Why Games Designers need some Marketing Training

A nine foot tall rooster walks into a bar, looking tired as hell. The bartender looks surprised when the rooster pulls up a chair, sits down and orders a drink.
"A talking Rooster, don't see many of you guys."
"Yeah, this bar doesn't really agree with us, but I just NEEDED a drink, and to get out of the house."
"A rough morning crowing at the sun?" The Rooster fixes him with a withering glare, then downs his drink in one go. Gulp, it's gone, and without thinking the bartender's pouring him another.
"Oh har har. No, it's me wife, actually. She's hounding me day and night to get me into bed. It was great at first, but now I just can't take it." The Bartender raises an eyebrow, and the Rooster pulls a photo out of his wallet. It's a photo of the most beautiful blonde put on this earth. A body that could stop a train in its tracks, a smile that could give a statue an erection, and a certain gleam in her eye that spells the good kind of trouble. The bartender is amazed, completely speachless for several seconds..
"Holy crap! I was expecting you to be married to a, you know, chicken or something."
"Nope, chickens don't marry." The Bartender just blinks a few times before his curiousity takes over again.
"How did you two, you know, fall in love?"
"Turns out no woman can resist a nine foot cock."

My sense of dignity was telling me not to put that joke down, since this blog has my actual name on it (which, thinking of it, I'll remove the surname of, not that it'll help if someone genuinely tries to identify me, since my email's here). But screw it, I just made that joke up two minutes ago, and I am going to TELL the f***ing thing.

• 71. If I spell it 'arse' I'm talking about my posterior (or possibly your posterior, or a specific or general third party posterior, dependant on context). If I spell it 'ass' I'm discussing a four legged mammal.

Ever heard of the game Boarderlands? I saw a sneak peak in a magazine I get regularly a number of months ago, and it looked pretty cool.

FPS/RPG game with vehicle combat in which you can jump from one vehicle to another. Just that sentence gets my attention. Seeing the ragged, Fallout-3 like set-up they've shown for the world REALLY grabbed my attention. Freeform sandbox gameplay OR you can follow the singleplayer campaign story OR co-op freeform multiplayer. That gets my heart beating so fast I'm getting a workout just by reading it.

Then I saw this.





When you're showing off your product to the world with phrases like "man, I just disintegrated that guy", "Mordekai is such a badarse even though he's wearing a skirt" and "you can get, like, green type weapons that fire acid, that can melt off a guys face. Like in Indiana Jones", you have lost my vote.

Point 1: If disintegration is a selling point for a game, it's lost my attention.
Point 2: If you refer to your own characters as 'badarse' you've got a few issues. I have seen very, very few characters in games who make me stop and go "Wow, badarse."
Point 3: Similar to point 1, except substitute 'melting off faces with acid' for 'disintegration', and throw in a healthy 'until your game makes a gun called the "Lost A.R.K." that fires holy spirits to melt people, it's not Indiana Jones-like'. In fact, I think I'll go on record and saying 'Indiana Jones style claymation face melting is NOT a goal, for many, many reasons.

Well done. In that one video you just lost a customer.