The Rise of the Patient Buyer (and New Marketing Opportunities) in Video Gaming

We’re going to take a trip down memory lane. The year is 2010 and it’s the night of March 15th. You and all your friends have been waiting in line for hours to get your hands on the brand new copy of God of War III at your favorite game store. The energy is electric, and the crowd and line are growing by the minute.

When the clock strikes midnight, the store opens. Copies of the game start being handed out. You quickly grab yours and race back to your car in order to drive home and immediately start playing it. Before you know it, your alarm goes off, as you fell asleep trying to stay up all night playing the new release.

The transition from physical to digital formats.

That was the norm for avid gamers when it came to blockbuster title releases. But as technology has advanced, we’ve seen a massive shift (as the graphic below shows) from 2009 to 2018 in buying behavior, from physical to digital delivery formats.

This seismic shift from retail to e-commerce has allowed companies to create digital storefronts, which in turn has opened new revenue streams for studios within a single game.

The most visible gain for publishers has been their ability to cut out retail stores as the main source of distribution for video games. In only nine years, gaming console companies gained the ability to sell directly to consumers through their own online marketplace. And within these marketplaces, they became able to sell other games while still getting a percentage of the revenue.

The ripple effects of online marketplaces.

This shift to online marketplaces brought additional benefits for these companies. The most visible one is having more time to complete games. Before, limited to physical formats, they needed to have 100% of a game ready before putting it on the market, which in turn meant risking delays and potential damages to the customer relationship. Nowadays, they can ship a game that’s only a quarter of the way done, and complete it with a patch on release day. This also gives them the opportunity to fix bugs, along with adding new features to the game in real time in the form of downloadable content (DLC). 

At the same time, the cost of developing games has drastically increased over time, with larger blockbuster releases costing hundreds of millions of dollars over several years of development. This has driven up the cost for consumers, forcing them to choose fewer more expensive titles per year instead of more, cheaper titles in the same period of time. Publishers have tried to offset some of those costs by adding in DLC and making more games into Live Services.

All of these changes have modified the dynamic between publishers and consumers. Gamers have started to expect better and more frequent updates from publishers, and in many cases develop unrealistic expectations around the development of games based on the ability to constantly update them. 

Let’s take a look at a very high profile instance where these expectations collided. Cyberpunk 2077 was the most anticipated launch of 2020, eight years after the initial announcement of the game, and it didn’t go as expected, with constant delays to the release date and developers even getting personal threats over them. The parent company of the studio developing the game, CD Projekt, was between a rock and a hard place, trying to balance the temptation to capitalize on the hype generated around the release and the risks of prematurely releasing an incomplete game.

Eventually, both parties were disappointed, with users reporting numerous bugs and performance issues on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions. Cyberpunk 2077 was labeled one of the biggest flops in gaming history and even removed from digital storefronts. A couple of years later, when the fully finished version of the game was released, critics and consumers started to change their tune and proclaimed it the top game it had always meant to be. 

This botched release (and later recovery) can be told through financial results: the year of its launch, 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 sold $351 million, with 13.7 million copies being purchased in the first 21 days. But after the disappointment with the bugs, in 2021 it sold less than a third of that amount (around $91 million), a number that slowly but steadily increased in 2022 and 2023 with the release of the fully developed version of the game.

The rise of the patient buyer.

Besides the sales numbers, Cyberpunk 2077 tells us the story of a new type of consumer, the patient buyer, as data shows that consumers are now more likely to wait until games have launched to see if the hype is real before investing in them. With the rising expectations from customers on video game experiences, the cost of developing an AAA game (the more technically complex and blockbuster-like titles) has systematically risen—from a $50-$150 million average cost 5 years ago to $200 million or more in 2024. This, in turn, has famously elevated the price of AAA games for consumers over the $70 mark.

Enter the patient consumer, who doesn’t feel the need to wait in line at midnight for that physical release, and can wait until the release has reached the desired maturity online before investing $70 or more.

A change in marketing strategies?

The real question is this: have publishers changed the way they market based on this crucial shift? In other words: have they acknowledged the rise of the patient buyer?

Not necessarily. 

Marketers still treat game launches as if they're crucial, do-or-die events. The graph below —built using our proprietary AI tool Huge Live— represents the overlaying and normalizing of six of the top comparative games from different studios and their conversational trend lines based on the performance of these games around their respective release dates.

The graphic is time-stamped and labeled every 20 days, starting at 60 days before launch and ending 40 days after. You can see that publishers are still spending a majority of their efforts trying to create awareness and conversations before the game has launched—an effort that isn’t converting to sales. Conversations and spending drop significantly after the release date, showing that lack of awareness of the patient buyer—and the conversations that happen after launch,

When analyzing the video game release campaigns for a client, we used time-series modeling on a recent AAA game campaign. Using Huge Live, we gathered conversation volumes on the release across all social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, TikTok and blogs), being able to compare their “expected” and “actual” volumes. 

As you can see in the graphic below, the analyzed campaign exceeded expectations before and shortly after launch (which, as shown above, was the traditional strategy marketers have taken), but fell short in the following weeks, leading to potential sales being left on the table. This major discrepancy is due to the lack of campaign beats that catered towards the patient buyers.