Massacred Pen

Yeah! Or maybe it was some studio that wasn’t named Halo that made it… The reason why you should care is that the developers now want to brand themselves instead of the games they are making. The tool to do this is to take advantage of social sites like Youtube, Flikr and Facebook to spread the words about new games. Over at Next-Gen.biz they have a 2-page article about that subject, which you can read here: Using Social Sites to Sell Games

I think it’s inspired by the movie business, how many movie posters have you seen without a line like: “From the producer of Glitter/Crossroads” or “From the director of Killer Clowns from Outer Space”, but actually I don’t think it’s a new phenomena, the first time I saw it was from the box shot of Freedom Fighters:

Also I think there’s another reason why the developers want to brand themselves, to make it easier for them to choose publisher, instead of them being dependent on the publisher, they can now instead easily switch publisher because it’s not important who published but the game, but instead it’s important who actually developed the game, and thereby getting more control over the production of the game, instead of the publisher who tell them what to do and what not to do. Specially Bungie has a problem, that people think that Microsoft made the Halo games, and when they recently left Microsoft, they are really in a need to brand themselves. Personally I know who had made most of the games I have on the shelves at home, but The Common Man™(Or woman) might not know who made the last Halo game, or The Sims game.