Dark Souls Terrible Marketing Masterstroke

I didn't want to write this follow-up. If you haven't read it, this will be me expanding on "Machismo and the Marketing Masculinizing of the Video Game Hobby" which may be found here (https://www.patreon.com/posts/machismo-and-of-56440167). I didn't want to write this follow-up because I barely felt qualified to write the first essay. I'm the target audience for this kind of marketing. I have no background in marketing studies. I have no background in gender studies. I only have observations. That said, the subject bothers me a lot so I hope you'll allow me this indulgence. In a sense this is also a follow-up to my "VR is the Wii for Self Described Gamers" essay (https://www.patreon.com/posts/vr-is-wii-for-56124098) so clearly these ideas rattle around in my head a lot. If I say something stupid I plead only that it was not out of malice.

Preamble done, let's dig in a bit. Dark Souls was, relative to its status as something of a new IP, one of the biggest hits of that 2011 era. Calling it a new IP is a bit tenuous; technically it's unrelated to Demon's Souls but obviously the cult following that had built that game into a surprise success was a huge part of Dark's success. Either way though, the groundswell of support both from players and the development community gave it healthy sales and a huge influence on design going forward. The game would go on to sell something on the order of 5 million copies across various platforms. That kind of success would be nothing to sneeze at for even most AAA games, but Dark Souls did those numbers on what at least appeared to be a relatively modest budget. I'm obviously not qualified to say how much it cost to make, but given the turnaround time on it compared to its predecessor, the kinds of budgets From Software had at the time, and the fact that it was technically a new IP on the back of a game that was considered a huge surprise success at a million copies, the return on investment was likely quite high. Dark Souls was a quality game and word of mouth around Demon's would have likely propelled it relatively far, but it wouldn't have taken it that far. Word of mouth is one thing, but Dark Souls became a meme. A frankly disgustingly successful meme. To be clear, there are some slangy references to popular games as meme games, or famously janky ones as meme games, this is neither. Bandai Namco's marketing department seems to have carefully considered the attitude within "gamer" culture at the time and the kinds of people most invested in Demon's Souls when crafting their approach. It's one of the most solid bullseyes I've ever seen in terms of marketing. It is also cravenly and transparently obvious. Let's observe it in action.

https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/275948-dark-souls-playstation-3-back-cover.jpg

Image courtesy of MobyGames. Everything about this marketing strategy is emblemized here. The back cover of Dark Souls lays out its thesis in three words: Prepare to die. Much hay was made that Demon's Souls was hard and this was going to be EVEN HARDER. The satisfaction of overcoming challenges was placed on the box to justify this, but placed much deeper in the copy. Yes, that's the gameplay reason behind its design, but it's not the marketing reason to put that foot forward. Nothing stated about the plot, nothing about the world, this is all challenge and technical features. This is masculinity-baiting catnip. There's a lot of ways that this has been put together to appeal to a very insecure straight dude market without having to use anything that would typically mark that. There is no need to delve into the more overtly machismo fueled fantasy set; no need to assure the player that there are conventionally attractive women in the game who will fall for their player avatar. The player base that has already been primed for using games as an assertion of masculinity has already been summoned just by what's on this back cover.

The emphasis on difficulty is the famous bit and so the bit I'll cover last. The other stuff's pretty prosaic but still signaling. Almost all of it feeds into the hard part except for the "groundbreaking online features." These were legitimately innovative and neat for the time, but the phrasing is absolutely meant to project the concept of bleeding edge technology. Bleeding edge tech is most interesting to people who are already extremely invested in something, the people who are most keen to discern what new advances the game introduces. They signal that this game exists to give novelty to the kind of person who plays dozens of games a year. Given how much it had been assumed to that point that said person was a straight dude, it can't be ignored that this is more signalling to them. Anything can be a signal if enough people associate it properly, and this kind of technophilic marketing is exactly that.

But back to... "Prepare to die." Ugh. Okay, let's get this over with. The refresher course: in the 90s, games marketing really and specifically shifted to expect that games were for boys. Games marketing had a heavy emphasis on the existence of violence and breasts like most things marketed at an assumed teenage straight male audience. As video games were more expensive than obvious competitors in entertainment such as movies and TV, they often advertised a value proposition emphasizing how long games would take to complete. In the 90s this shifted from an emphasis on difficulty to an emphasis on breadth of content. That's all stuff I've rambled about before. The corollary though is that every piece of enthusiast press from this period fed this set of ideas back into the subculture. For nearly two decades by that point, the key players in the enthusiast press had been part of this specific form of marketing machine. Enthusiast press had existed beforehand, but it had morphed to match this new marketing caricature of what a gamer was and the people reading followed on by trying to morph to fit that caricature to some greater or lesser extent. This idea of what a gamer was was assumed to have come under attack in the late ‘00s though. Between games designed to be played on social networks, the Wii, the DS and the nascent mobile game trend, there had been a significant counter-marketing trend to try to sell games to people who didn't consider themselves gamers. When these were in their infancy there was tentative enthusiasm from enthusiast press—games would be recognized as an important cultural medium if your parents were playing them too. However, the second these started to take off, the audience became defensive and so in turn did the enthusiast press. It was an overt and defensive reaction, that if games were allowed to be for "them" soon they wouldn't make any games for "you." Given the audience that had been courted, "you" was an assumed straight male somewhere in their teens or twenties. Entire genres that had previously had proper designations were reassigned as "non-games," particularly slow-paced games or narratively driven games. Anything that was considered approachable was suddenly more likely to be tarred with a brush of being for "them" and thus a threat to your consistent diet of shooters and action games.

Hopefully, you can see and agree with the line I'm trying to draw. Dark Souls’ marketing is built around an identity-reinforcing shriek laser targeted at people who saw video games as being at an existential crossroads about whether games were for them or for their grandmas (somehow it was always grandmas that came up in these comparisons.) To be hard was an assertion of being inaccessible, and players of Dark Souls immediately ran with this. It wasn't just to prove masculinity in a personal sense, it was to assert that the best games, the only games worth caring about, were the games for "you." Despite Dark Souls taking many steps to make itself more accessible than its predecessor, it was treated as a rebuke of the concept of games for a broad or non-traditional audience. The marketing played a key role in that—it lit the spark that helped ignite that obvious powder keg and it rode the explosion to higher sales than it likely would have otherwise attained. Dark Souls' marketing made it a symbol to rally around even among people who might otherwise have rejected that kind of game.

That's frustrating, that shouldn't have ever been the case. Dark Souls being challenging for the reward of overcoming difficulty is so obviously the core intent, because Dark Souls' design is clearly meant to strip out as many punishing elements as possible. Dark Souls requires a relatively high degree of precision compared to its contemporaries, but it almost always leaves the player no worse off than their last attempt. Its design feels meant to invite more players to get further in than Demon's Souls. It is an ideal first "hardcore" action RPG for a new player, but its marketing and consequent reputation did their best to hide this. Estus Flasks, your healing items that recharge on death, are one of the single friendliest changes ever made to any game of this type. There’s also the lack of punishment for being in "undead form" compared to "soul form" relative to its predecessor. The game has very deliberately pulled multiple levers, very key difficulty modulating levers, in the players’ favor compared to its predecessor. For all that though, the motivated reasoning of its marketed audience could not be overcome.

This still really bothers me. It makes me wish I liked Dark Souls less because it definitely helped galvanize and perpetuate an attitude I despise. It'd be so much easier if the game was bad, or clearly spitefully made. Instead it just makes me frustrated that a cleverly designed game that did try to make itself more accessible to new players immediately had clear design intentions overwritten by an audience zealous for it to represent their fevered anguish that some games might be for other people too. Bandai Namco's marketing did exactly what it needed to; it sold that game and made it a success that no one would have reasonably expected from it. The design built into it was top notch. Sadly, the culture around it poisoned the analytical part of the brains of a wide swath of its audience. If it hadn't been this game, it's very probable it would have been another, but a game of lesser quality probably wouldn't have found as much success. Dark Souls’ marketing was a perfect storm of exploiting a truly ugly part of the culture while representing a game so good that people were willing to accept that.