They say word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective form of marketing. What games did you (not) enjoy that came well-recommended by friends to you, and why did they recommend it to you?

10 months ago by Elevator7009 to c/patientgamers

Feel free to replace "friends" with "anyone you know in real life" or even online groups you trust or are close with.

"They":

WOM marketing is highly effective as 88% of consumers trust friend recommendations over traditional media.

and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.

Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for !videogamesuggestions@lemmy.zip (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don't run the place.

EDIT: The "not" in the title is optional; I'm asking about both successful and failed recommendations.

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Tahl_eN 21 points 10 months ago

Half Life 2. Wasn't a big fan of the first one, but the second had tons of hype, so I gave it a shot. The physics stuff was cool, but the gameplay, story and characters were boring and flat. And the "revolutionary" storytelling method of locking you in a box to talk at you rather than making a proper cutscene still sucks.

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Zahille7 19 points 10 months ago

Damn, that is a hot take.

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dylanmorgan 11 points 10 months ago

Honestly impressive for a 20+ year-old game to still inspire hot takes.HL2 remains undefeated.

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sp3ctr4l 10 points 10 months ago

Because I can't help myself from countering:

HL2 has better, more realistic and detailed and believable mouth and facial animations than many current AAA games, they just have higher res textures and fancier lighting.

That's not to say no game has exceeded it, thats not what I mean, some clearly have.

But... the other side of this is that a lot of modern AAA games, with 20 years of improved/new tech... still can't figure it out.

AAA games that market themselves as being very graphically detailed/realistic/immersive.

I'm not trying to say waaagh how can you not personally have thought HL2 was amazing!

I'm trying to say that the technical advancements it made, which you do not find compelling, well, a good deal of game devs still haven't even reached that level from 20+ years ago, when they say they are trying to.

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Katana314 3 points 10 months ago

This game was what pulled me into PC gaming, but when I’ve watched novices return to it even with all the time I spent listening to their commentaries on good teaching…players don’t learn the things they want well, and I can’t blame them on reflection. Even things like where to go are tough for reasons they shouldn’t be.

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Trainguyrom 3 points 10 months ago

Back when I was first getting into gaming and learning about this Steam thing a friend told me I needed to play the Half Life games. I snagged them on sale started playing and every one I tried I ended up putting down pretty quickly because I'm just not a shooter fan.

Funnily enough I actually like more combat-oriented games more now but I've played too many newer games that were at least partially inspired by Half Life so I have a feeling I'll go play it and find it's too unpolished and not aged too well

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the16bitgamer 2 points 10 months ago

I watch Freeman's Mind and wanted to play. Yeah totally not my cup of tea.

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