Video games have been out-earning blockbuster movies for the past few years, and to help stoke the fire, publishers have been spending movie-money on marketing their games. Usually the output is some kind of movie-trailer style video, movie-like banners on the web, movie-esque wildpostings and mass-transit ads, and if the game is a big enough deal, it might get its own flavor of Mountain Dew.

But now, Electronic Arts has announced that they are going to start selling premium downloadable content before in-store game packages are released. Costing around $10-15, it will essentially be a long demo of the game, followed by the full packaged game at full retail price.

“The idea is that if the PDLC gets favorable reviews, it will build word of mouth for the boxed product. If the PDLC has issues, they can tweak the packaged product to address those issues, improving the final product before release.” —EA senior VP Nick Earl

It’s always seemed odd to me that game companies know how to make something that people will want to spend hundreds, maybe thousands of hours interacting with, but don’t apply that knowledge to the marketing of that product. Instead they hand over their marketing to people who specialize in creating messages rather than interactions. This results in a necessity to  focus on the storyline of the game, which is a slippery slope to creative work that mimics marketing for linear media, like movies.

People like games because they like learning new patterns, because learning new patterns is fun. Story is at best secondary (and lets face it, most story in games is almost as bad as the voice acting). So it would seem that the best way to really build hype for a game prerelease is to immerse users in the game world using game mechanics. Give people something to solve, ways to interact with the story … get interactive. Gamers are clearly wired for games, so why not use game mechanics to market them?  This PDLC idea seems like it could be a step in the right direction.