So this weekend MLG Dallas took place including Halo 4 MLG also had Fighters, Starcraft 2 and League of Legends. Last month Riot released an infographic stating that LoL has 70 million accounts with 32 million monthly active players. Last season they also committed a 5 million prize pool. Now let me state that I would never expect 343i to take this route but let me show you what I believe the best thing a developer could do to support/promote their game. http://imgur.com/vN5zG
Now since this money can be considered one giant marketing budget that has been invested they’ve taken a great approach to promote it. After seeing LoL do such a great at promoting the events and a year of the Starcraft community asking for this implementation Blizzard has also improved to do this within their client.
The last three times I have gone to play halo reach I have got a message promoting the forward onto dawn videos. I see this as such a great way to not inconvenience the player base but to promote things since it only ever appears once. Now I don’t know if 343i committed money to the prize pool or anything but they have spent a lot of human resources to work on the playlists with MLG, giving them early release access to the game and sent a few staff over to the event. I know this is way less than a video series budget but nonetheless should be promoted. Besides the halo twitter and forum which will never reach a whole games player base especially for a console game.
I do doubt that there is currently a person playing Halo Reach still that is not going to be buying a copy of Halo 4 but this event had such a potential to create a good amount of hype enough to just get people talking to their friends and telling them to check out the game play.