Efficacy of SotS2 Steam Store Page

[starsrift]

I hope the developers or PR guys or something are reading these forums.

Because seriously, guys. You have twenty screenshots up there, and 18 are gratuitious close-ups that don't show gameplay, and you have 2 gameplay shots. Unless I'm way off by assuming that SotS2 plays like SotS1 and it's a strategic game, not a tactical one.

Is it that the marketing department doesn't understand games that aren't shooters, or what's the deal? Those two screenshots of gameplay aren't inspiring me to get SotS2 or put it on my Steam wishlist, I gotta say, though I might go and reinstall SotS1 again.

[Lord_WC]

Kerberos is 12 guys or so, they don't have marketing/PR department to speak of as far as I know.
Their 'marketing' consist of devs posting/commenting/discussing the game on their forums. I agree it's far from professional, but all in all it's a niché game and people will find it ;)

[Tayrtahn]

If you look at the store page for the original SotS, you'll see that all the screenshots are of tactical gameplay there too.

I'm guessing they want to show off the graphics engine, as they're aware that many people judge games (especially games they have not heard of) based on screenshots. A bunch of pictures of menus would probably scare some people off.
I'm glad they included a few pictures of the interface though, for comparison with the old game.

[Essedarius]

People mostly want visuals, not charts or strategy pages in clusters.

Yet strategy gamers in particular don't really look at how pretty the pictures are because they know the object of the game requires less attention in that regard.

However, SOTS II is using a new graphics engine. So to show that, I think this ad on Steam does the game justice and the developers (all 12 of them, or however many there is) provided us with enough of it to tease our interests.

I for one am looking forward to this one and the ad really didn't cause me to lose any interest either.

[Runt]

Take a look at the Total War: Shogun 2 page, it's not a great deal different. You have 4 screenshots of the strategic map, and 24 close ups of units or scenery, and one of a battle from the viewpoint you'd normally see the game from. I'd say it would be the standard for games like SotS to do things in that manner.

A couple of pictures of the strategic map will decent taste of that, but a lot of it is mostly interesting only when you're actually playing around with it. For example, looking through the tech tree in SotS is pretty cool. Staring at a picture of a small part of it? Still nice, but not something people will usually impress most people that much. The battles and the models there tend to be the most interesting parts for most people. They're also the easiest to show off, so they're what get shown off.