Shadow of War's Spotty Marketing

Shadow of Mordor, released in 2014 by Warner Bros. Studios, and developed by Monolith Games, was a bit of a shock for me. I had heard about it months in advance, but it seemed far too ambitious. My expectations were nothing short of it completely burning and crashing. And... well, it didn't. It exceeded my admittedly low expectations by quite the margin, and I was thoroughly impressed with it.

So, of course, when its inevitable sequel, Shadow of War, was announced, I was incredibly excited. All indications seemed to be pointing towards Shadow of War expanding upon everything that made the first game great. Its first gameplay video was met with a lot of positive reception. But, over the past few months, there have been quite a number of things that have turned off several people. While I will certainly be purchasing this game, it's undeniable that there's now a stain on this game.

The most obvious, of course, are the micro transactions that were announced within the last couple months. I'm sure that most gamers of all kinds know what micro transactions are, and I'm almost positive that the majority of them groan at even the very mention, myself being one of them. But, just in case, micro transactions are small purchases one can make within a game to get extra stuff, such as bonuses or items. They're different than things like subscription fees like the one that WoW implements, or the purchasing of individual "episodes", such as the TellTale games. They're meant to be entirely optional.

Micro transactions as we know them first started popping up in the mobile game industry. To be fair, this actually makes a lot of sense. A number of these games were initially free, or incredibly cheap, so it's only fair to advertise extra little goodies or bonuses so that the developers can actually make a profit. But there was a major problem with this model of business. While it was possible in most, if not all, of these games to progress naturally, without the need for micro transactions, many of them deliberately made this progress very slow, almost glacial, to encourage people to spend their extra nickels and dimes.

But, for a time, this was contained in the mobile industry. But when bigger developers caught wind that there was BIG money in micro transactions, it was only a matter of time before we started seeing them in some of our AAA titles. But these were mostly multiplayer games, such as Star Wars Battlefront or GTA Online.

I wasn't aware of this, but apparently there's a very distinct line between multiplayer and singleplayer games when it comes to micro transactions. The announcement that Shadow of War would have micro transactions was a very divisive issue, one that had some people defending this action, saying that no one HAD to buy micro transactions, and others saying that this was a dangerous precedent to set and there were even some that were boycotting the game entirely.

But then it gets worse. Last year, the Executive Producer of the game, Mike Forgey, passed away. In response, the developers decided to put in a small $5 DLC: Forthog Orc-Slayer. It was the company's way of forever immortalizing Forgey in the game. Not only that, but 70% of any purchase made would go to Forgey's family until the end of 2019. Which sounds great.

But some people had noticed that this wasn't universally true. Firstly, this donation would only occur if the purchaser was in the United States. Meaning that anybody from Canada, the UK, Mexico, or anywhere else, wouldn't be able to make the donation through purchasing the DLC. Not only that, but there were a few states inside the U.S. that this also wouldn't apply to.

Numerous amounts of people accused WB of profiting off of a man's passing, while WB promised that they weren't going to be making a profit from this. It's fair to say that it's a bit too early to determine whether WB was being incredibly scummy, or if there was some other reason involved, like needing to pay legal fees and whatnot. Regardless, it left its mark and it's likely not going anywhere anytime soon.

Marketing can make or break a game. There have been a number of gems that weren't marketed much, and were overlooked by most simply because they had no idea about it. Of course, with the growing trend of indie games becoming beloved, word of mouth has become even more important and integral than it already was. But the way that Shadow of War's marketing has been handled has turned off a number of gamers, and for good reason.

Of course, bad press can do a product wonders at times. But with Shadow of War, I don't think that's the case. The controversy doesn't exist in the game itself, so there's no reason to buy it to see what all the fuss is about. It all stems directly in how WB gets money from the game. And at this point, gamers are fed up with generally anti-consumer business strategies.

Do I think that the game will be heavily marred by this? No, not in any huge way. But this should be an example for how NOT to market your game. Hopefully the game will still be good regardless of the mess that it's conjured up for itself.