The new Halo 4 ad campaign. Sign of failure?

Games Other Halo
1

Have you noticed lately that there have been a resurgence of Halo 4 commercials on TV? It’s basically a commercial touting its achievements, the new DLC and its new price point of $39.99. My question is why? Why are there new TV ads for a game that came out months ago? I haven’t been seeing any commercials for BOII or any of the other games that came out in Fall 2012, why is that?

My thinking is that MS is noticing the dip in numbers for people who play Halo 4, so they’re trying to bring people back in with the new price point and trying to generate buzz for the game again.

I honestly think these new commercials are a sign of failure for Halo 4. Take for example a movie. Usually, when big movies that cost a bunch of money to make don’t do too well in the theater’s, what happens? You start seeing commercials for them again 3-4 weeks after they’ve been out, with random quotes from Joe Schmo saying “It’s the best movie ever”.

Did you see commercials for the Avengers or TDKR weeks after their release? No, because the movies were successful enough to generate all the hype they needed on their own once they released. Word of mouth is still huge, and when people see awesome movies like those they tell other people to go see them, just like if lots of people thought Halo 4 was awesome, they’d tell their friends to go get it.

I actually did do this at launch before I started to see how flawed this game was, I kept telling my friends “screw COD, go get Halo 4, this game is awesome” and I actually got a couple of friends to bite and they bought it. But after about 2 weeks of them playing it, they were fed up with consistent lag and the general “buggy” feeling of Halo 4, so they put it on the shelf and went back to COD. Can’t say I didn’t try, I did my part, I got my COD lover friends to actually buy/try Halo, but Halo 4 failed them. I’ve not given up yet, sometime during the summer I plan on telling my friends to give Halo 4 another chance, and I sincerely hope by then there have been substantial TU’s to make the game play better.

To me, commercials weeks after release are a sign that the movie isn’t living up to expectations, so the company that owns the brand puts just a bit more money into the movie in the form of commercials hoping it will get the movie to take off finally, usually this doesn’t work and I can’t think of one example right off hand where a movie that started out doing poorly starts to gain momentum, I don’t see this being any different for Halo 4.

I don’t think these new ads for Halo 4 are going to do it any good. What do you think, will these new commercials 4 months after Halo 4’s release help it gain back some players, or is it just going to slowly keep losing players?

I think Halo 4 will average out here in the next couple of weeks at around the 60,000-80,000 player mark and come summer time during the slow gaming months Halo 4’s numbers will pick up a bit, but never to that 400,000+ players it had the first week.

<mark>TL;DR</mark>: This new ad campaign for Halo 4 is a sign of failure in my opinion. Other big name games don’t need commercials to sell copies or DLC, they do that on their own with word of mouth. I don’t think these commercials will help Halo 4 at all, the only thing that will help Halo 4 is for its developer to start making some substantial changes that please the fans (see Custom Games topic/Competitive Playlist topics/ Rank topics). Once you please the fans, they’ll start spreading the word that Halo 4 is better now and they will get their friends to come back and give it another chance. TU’s > Commercials.

2

I’ve seen Black Ops 2 ads recently, maybe even last week. But I live in England so maybe it’s different for you guys.

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> I’ve seen Black Ops 2 ads recently, maybe even last week. But I live in England so maybe it’s different for you guys.

The only BOII ads I see are one’s on YouTube or IGN, never on TV. I’ve been seeing these new Halo ads everywhere.

4

Companies like to sell more of whatever it is they’re offering. Commericials are the expression of that. Is microsoft necessarily worried about the Halo 4 population? No, they’re just looking to make even more money.

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They’re a company, of course they will advertise their products in order to make more $$$. Shoot them for it if you want but ya know, that’s usually what big businesses like to do. I think you’re looking into this a little too much.

Edit: I read your post about how your CoD friends gave up Halo 4 because it is too buggy/laggy. Have they not played Lag Ops II? That game is a camper haven with even more unbalanced gameplay.

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> > I’ve seen Black Ops 2 ads recently, maybe even last week. But I live in England so maybe it’s different for you guys.
>
> The only BOII ads I see are one’s on YouTube or IGN, never on TV. I’ve been seeing these new Halo ads everywhere.

So they’re looking to reach a wide market to sell products. What the hell is wrong with that? If Apple places an iPad ad at a city bus stop does that mean their company is quaking in fear that their new flagship product is in danger of loosing all popularity because Samsung didn’t do the same? No, they’ve just got the resources and initiative to advertise to a lot of people.

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> They’re a company, they advertise their products. Shoot them for it if you want but ya know, that’s usually what big businesses like to do.

Then why aren’t there BOII ads plastered all over the TV and internet? Surely Activision wants more money as well? The reason is because COD pulls enough players to where they don’t need to advertise on TV for people to be aware of the game. Halo 4 isn’t in that category, so MS is trying to raise awareness for it again.

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> > They’re a company, they advertise their products. Shoot them for it if you want but ya know, that’s usually what big businesses like to do.
>
> Then why aren’t there BOII ads plastered all over the TV and internet? Surely Activision wants more money as well? The reason is because COD pulls enough players to where they don’t need to advertise on TV for people to be aware of the game. Halo 4 isn’t in that category, so MS is trying to raise awareness for it again.

I’m getting Black Ops II advertisements here in Canada and yes, they are on TV. However, I have not seen one Halo 4 commercial so far. I don’t know where you live but they’ve been advertising their new Revolution DLC and how it’s available now for PS3, PC as well as Xbox! You’re sounding a bit like a CoD supporter yourself but of course, these are just my assumptions. Maybe I’m just crazy.

9

> > They’re a company, they advertise their products. Shoot them for it if you want but ya know, that’s usually what big businesses like to do.
>
> Then why aren’t there BOII ads plastered all over the TV and internet? Surely Activision wants more money as well? The reason is because COD pulls enough players to where they don’t need to advertise on TV for people to be aware of the game. Halo 4 isn’t in that category, so MS is trying to raise awareness for it again.

You’re wrong…no explanation as to why just take my word for it.

10

The commercial is due to the release of the map pack and advertising the price drop. I saw BO:2 commercials pop back up in the same way when their map pack launched. You guys are trying way to hard these days.

When big movies don’t do too well they get them to DVD quicker as that’s where they make a good portion of their money.

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Black Ops 2 is currently $39.99 on Amazon. “OMG COD FAILING!!@!@”

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> > They’re a company, they advertise their products. Shoot them for it if you want but ya know, that’s usually what big businesses like to do.
>
> Then why aren’t there BOII ads plastered all over the TV and internet? Surely Activision wants more money as well? The reason is because COD pulls enough players to where they don’t need to advertise on TV for people to be aware of the game. Halo 4 isn’t in that category, so MS is trying to raise awareness for it again.

WOW also plastered the internet (and presumably TV) with ads for just about all their expansions. Despite making more money than sense at least a few years ago they still made the effort to advertise their game. Why? Because they wanted more money and their marketing folks surely thought ads would help. Other games in similiar situations, on the other hand, didn’t go that way and there’s really nothing else to say about that than these games just have different marketing strategies.

Regardless of current population size or status each has a marketing department trying to make the best decisions to raise product awareness of whatever kind or another with respect to that game’s particular user base. MS has decided here to try to reach out to a lot of people about their game and DLC. Activision hasn’t. What does that mean? Nothing, Halo has always had a heavier-handed marketing strategy (see. all the insane -Yoink- pulled for Halo 3’s and Halo 4’s releases) and this just follows along that.

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I voted ¨A sign the game is doing poorely¨
Not that I think its actually doing poor. {7 million copies by what I read here on WP} but by what a mentor once told me.
¨If you see ads run for a product more than normal. Stay away from that product.¨ He said that after we viewed a ¨Homelite, the chainsaw king¨ commercial back in the 80s. But like a fool I bought one, and learned that lesson the hard way.

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^ I guess every product ever released is doing poorly then.

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> I voted ¨A sign the game is doing poorely¨
> Not that I think its actually doing poor. {7 million copies by what I read here on WP} but by what a mentor once told me.
> ¨If you see ads run for a product more than normal. Stay away from that product.¨ He said that after we viewed a ¨Homelite, the chainsaw king¨ commercial back in the 80s. But like a fool I bought one, and learned that lesson the hard way.

OK ill stay away from zoosk and COD ( literally like 3 months in and i get COD adds on Halo 4 streams -_- really

16

They are going to drive Halo into the ground with this campaign because they are advertising too early.

Release season 2 of spartan ops, fix the lag, fix the balance, fix the bugs, add new playlists, basically fix everything, and THEN hype up the game.

If you hype the game up in it’s current state it’s only going to give it a bad reputation because people will try it and leave disappointed, then spread that around. They are being too hasty. I’m no marketing genius and even I can realize that.

Lowering the cost to $40 isn’t gonna help much either.

17

Are you people seriously TRYING to pick at EVERYTHING 343 attempt to do and always considered it as a downfall?

NEXT TIME ON HALOWAYPOINT. THE COMMUNITY EXPLAINS WHY A PICTURE OF THE 343 OFFICES MEANS THAT HALO 4 WAS JUST A SIMPLE ILLUMINATI PROPOSITION TO TAKE MONEY FROM THE COMMUNITY TO CONTACT SATAN!

18

Where’s the IDGAF option?

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Btw. The critics trailers are for “The Critics Awards 2013”.

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> Where’s the IDGAF option?

Oh, you have to look up higher. On the top right of the screen there is a red X button (You know, like old Halo games), just click on that. It will serve about as well as your post. :slight_smile: