Posted on: Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
Posted in: News
Comments: 29
Marketing Gone Wrong: Hitman Kills Your Friends
An offensive marketing attempt by Square Enix targeted at Facebook users draws flak and forces its removal!
Hitman has always been a series that has had trouble marketing itself, often stepping on toes and even having a horrible track record for creating marketing done in poor taste. Though it seems this time the marketing has taken a turn for the worse especially after the ‘fallout’ from the “Attack of the Saints” trailer that many still question to this day.
The marketing app was designed for Facebook and would allow users to put out hits on their friends, inserting descriptors such as small tits, small penis, obese, bad odor, etc. To many of you, this would seem to be a huge mistake from the very beginning, especially noting how the internet brings out the worst in its users. Needless to say the backlash came swiftly with Square Enix pulling the app down as quickly as possible, giving this statement as a response:
“Earlier today we launched an app based around Hitman: Absolution that allowed you to place virtual hits on your Facebook friends. Those hits would only be viewable by the recipient and could only be sent to people who were confirmed friends.
We were wide of the mark with the app and following feedback from the community we decided the best thing to do was remove it completely and quickly. This we’ve now done.
We’re sorry for any offence caused by this.”
It begs the question of what Square Enix was thinking for even green lighting the application, and does a lot to reveal what the company thinks of its consumers and player base. On the one hand this sort of thing was designed to stir up controversy to get more people talking about Hitman while taking the backlash this app would cause as a manageable loss. Marketing like this is used to incite anger within a userbase who will drive traffic to vent their anger, using them as little more then free ad revenue and marketing themselves, being used all too often.
I know this is incredibly biased on my part, but I do have to say that bringing this sorry practice to light can help bring these practices to an end. I would love to hear your thoughts on the situation.
Sources:
Escapist Magazine
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29 thoughts on “Marketing Gone Wrong: Hitman Kills Your Friends”
Someone fundamentally lend a hand to create greatly content I would state. Which is the first time I personally frequented your web site page and so way? I personally pleasantly surprised using the analysis you’ve made to produce that distribute wonderful. Amazing pastime!
umm i dont know what to think
Yeah, this isn’t really friendly teasing as much of just being a dick to your friends, seriously.
And also if you get upset over something like this sent, why do you even have facebook in the first place, you should know of the risks and problems you could face.
I hardly see the big deal about this, considering it was just a bit of fun, have people got so neurotic now?
Wow. What made them think that *that* was a good idea?
Love your game reviews. when can we expect 10 best and worst reviews for this year out by? keep up the good work.
Well I only have one video review, though several written reviews if that’s what you are talking about.
Or I could say, I am not Joe.
Yea… it’s really not in good fun, I understand friends (particularly guys) rag on one another all in good fun when were hanging out and the like… but this is just like sending your pal an e-mail saying “you have a small dick, you deserve to die” or “you smell like an unclean asshole, F*** you buddy!”
It’s ah… really just a poor advertising attempt, and if your the kind of person who speaks to your friends like that on a regular basis… you really don’t need the “app”, you can just be an ass in person, this whole advertising technique is utterly terrible…
Only stupid people get offended…
I don’t give a shit, this is not news worthy.
Maybe I’ve come from a different era, being an older gamer, but I was taught to be respectful to my friends. Calling someone fat or stupid or degrading them seems to fly in the face of that lesson. Most of my friends, being called that by me, would have no problem giving me anything from a range of a dirty look to being jackslapped for saying something pretty darn stupid in the first place.
This promotion should have never been green lighted.
People use facebook for anything but dumb little games still?
Thought twitter buried that…
I hope 47 takes out all the self-centered egotistical facebook users.
Weak people are easily harmed by WORDS.
If someone says you have small this or that, fuck them you are who you are.
I agree with Billy.
The whole thing is not “in good fun” but instead was in poor taste from the beginning.
Sure, it’s fine to jibe with your friends but there’s a point at which it’s just not funny any more. Like laughing when a friend falls off a building or something.
So wait the problem is with the description and not the Hit?
Wow what a bunch of Hypersensitive Babies.
::Cry:: A person on facebook sent me a message from a video game app and h-h-h-he called me FAT. ::BAWLING NOISE::
Oh and only he and I can see the message. How will everyone know how upset this makes me unless I re-post it and then whine that I got my panties in a wad over it.
Seriously Hypersensitive cry babies. Sheesh.
If the hit is only viewable to the person who made it and the person it was placed on and you could only place a hit on your confirmed friends, I don’t see what the big deal is. If you have people on facebook who are not your friends, that is your fault for adding them. As for friends talking bad about one another, well I’ve had many fun times with friends saying worse than the options presented there. Not talking behind people’s backs, mind you, but we would say such things to each others’ face in good spirit.
The old mantra; “All publicity is good publicity” is..in my opinion, sadly flawed. I mean..to cite a recent example:
Romney got a LOT of publicity for his 47% comment, and that really didn’t help him much.
Plus, the advertisement picture linked to of the woman on the bed bothered me as well. The mixture of violence and sexualization bothers me. In a culture (gaming) which is already seen (I like to think incorrectly) as misogynistic, we don’t need images like that being propagated by major content providers.
Myself being a new fan of the Hitman series, absolutely adoring Absolution I am not just bashing a series I am against. I am just saying that I think their market philosophy of “create a controversy, then profit.” Is woefully out of date, and the images that they chose to use seem to be appealing to a stereotypical, but very small, population of gamers.
Thanks for reading,
Billy.
I found it somewhat funny, yet sad, that it’s not the “hit” on your friends that’s offensive to people, it’s how you can describe them. “I dont mind you killing me but you called me fat, you’re off my friends list!”
you do realize that by making this post you just help them get publicity and now u are one of those “used fan-base as publicity”?
about the subject, yes this was obviously to get traffic and controversy. It’s impossible to let the user-base complete free access to describe other people as they want and then not expect them from abusing the system. It would have been really easy to make this app work simply by limiting the possible descriptions as:
-height
-age
-hair colour
-skin colour
-nationality
-etc.
and only allow people to choose from a list of pre-determinated possibilities, but obviously they never intended to make nothing more than a controversial add!!! good F***ING JOB! now your marketing campaign is in the same level as EA, how would have guess that there would be space for more in the rock bottom of the earth
I know the hard part about reporting these kinds of practices is you just make more people aware of said practices giving them more impact. There really isn’t anyway around it as we can’t just ignore what they do and we have to post.
there are ways around to talk about it, kind of like EC made a video about propaganda games but refused to talk about any particular modern game to avoid giving them any traffic, but u have to be very general about the subject….some companys just doesn’t care about people talking bad about them as long as people talk about them
With that though, they had an entire topic to work with, I have to present what happened and the reasons it was shelved.
yes sure, u did the right thing. I guess what i’m trying to say is that when this kind of things get popular i can’t help it but think that some guy on marketing who made this entire campaign to fail is laughing in succes at all the traffic it got
Whoever made the app was out of touch with the younger community and didn’t really consider how it would be used. The idea seems a bit dated, like an older person came up with it, or someone who had some blinders on and was obsessed with the Hitman series and didn’t ever consider that this app could do wrong. They responded to it correctly though, and I don’t think this kind of reaction was intentional at all, so who cares? Live and learn. Can’t blame them for trying something different and it didn’t work out.
I can kind of see what SquareEnix might have been trying to do with their marketing campaign, but it still missed the mark. Something similar is currently, and has been in use, for the Walking Dead Social Game on Facebook. Where some of the Walkers will have icons above them showing that they are members of your friends list. I can not count the number of times that Angry Joe has appeared as a Walker, and each time you kill the person that is on your friends list it will come up with a window message saying “You have just bashed Joe’s undead brains in. Click share to show them.” and the messages change depending on the weapon you used. It does give you the option not to post the messages, which I choose not to share the messages.
With the ability to add messages to the hit lists it makes it a different kind of animal however. It is an idea that should have been more thought out then what it was, and better executed as well.
the premise behind it, like putting a fake hit on friends seems like an “okay” idea to me. can be slightly controversial but it would’ve gotten people talking about the game. the descriptor element however takes it too far imho, and i’m glad square enix at least had the sense to pull it down right away. sounds like they could really use some new talent over at their marketing division…
TELL EM, I think internet is being used by the government to bring out the worst in people, less they’re ust to stuipd to realize that there being mind fucked. Have you seen the New black ops 2? AMAZING GAMe…but the campign, The enemy is a group of hackers who call themselves anonymous…WHICH mind you there is a hackivist community out there that call themselves anonymous, and they rally in guyfox masks, the same ones on the game, and these people are only individuals who exercise the righ tof freedom of speech and freedom of the internet. Yet they have them as the enemy shooting people with aks on the campign. They shouldnt use our video games to alter how we think…and people shouldnt allow this to happen.
Yeah this is just stuff that makes us look horrible as a group. When Rockstar tries to bank on any potential controversy they are doing it right by pointing out what’s in the game so gamers would pick it up to see just how bad it really is and find out that they’re playing an incredibly deep and fun crime drama. But this is just lowest common denominator bullcrap like the EA scandals with Dante’s Inferno or the “your mother will hate it” ads for Dead Space 2 making the majority of us look like nothing but a bunch of loud mouthed dead brained teenagers.
I personally hate this kind of marketing. It just seems mean-spirited from the get go, and that’s before you even consider how vile people on the internet can get.
I also suspect that you’re right and that Square Enix did this for the publicity generated from the controversy and that ultimately nothing will change :-/