Heavy Rain Creator Blasts US Marketing Departments

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Video games are a very fickle and ever-changing genre of entertainment. What’s in now might be all but extinct in another five or ten years, and gamers around the world have an almost rabid loyalty to their favorite genres and series. This is what makes innovation so difficult to pull off in the world of video games, and developing an new IP or trying to create a new genre is a very risky move for a studio.

Quantic Dream has taken risks like that in the past, and as a result, their games have enjoyed less exposure in the US than games in the FPS genre – say Call of Duty for example – are given. Quantic Dream co-founder and Heavy Rain writer and director David Cage isn’t going to take it anymore though, and in a new interview with Develop, he blasted the US marketing departments he feels are doing his games a disservice:

The U.S. always have problems with my games, to be honest. Nomad Soul was the first to have issues over there. We were asked to change the name over there, so it was called Omikron: The Nomad Soul, but there was still no confidence that it would sell well in the States, so it wasn’t supported. The games I make don’t include a gun. Very often, American marketing departments have a problem with this. They have this image of their market being gun-loving rednecks. It’s completely wrong.

I have to post a little disclaimer here: I think that David Cage is a very self-absorbed game creator. I get the feeling that he thinks everything he puts out is a work of creative genius, and when they don’t do as well as he hopes, he tends to get offended and complain that consumers and publisher just don’t understand what he’s doing.

But I have to hand it to him, because he’s right in this instance. The games that do the best in the United States typically belong to the FPS genre for better or worse, and publishers and marketers across the country are well aware of this. This is just the nature of the beast, and there’s really no way around it until gamers decide that they want something different.

That being said, I think that Cage needs to be reminded that it’s always a risk for publishers to invest boatloads of money on marketing a video game, and that risk is multiplied many times over when a developer is making a new game in an unproven franchise. Also, if it was exposure that he wanted, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to promise that his obscure, experimental games will be PS3-exclusive from now on.

But enough about my take – we want to know what you think. Does the percieved failure of games like Heavy Rain in the US lay specifically with marketers and publishers, or should Cage be taking some of the blame too? Head down to the comments section and sound off!