A “stars aligned” moment happened for me on Sunday night. I started a new weekly stream with Tales of Arise and as I ended the stream, I was editing the VOD details as I always do…then I saw the trailers for Guilty Gear Strive 2.0 and JAM on my feed! To say that I was hyped was an understatement.
When you’re getting older, you lose track of things, especially when it comes to events (Arc World Tour Finals for Guilty Gear Strive in Korea) that you don’t really have enough mental bandwidth for…AND it’s the school holidays for my kids.
I felt like this came out of nowhere, but honestly, it was already brewing in the background:
This felt super different from when they first launched Guilty Gear Strive back in 2021…but why? They did pretty much the same thing but why did this feel like a “soft” landing compared to the first time round? Let’s go back a few years and see where this began…
Novelty#
EVO 2019. It’s been 5 long years since the last installment of the franchise. Then this announcement came out of nowhere:
Everything about it was like a punch in the face. From the hyper polished, updated visuals, to the theme song “Smell of The Game”, to the mysterious character teased a the end of the trailer. The hype was real. 5 years is a long time and when something of this magnitude hits, the novelty factor compunds with the number of quiet years in between main releases.
Normally, announcements like this come with a period of lulls and no news until closer to the release date but Arc System Works was no ordinary company. These were the people that gave everyone the same sucker punch when they announced Dragon Ball Fighterz just 2 years prior to EVO 2019.
Dragon Ball was a huge anime franchise and just a small mention would bring instant recognition. The Dragon Ball FighterZ announcement was so huge that they really didn’t need anything else to drive media traffic but a few sprinklings of showcases here and there.
But for a smaller, niche franchise like Guilty Gear, you need a different strategy…
Sustained HYPE#
For a full 2 years after that, Arc System Works released individual character trailers every other month, on top of the game’s public beta test as well as the full story from Guilty Gear Xrd on their YouTube channel…all while COVID-19 was punishing extroverts into their hellish prison of living on military rations and virtual hook-ups. 2 years of hyping up the release. 2 YEARS!
This sustained hype strategy worked well in their favour as the music, visuals, and the game’s overall motifs stay embedded in the minds of the masses, especially since people didn’t really have anything else to do during the pandemic. You could argue that the pandemic actually helped put eyeballs on this little known franchise outside of its hardcore fanbase, but on the flipside, there was so much nonsense and information during the pandemic that it was equally as easy for it to drown in the sea of COVID-19 generated slop.
One thing for sure is that the strategy works, and even if you removed the COVID-19 pandemic from the picture, it would still work albeit to varying degrees of success.
So now that we’re all caught up, why didn’t the Guilty Gear Strive 2.0 announcement seem so lackluster in comparison? They didn’t seem to do anything differently? Or did they…
It’s Just an Update#
In the franchise’s history, updates have usually been treated with much less fanfare, due to the fact that they would slap some random psuedo abbreviation behind the game’s title. They did the same here: Guilty Gear Strive 2.0.
To be honest, this looks a lot more polished than any other update in the franchise’s history (I honestly am looking forward to the “short story” feature) and the fact that this is essentially the 5th year of this game being out on the market says a lot.
Anyway, this is exactly the problem. The whole “it’s just an update” mentality kind of spilled over into the marketing. There was no “every other month” update until release date this time around. In fact, it’s been a weird roller coaster of information coming out of the ArcSys media machine:
- The OG creator of Guilty Gear moving on to his new pet project and mainly promoting his new baby
- Marvel TOKON completely flooding the entire FGC’s attention bandwidth
With the entire priority structure of the company spread across multiple outlets, the same focused, sustained hype marketing pretty much doesn’t exist anymore this time around. You could also see that in the two titles I mentioned up here: they all suffer from the lack of focus, as the diverted attention (and also the manpower behind the marketing itself) pulls away from the hype, resulting in sporadic announcements (once every 9 months?!), as compared to the absolute sustained hype and focus of 2019-2021.
With the amount of acclaim and recognition ArcSys is getting, scaling and expansion is the next logical phase in the company’s lifecycle…
Corporate bloat#
The blueprint of any company that starts off small and begins to scale never really changes:
graph LR; A[Startup]-->B[Expansion]; B-->C[Mega Corporation]
With this comes the similar trade-off that appears in the pattern that we see time and time again. A booming startup or indie game development company begins to scale, adopts corporate structures and culture, becomes a super mega corporation with all the standard bells and whistles.
Now having said that, ArcSys is definitely not a startup or indie dev, but by the way they have been working for the past 30 years, they definitely did not have the typical mindset of a corporation at least from those of us looking on the outside.
The culture and mindset is what really defines a company, and this shows in their products and offerings. For the past 30+ years, ArcSys have been known for breaking the rules every now and again with home-grown franchises like Guilty Gear and BlazBlue that have become iconic, as well as their hyper stylized anime fighting games. This all comes on the back of constantly developing 3rd party titles for franchises like Double Dragon, Sailor Moon, and up until recently, Dragon Ball.
The fact that we see how their attention is being split between their latest releases I mentioned earlier goes to show you how they’re struggling with this crisis at the moment. I’m sure they’re split between “we need to expand and scale up to accomodate all this development” and “we need to keep our independent spirit alive” right now up in the leadership.
“Do I risk the fact that we might not have enough runway after we scale up? What if we don’t and we start firing right after the project is complete? Do I stay small and secure but stretch our people so thin that we end up with unhappy employees who will whistle blow and give us a bad reputation?”
— ArcSys CEO impressionist
Final Thoughts#
Running a sustained-long term marketing strategy definitely beats out a once-in-a-blue-moon update, but with it comes some serious cost considerations with regards to:
- Manpower
- Return on Investment
In the Guilty Gear Strive initial release vs version 2.0 case study here, it’s pretty obvious that they were successful the first time around (all-time-high sales record for the franchise, accolades, etc), and second time around? We’ll have to wait and see.
All-in-all, I’m super hyped for the new update, and I guess I’ll see you online when it drops.
-Fab