Videogames 3 - Assassin's Creed: The role of Trailers in Marketing

Assassin's Creed: The role of Trailers in Marketing

• Assassin's Creed is a tent-pole or triple-a game.
• You can pre-order the game, however it is usually quite expensive but with marketing the game can convince the audience to buy it early.
• Industry and Audience.
• Possible questions - product attraction and maintaining audiences locally and globally, marketing and promotion. Specific process of production, distribution and circulation shape the game. Digital convergence affects the product in distribution, production and circulation. - trailers.
• The trailer targets a specialised and generalised audience that's either mass or niche. Theory - David Hesmondhalgh - it's needed for industries to minimise risks and maximise profit. Assassin's Creed needs to target a mass audience because of profit and power but also targets a particular niche audience, this is through a particular marketing campaign.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla Trailer

• It targets a mass and niche audience.
• The high production value are seen such as the fur and hair on chracters, the game is suggested to be a high quality game, however the trailer is pre-renderd and won't exactly look like the trailer in gameplay.
• The trailer has paradimatic feautures of film trailers such as a narrative, range of scenes in the narrative of the game, it uses a song that builds up, this may excite the audience.
• There is a clear narrative of vikings and knights, the vikings are seen as the 'bad guys', as they are invading the knight's land, the audience is taken from the perspective of the 'bad guys'.
• There is intertextuality at the end of the trailer, it references the Assassin's Creed franchise - aims at the niche who enjoy the series. For mass, it references fantasy films such as Lord of the Rings films which became very popular, the dark settings of iconography and mise-en-scene of Game of Thrones which is a popular TV show.
• The trailer has minimised risks such as referencing to the Assassin's Creed's Franchise, films and TV shows.
• The game will be a straightfoward game, previous Assassin's Creed games on videogame covers usually features the main character whos face is covered up by a hood with a grey or blue background with direct address. The USP of Assassin's Creed is the game is always set in a historical time period. The genre is hybrid, it's an action-adventure game, the previous games always featured a sci-fi aspect which is never mentioned, it avoids creating confusion.
• It may target the niche audience of those who live in the north of England as the game is set there, but globally it will attract these audiences by violence and history of vikings.
• The game is high budget, so it needs to attract a wide audience.
• Digital convergence allows to target a large audience by the internet, the trailer on YouTube can easily be circulated.

• Fans became mad at the trailer because of the pre-rendered CG as it doesn't really show how to game looks and works when playing it. Ubisoft made this decision to show the 'first look' of the game and make fans excited, as well as targetting a mass audience.

Other Trailers

• Assassin's Creed: E3 annoncement trailer (2007) - Used pre-rendered CG instead of in-game graphics, this could lead to negative reactions of fans as the game won't look like the trailer.
• Assassin's Creed Revelations E3 Trailer (2011) - Ubisoft' marketing strategy is utilised in using prerelease trailers using a famous pop song as it draws in a mass audience as the song will be popular despite being wildly at odds with the franchise.
• Assassin's Creed Odessey: E3 Trailer (2018) - This trailer used in-gameplay graphics, different from other trailers which use pre-rendered CG.