Bex Confirms ExileCon is the Jumping-Off Point for Path of Exile 2's Marketing

That doesn't mean it's not coming later this year or at the start of next one. Realistically speaking, marketing doesn't do much on a period longer than 6 months, so doing a year+ of marketing tends to be a giant waste of resources.

Imo August is 3.22, ~Sep/Oct is 3.23 + PoE2 Beta, and 1/24 is PoE 2

For the marketing, look at D4 - the marketing started in march with the closed beta, and the game came out in June. And there's one thing Blizzard is still great at - marketing.

Marketing for a year or so seems a bit daft, 3 months or so is usually more than enough otherwise people lose interest and the hype levels decrease significantly.

As was evident with D4, an open beta is all you need for marketing, if the game is good it will sell itself.

GG GGG, GG.

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Xyel wrote:

And there's one thing Blizzard is still great at - marketing.

I think a very convincing argument could be made that Blizzard are actually terrible at marketing but have so much brand pull its completely irrelevant.

By that I mean if a week before its release they said "oh yeah D4 is done" and that was the only marketing they did D4 would still have outsold many titles that dump millions of dollars into their effort.

Does that make them great at marketing? In a strict results based sense I guess it does :p but I think the best marketing comes from smaller developers getting a far bigger response than their budget justifies rather than critical mass is already achieved so its irrelevant.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

By that I mean if a week before its release they said "oh yeah D4 is done" and that was the only marketing they did D4 would still have outsold many titles that dump millions of dollars into their effort.

Ehm, so this is the D4 3D billboard from Times Square, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp4zbGR45aQ , this is a live action video they set up in a deconsecrated church in France to film https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=74&v=jWSOFkpOCFo&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcgamer.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo , there was a world-wide collab with NVidia, a US-wide collab with KFC, collab with the UFC, and then there were billboards literally everywhere (like even in my second world country). And I'm sure it's not an exhaustive list.

It's not some magical goodwill, of which Blizzard doesn't have much, but an extremely strong marketing campaign that worked. It's easy to look at reddit, and not realize that the 600K people following the D4 subreddit are more like 5 % of the game's actual population.

Expectation management is key, people.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

I think a very convincing argument could be made that Blizzard are actually terrible at marketing but have so much brand pull its completely irrelevant.

What a statement. Blizzard marketing so terrible, that their brands, which they have created by marketing, don't need to be marketed. Wait what?

I think it's going to come out in December, the beta that is. Maybe have the keys tied to supporter packs like they did with the Fall of Oriath

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sumfight wrote:

I think it's going to come out in December, the beta that is. Maybe have the keys tied to supporter packs like they did with the Fall of Oriath

I've always suspected Q1 of 2024 release, so holiday beta could make sense. But not if its a limited Act 1 type-only beta. It need to be much larger imo.

Edit: if this drifts out further than 2024 however, that's a really bad sign.

The tie to the yearly supporter packs makes a lot of sense tbh... now I'm even more confident in expecting it in 1-2024