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Destiny, P.T. And Why The Best Games Of The Summer Were Ads

I’m currently listening to the soothing sounds of my PS4 homescreen, a necessary break after spending the better part of the last hour listening to laughing babies and croaking dead women in the P.T. “playable trailer” for Silent Hills.

I finally hooked up my PS4 after a lengthy move and was able to play what a few are even calling the best game of the year, even if it’s just a playable teaser. Before that, the biggest video game event of the summer was the Destiny beta, again, a preview for a game that isn’t out yet.

Both were free. Both will do a masterful job at selling their final product. The age of the demo is back, in a wide range of forms.

For hugely anticipated new games like Destiny, Titanfall, Hearthstone or a large collection of upcoming MOBAs, the “try before you buy” concept is taking the form of playable betas. They serve as actual tests for the game yes, but it’s underlying purpose is very clearly marketing.

This works wonder for big name releases like Destiny, which very cleverly gave each beta tester two other codes to share with friends. Then, at the end of the test, the game was opened up to anyone and everyone, and in the end 4.6M people played the beta.

“After the beta, word of mouth among my other friends was crazy,” one of my friends told me. “It got me to pre-order.”

For Destiny, the beta successfully built the game into possibly the most anticipated release of the fall, and getting people to actually play the game was the best possible marketing the game could have come up with. From trailers alone, most, myself included, were a little concerned that Destiny seemed to be a bit generic and ordinary. But after playing, many changed their tune. Potential issues aside (and there are still plenty) when you actually got your hands on the game, it was hard to not have a good time, no matter your previous objections.

The P.T. Silent Hills teaser is something entirely new, and possibly even more exciting from a marketing perspective. Beta tests are great for when your game can manage them, and is ideally, actually good. But that format doesn’t lend itself to all genres, and something like say, simply playing the first level of a new Silent Hill game doesn’t produce the same sort of excitement and buzz as something like P.T.

P.T. is a simple looped hallway, and the entire stage is probably no more than a few hundred square feet. But creepy tweaks with each new go-round make it gripping, and the repetition and descent into insanity is reminiscent of Kubrick’s The Shining. The only problem with P.T.? Now the game it’s advertising has to live up to the masterful madness of the teaser.

It’s clear that P.T. won’t be the last playable teaser released for a new game, given the attention it’s garnered. But I have to wonder how it will translate to other genres. I’m picturing cool little set pieces, like say, that final Halo: Reach mission that was simply a small area and an enemy wave dump, but was compelling from a narrative perspective as a hero’s last stand. To me, something like that would be better marketing than any trailer could muster.

People own these new-gen video game consoles now and want to do things with them. But the relative vacuum of releases, and the constant overloading of titles into fall and now early winter means that most of the year, your console can be devoid of must-play titles. But now, we’re seeing that change through these free marketing gameplay promotions, either in beta form or now this new, interesting playable teaser format. These were the most compelling console experiences of the summer, and they were advertising.

I want to see more of this. More free betas. More creative, clever hands-on trailers. More actual demos like the ones now hitting Xbox Live. This is how you encourage people to get excited for your game and buy it at launch, not irritating retailer/console-exclusive pre-order bonuses.

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