can almost guaruntee you’ll remember none of the ads.  It becomes almost impossible to tell the products apart, or why our product is better, or theirs is worse.  And since its almost impossible to communicate true product differentiation in a hurry, usually the fallback is to find a way to slap a pair of tits on the page somewhere.  (I’m looking at you, NCSoft)

Other industries are much savvier about creating product differentiation.  They have to – often they are selling items that are functionally identical: Crest vs. Colgate, or Hertz vs Avis.  A quick example: have you noticed that the number 1 and number 2 brand in almost every major category have a different color scheme?  Tide/Cheer, Coke/Pepsi, Hertz/Avis, Caterpillar/John Deere.  This is because whenever a message is muddy, and customers don’t know what is advertised, they automatically give credit to the lead dog.  You see a red soda can in an ad, you think Coke, even if the logo at the end says they’re selling Big Red.

So what does this have to do with games, especially WW2 shooters?  Simple.  The most successful games in the world are identifiable by a simple screenshot – think the Sims, World of Warcraft, Civilization, Duke Nukem.  They benefit from being in a space where they can stylize the art, and make a look that is unique, and can become iconic.  The game art begins to create an identity for the game, which helps the game catch fire.

World War II shooters, on the other hand, can’t rely on that so much.  First off, every major publisher in the industry’s got one, and what’s more, the market depends on gritty realism as the cornerstone of the looks of all of them.  WWII shooters aren’t the only ones with the problem – check out ads for racing games sometimes – but its still a real problem: how do you sell something that’s got a flood of competition, the screenshots of all of which look mostly alike?  Your competitors are all going to be doing the obvious thing, which is using genre-appropriate music.  But this doesn’t help sell your game – it helps sell the genre.  And with so many similar games on the shelves, there’s no guaruntee it’ll sell yours.

So you create some dissonance.  As an example: ‘Doom’ has had the ‘Space Marine’ concept pretty locked up.  Ads for other games (such as Unreal) that sold on the Space Marine riff were selling the genre, which supports Doom rather than competing it.  So what do you do if you’re a marketing guy handed yet another Space Marine game?  You create one of the most achingly dissonant and memorable game ads of all time.  You can’t help but watch it to the end  and see the logo.

And for what it’s worth, Soundgarden is a far cry from, say, Skid Row’s “Big Guns”.