False, I’m incredibly worried about Splatoon 3. I’m not worried that the game will suck or that there will be delays, I’m worried that Nintendo’s marketing strategy may have destroyed Splatoon 3’s potential, now I mentioned this briefly in the Splatoon 3 needs you article, but that article was short, so today, I’m going to put on my little marketing hat and go into more detail about what I mean.
I’m incredibly excited about Splatoon 3, as many of you are, but I’m not afraid to say that the way Splatoon 3 has been handled from a marketing standpoint is very subpar for me, and that concerns me. The reason for my concern is that the way a game is advertised and marketed prior to release has a huge impact on how well the game is received by a wider audience, the reputation it gains, and the growth of its sales and franchises.
If you think I’m exaggerating, or I’m exaggerating too much, let’s take a look at some of Nintendo’s other marketing mistakes in the Splatoon franchise, and let me take you back seven years to something many of us know and many of us hate, and that’s Splatoon 1’s European Kid Now Your Squid trailer. You know what? Yes, people remember that phrase, but for all the wrong reasons, did it make more people play this game without it probably cost Nintendo the new Splatoon gamer abso freaking out, I think at the time Nintendo was like oh, it’s squidgy boy yeah rhyme etc etc, a phrase that came from an ad seven years ago, but Splatoon is a for kids only The game’s reputation has stayed with it until today, and that’s in part because of that ad.
I’m not actually talking about a lack of new information, I’m talking about a lack of advertising in general. Nintendo’s twitter accounts are all very active, much more so than Splatoon’s official account, and they’re all a great opportunity to get the game out there for people I would say if you’re a fan of Nintendo, but not necessarily a fan of Splatoon, but Splatoon 3 barely appears on any of these accounts, compared to a lot of other Nintendo ips, and obviously yes games like Kirby and Forgotten Lands or Nintendo Switch Sports all came out before Splatoon 3.
But Splatoon 3 is also the one that’s been known about the longest, and without frequent enough advertising people will forget about it, they don’t need to pump out a lot of new content for us, but I really think the game could benefit tremendously from being in the public eye more. As I write this, one perfect thing proves exactly what I’m talking about, I left a comment on a pro chara article four or five weeks ago talking about Splatoon 3’s advertising, or lack thereof.
This article had someone respond that I didn’t even know there was a Splatoon 3 coming out until last week, which is a huge concern, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about, because this person wouldn’t be the only one that’s marketing your game in a way that people know it’s a thing I’m sure most of you know or have at least heard of Mean Girls by now. I bet half of you don’t know there is a Mean Girls, and if you don’t, it’s because the movie was a big failure compared to the first one, and the reason it failed was because they relied on the Mean Girls name to draw people in, which is not a good marketing strategy for anyone who isn’t a die-hard Mean Girls fan. It wasn’t a good enough marketing strategy to live up to the success of the first film, and Platoon 3 has the potential to be the biggest game in the Splatoon series to date, but not if Nintendo continues to participate in the marketing school of Mean Girls 2. You know you’re probably thinking that’s fine and to some extent it is, but I still have some issues at this point in time and I would say probably 90 to 95 of the fans are probably already playing Splatoon or have played Splatoon and therefore already You know that tweet they posted, they had the right idea but they didn’t put it in the right place and I think Nintendo should do a good job on netflix, netflix has individual accounts for many of the most popular shows, right now I personally don’t follow Bridgeton’s account.
