As a business case, I do have to admit that money spent on advertisement is rarely wasted and should be looked at seriously. It’s not rare to see a 10-1 ROI as long as you don’t go completely overboard. There are a lot of good indie titles that nobody has heard of or played because they had no hype.
Those are fine ideas, but most people are really not even that picky.
Make it good, price it even halfway reasonable, people will buy it. Lots of games are selling well.
(Maybe stop spending half a billion on the budgets if you want to be profitable, instead of trying to squeeze more out of the players.)
Or put less of that half billion into ads and use it to improve the game development part
As a business case, I do have to admit that money spent on advertisement is rarely wasted and should be looked at seriously. It’s not rare to see a 10-1 ROI as long as you don’t go completely overboard. There are a lot of good indie titles that nobody has heard of or played because they had no hype.
I’m not saying cut all of it, like 10%, put it towards higher dev counts so you don’t have to engage crunch as much