Sony is backing Uncharted 4: A Thief's End hard. The platform holder – often criticised for not promoting its first-party games – is blowing its entire budget on Naughty Dog's next big game, plastering the PlayStation 4 exclusive on London buses and around football stadiums. While we don't have a pic of the former just yet – we're informed that the capital's iconic public transport has been consumed by Drake – you can see evidence of the latter above.
The static screengrab doesn't really do this promotion justice, though. The rolling banner starts with the PS4 logo and 'For the Players' slogan all around the perimeter of the pitch, and then an animated coin toss prompts a transition to the Uncharted 4: A Thief's End logo. This isn't just any old match that the manufacturer's chosen either – it's the Champions League semi-final, which is the biggest club football competition in the world. And it's likely to run the same promotion right through to the final in Milan on 28th May.
The scary thing is, we get the distinct feeling that the firm's only just getting warmed up. How big is this game going to be?
Comments 24
wtf.why you didn't promote ratchet and clank.and until dawn.2 great games.I live in New York.and I never saw ratchet and clank and until dawn commercial.but you had call of doodoo commercial.
@playstation1995 sony know what will sell. R&C is already well received, so they may well be testing the waters before throwing their weight behind the franchise.
Until Dawn may have been good, but it was very much a "B" release.
@playstation1995 Because Uncharted and Call of Duty are system sellers. Ratchet & Clank and Until Dawn both performed above expectations nonetheless.
true but people need to know those games.because the more they know the better that the game will sell
Ratchet and Clank seem to be doing fine and it'll get some more promotion from the upcoming movie, hopefully leading to some sequels. As for Drake, I've been watching the match and seeing the quite impressive advertising, also when I saw Batman vs Superman there were trailers for Uncharted 4 then.
I have a slightly blurry photo of an uncharted 4 poster on a London bus if you need Sammy - new to the site so not sure where to send it though should you want it
To be fair it's not just London. I live in Coventry and Uncharted 4 is pretty much plastered over every bus as of a week ago.
Forget about game exclusive, but why does the Champions league have to be exclusive to BT Sport...thank god for the internet
It's on every bus and a LOT of giant billboards here in Manchester, too.
@Rob_230 sammy [at] pushsquare [dot] com would be amazing. Thanks! I'll add to this article.
@get2sammyb
Despite that, you can still blame Sony for under promoting games. Nobody expects Until Dawn or Ratchet & Clank to have the marketing budget of Uncharted 4.......but they should have some kind of footprint.....as in, something? Anything? Those games are successful because of reviews and word of mouth, no thanks needed for Sony.
@sub12 They do promote them, though. Ratchet & Clank had takeover ads on a lot of sites, both games had a huge presence on the PlayStation Blog, and they featured heavily at various press conferences over the years.
Both are examples of games aimed directly at the core PlayStation audience, and they promoted them appropriately - in the venues that they know fans will be looking.
Uncharted 4 will be mainstream smash, so they're getting the word out to a more mainstream market, via buses and football stadiums.
I do understand the frustration, but you can't run multi-million dollar TV campaigns for every single game. And if you don't think they should be running multi-million dollar TV campaigns for every single game, then what would you do differently?
Where should they have advertised Ratchet and Until Dawn?
@get2sammyb
Come on, look at last year's E3, no Ratchet and Clank during the main press event, I'm not sure if Until Dawn was even mentioned either. That's great that they are advertising on the day of launch, on game oriented sites, but games like Ratchet could have more mass appeal if they made an event of it, worked on giving it some cultural cache.
Also, it's not like this is new, Sony was infamous during the PS3 era for having a ton of paid exclusives, but then dropping them on the console with a dud. Sony has long been pretty p*ss poor at marketing games specifically, outside of their tent pole franchises. Look at Vita, you don't even know about game releases until a week, or at most two weeks before launch. It's as if Sony is trying to actively work against the platform.
Of course you can't do a blitz for every game, but put some oomph behind up and coming IP's. For every Uncharted 4 and No Man's Sky, we also have Sly 4 and Until Dawn.
Language - get2sammyb
@sub12 Okay, fair enough, but what would you do differently to turn them into an event?
@get2sammyb
Still an extremely lame excuse, I don't care what anybody says. You have a great game, promote it. You guys did more to advertise Ratchet & Clank for Sony. That should be an embarrassing to any company worth a sh*t. Period.
@Gamer83 Right, but I'm asking what you want them to do. I'm just curious because I want to see if these expectations are realistic.
Sub12 mentioned turning these games into an "event". The only games I can think of in (relatively) recent years that were an "event" are Grand Theft Auto V and Halo 3.
@get2sammyb
Well, you'll probably disagree but if you ask me, since kids do exist, and there are families who game together, it wouldn't have been terrible to show the game off at E3. And it wouldn't have killed them to try and get the word out at Gamestop or Best Buy. A poster, something. There were no in-store ads, no tv, I'm sorry but for one of your best exclusive games, that's a poor job. And part of the problem is all the money Sony spends on unnecessary sh*t like VR.
@get2sammyb There's a movie coming out, right? What I would have done in the months running up to the game's release is emphasise how great it is to have a long running property get a mostly faithful film adaptation. Get some guys from Insomniac (I'm sure they're thrilled that this would happen) and Sony to talk about that in videos. Bring up the original game from 2002 and note how far the series has come since, as well as how it felt working on said game when it was a new thing. I've said before that I feel having Uncharted in the theater slot instead of R&C was a missed opportunity, and I still stand by that. Heck, talk about the cast of the movie, even! In addition to Taylor, Kaye, Ward and Shimerman reprising their roles, the celebrity cast doesn't seem too bad. Freaking Sylvester Stallone is in it! Even his lesser films get good press, I can't find press for this unless I'm actively looking for it.
All of that could get both the movie and game some attention on it. Just play it up as a property you're proud of. Is that really hard? Ratchet may never be the blockbuster Uncharted is, but it doesn't have to be. Sony just need to get behind it enough to show it's their proud property, but they haven't. Of course we gamers may love it, but I doubt the movie was made just for us, now is it? It's clear that Sony wanted R&C to be more than it is, but the lack of marketing and attention from them will fail that.
@get2sammyb
How to promote it? You could redo your top PS4 games list and put any of the above in the number one slot, and let Journey burn in hell with the gaming hipsters.......
@sub12
LOL
Uncharted 3 sold around 6 mill. I wonder if that will be enough for uncharted 4 to be a success since it probably cost more to make.
@Gamer83 The local gamestop near me has a Ratchet poster up right now, on the front door of all places. I have especially seen it on the internet many times. Could it have used a little more advertising? Probably, but I think the movie will be the big advertisement for it and they also dropped alot of money to make it as well.
I think the most impressive thing here is that none of our American friends have had to ask what the champions league is, then had them take a defensive stance when explained just how important it is to the rest of the world and the revenue it can generate. And hey this is coming from a rugby guy who doesn't care much for football. Glad to see them blow their budget guess they get free tickets to go to the final while their wives shop in Milan. If I organised this I know I'd be on a promise.
@Majic12
Well, I'm just stating what I've seen. Which was literally nothing in the way of in-store ads for R&C, good to know that maybe it got some advertising at some Gamestops across the country though. Still, it should've had a bigger marketing push. I'm not changing my opinion on that. Sony spends so much money on unnecessary bs that could've be better spent towards marketing the great games it publishes, and there are a lot of them, and that's what bothers me.
http://i.imgur.com/IB9VwHG.jpg
@get2sammyb these are how people are receiving recent videogame purchases from Amazon. They're going all in. I've never seen that type of promotion by Amazon.
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