Comic-Con Is No Longer About Comics!

If you’re a developer or publisher looking to stand out where you didn’t at E3 or just leverage the assemblage of nerds to push your game, then this is a great thing. Forty years into this, maybe it’s just an inevitable evolution, like it or not. Whatever the case it would appear that the name, Comic-Con, has become more of a brand and marketing tool and less of a gathering of fans of those printed funny pages.

Catering To Your Audience: Videogame Direct Marketing

In all of these instances and many more what you can see occurring is that developers and publishers are starting to realize that there are opportunities make a game that targets a core group while still making an enjoyable game that anyone can play without have read every issue of Civil War or have a photographic memory of every classic heavy metal album. The trick is to acknowledge your target demographic without insulting them but don’t spend so much time on doing so that you forget that the title still needs to be a game you would want to play.

Comic-Con — Comics Schmomics, What About The Games?

Sure they’ve been a good batch of quality comic-book video games — Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the Spiderman franchise and the recent Wolverine game to name a few. But has there been a game that would get comic book fans as excited as they were about the aforementioned Captain America issue? Not as of yet. Maybe Eidos’ Arkham Asylum might be the ticket but for now they’re still trying with a combination of comic book like games and just games they think comic book fans will dig. There are even developers who come out and talk games, special previews of games coming out and so on and so on. This is kind of like E3 having a big booth at Comic Con. And at this level of involvement the booth is continually getting bigger. The question as to whether the continued push to get comic book fans, or maybe the new hybrid comic book fan/gamer will work — remains to be seen.