Remember when publishers and video game companies used to push hard in promoting a game? It seems that’s going the way of the dodo if Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios is to be believed.

In a recent PC Gamer roundtable interview with developers across different studios, Warframe’s Creative Director Rebecca Ford mentioned, “Actual players don’t want to be marketed to,” which is something Larian Studios Publishing Director Michael Douse agreed to stating video game marketing is “dead.”

“Marketing is dead…Marketing is dead. It truly is—I can back this shit up, man. There’s no channels anymore—it doesn’t work. You used to have marketing, communication, and PR. Marketing was essentially a retail theory—you were trying to get your box on the right point of the store shelf, and you have partnerships with retail stores. Those pipelines are gone. Now you’ve got the internet. Nobody is looking at ads anymore … all of the channels that we would usually market through are no longer really viable. So their function is also reduced by the fact that players just want to be spoken to. They don’t want to be bamboozled—they just want to know what you’re making and why you’re making it and who it’s for.” – Michael Douse, Larian Studios Publishing Director 

Douse further adds that the best place to market your game is on the store itself, stating that “everything else isn’t worth it,” and how they learned that with Baldur’s Gate 3, though it took them a while.

Given Baldur’s Gate 3 essentially mopped up every gaming award last year, I’d like to think Larian and Douse kind of know what they’re talking about. I mean, BG3 wasn’t heavily marketed like other AAA games, but it managed to outsell noteworthy franchises just by word of mouth.

In other Baldur’s Gate 3 news, Larian mentioned that they are still working on crossplay. While that won’t be part of Patch 7, evil endings getting reworked is, which you can read about here.