Friendly reminder: Pre-orders are a metric guaging support (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, March 31, 2017, 17:56 (2581 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Agree with all of your earlier points :)

4. Finally, how much of a studio's time / effort is spent on the marketing vs the game they are making? It seems... questionable... that the two have much to do with each other. For instance, how many of Bungie's programmers, environment artists, tools designers, etc even touched the Destiny 2 teaser and trailer? And of the ~3 years Destiny 2 has been in development, what percent of the studio's time was spent on the advertising vs the game?

I'd actually be curious to know that, too. We know that Bungie didn't have total marketing control during the first Destiny because of what happened with Marty. So how much control do they have? Someone said earlier that they suspected that Bungie writers had basically nothing to do with the script of the teaser or the trailer and probably only looked it over for canon discrepancies, and I'd have a hard time believing that.

I can probably answer a bunch of questions about this. I've worked on several commercials as an editor, and been present for the dev side of several commercials as a Lead Production Tester.

The short of it is that marketing is a different department and doesn't really interact with development. In the case of destiny, ATVI probably just asked Bungie for assets, and then did whatever they wanted with the resulting footage. Occasionally you'll hire a real writer and director to come up with something more powerful and cinematic like the "wolves" trailer for Destiny (was that the name? The one with the guy from breaking bad in it), and that doesn't get much feedback from the studio beyond - as you said - cannon confirmation and maybe some help with art direction.

Lots of times you just hand your assets over to another company, and that company makes the thing. The ad agency will send back "we need this rigged to do a thumbs up" and then your animator will take some time to re-rig the asset and send it back. OR the ad agency will hire their own cinematic animator who will do the re-rigging himself (both are equally plausible. Often it depends on whether or not you want to preserve any rigging for the final game; reciprocal asset use saves money, and allows the devs to "steal" some of the advertising money to help their art team out, but lots of times you also don't need - or want - all of that extra rigging on the character models since you'll almost never be using it. That being said, Destiny has incredibly articulate character models, so I can see reciprocity being a thing for them.

Anyway, some studios (blizzard) have in-house animators and directors, and editors who all work to make the cinematics themselves. Other (most) studios hire out via their marketing departments, and some associate producer is tasked with collecting from the devs whatever resources the ad agency needs to make their commercial. Then there's several rounds of corporate approval, focus testing on messaging, and the ad gets released.

This is how you get things like "out here in the wild, this is how we talk" showing up in adverts. The materials were delivered to the marketing department probably months in advance, and were either not updated when they were removed from the game, or the ad was already complete and just not fully approved at the time of the changes, so they pushed forward with it anyway rather than reworking the whole thing.

Any other questions, let me know.