Lunar Threads

Thankfully, you can always use the internet to advertise something. More people will see it there, anyway. As for trailers, it doesn't cost a dime to post a video on YouTube or most other streaming sites, whereas it would cost money to put it on TV.

The costs for advertising on the internet are still considerable, especially if you want to get lots of eyes on your work. Marketing and social engineering don't happen for free, and there are lots of great trailers that languish because their producers could not afford a large promotion budget.

Xseed's Lunar: SSH trailer is a great example. They have it on their official site, and also uploaded one on YouTube. Its hits currently stand at around 1,000, indicating that it wasn't very effective in shipping games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv40vMB7w_s

Wow. Like 1,000 views XD
The trailer itself is a little eh. Those gold fonts are unimpressive and sometimes not very readable, the gameplay images' size looks kinda small sorrounded in blackness or the background stuff. It never looks full screen and awesome except the anime videos, which they at least made good use of.
The music is good too but it looks like it might be a boring game. And on top, no marketing for it?

How does that compare to this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWfSK9ZkDhY

155,000 views exact as of right now that I clicked!
See how the font is more readable even though its just white with shadow?
See how the gameplay is full screen and impressive?
Hear how exciting the music is?
It's a better trailer all around. And it probably had better marketing too. I'm happy though cause I love this game, but not more than Lunar...

So Lunar could not only use technical improvements but better marketing. I wonder what Studio Alex has to say today.

jay_are wrote: So Lunar could not only use technical improvements but better marketing. I wonder what Studio Alex has to say today.

N, nothing...they have been dead for ten years.

Coming full circle from the start of this thread, aside from the fact that the original staff are scattered to the winds, even if a totally different but competent staff were to take up a remake, they'd probably need not only a new battle system (at least at the Grandia level of action/complexity), Dragon Quest VIII-esque 3D-but-animated-looking backgrounds, and some heavy-duty marketing, as you say. And that's just in Japan. I have no idea if international markets are really looking for old-time RPGs in any serious numbers these days.

@Sonic: To which I say that happened because they didn't advertise smartly. It's not all about just throwing money around. It's all in how you play your cards. You need some advertising money, sure, but sometimes the real answer is in INTELLIGENT and clever advertising, which will get you farther than just throwing trailers at people.

^ And to hire clever marketers you need a bigger budget.

And to have a bigger budget, they've been re-releasing Grandia games in Japan...
OK Honestly, wasn't GungHo part of Lunar's PSP port? I don't know how much of a budget they had at the time, but right now GungHo is doing extremely well with their Puzzle and Dragon's game. (91% of the company's profit for 2013 came from THAT game alone)... but they won't use it on good projects like Lunar lol *cries in a corner*.
BTW, if GungHo controls GameArts, doesn't that mean it's THEM we should be begging for Lunar and not GameArts?
GameArts is probably just trashing everyone's letters cause they're not their own boss anymore. But I dont know how things work there.

Sonic# wrote:^ And to hire clever marketers you need a bigger budget.

Not necessarily. There are marketers out there who are downright skillful in bringing a lot of attention to a product for surprisingly little. Just throwing more money at something is not the do-all-be-all answer as corporations would have you believe.

I didn't say it was the do-all-be-all answer. I'm pointing out that marketing requires resources, and a certain minimum quantity of capital is needed to play the marketing game. Obviously spending those resources wisely is the next part of the equation, but it's more difficult to get the same effectiveness out of fewer resources.

In other words, putting a video on YouTube still requires considerable investment. Someone has to plan, produce, and run post-production for a trailer. Someone has to figure out methods to disseminate the video to a wider audience - and many methods involve money as well. Someone has to be ready to capitalize on whatever attention the trailer will create through interviews, promotional events, convention demos, and other programming. Groups can certainly do all of this and succeed on shoe-string budgets, especially if they're defining success rather modestly as small companies like Xseed do. However, it is exceptionally difficult to attain the level of success equivalent to Final Fantasy without putting forth high-quality marketing, and that will cost money.