#sex sells

Necromundu: Underhive Wars (2020) by Rogue Factor

Looking at the trailer and promotional material for this video game you would be forgiven for thinking it was some sort of ultra-violent dating reality show where competitors are eliminated through rounds of live ammunition laser/bullet tag.

Collectively the Escher gang tick off a lot of bingo boxes, and so much screen time you would think the game was supposed to be entirely about them and not the *checks notes*  the six core gangs, five or six other factions, and four extra gangs invented for the sequel tabletop game “Necromunda: Underhive”.

This is probably in part because the base game only has three playable gangs, and clearly they chose Escher for the sex appeal angle, and Goliaths for the weird hypermasculinity… but they really… really lean into one of those:

How’s that working out for them…

I can’t help but think that perhaps the fashion bras, skin-tight pants are not really conveying the Escher gang as a people of amazons from a sub-society where their men are generally physically feeble and unable to defend their territory.  Maybe it’s several decades overdue for a reinvention.  Possibly at a conceptual level that forgoes the assumption of patriarchy being the default.

I’m sure Games Workshop is working on that… oh no…

- wincenworks

So, looking at the promotions one would be forgiven for believing the remastered Grand Theft Auto trilogy is either a low budget dating/sex game or one where you play a female carjacker who operates literally in a bikini.

This is, sadly, almost pretty standard but actually slightly worse than usual for the serious in terms of marketing.

This includes Grand Theft Auto Online’s expansion pack)

The exception being Grand Theft Auto IV, which was essentially the tittle in the series that deconstructed the rest of the series, and featured female characters less like Candy Suxxx, and more like:

It’s a shame that the leads at Rockstar and the wider video game industry didn’t take notice and continues to treat women as some sort of mysterious commodity that magically make products sellbutaren’t worth further consideration.

- wincenworks

Working on this blog a real cost to my sanity and personal shopping experience, particularly in regards to comic books.

Though I do want to point out that these kind of recommendations do come in waves, and usually my recommendations are more like this:

Because the titles that rely on fairly small groups of reactionaries who fund their projects to get started less for the product itself and more for the political stance that the market should cater to them.  And even then, not particularly well.

They fall off recommendations quickly because they don’t have any wider appeal and because most of the people who were interested in them already pre-ordered their special nine variant covers to own the libs.

The ones that show up more frequently like Princeless are ones that definitely have political messages, are stories all sorts of people can enjoy and find lasting appeal in.

And this is why media industries both need to drop the myth of sex sells, and everyone should read Princeless.

- wincenworks

The Dark Mistress was, in all other ways, a fairly standard unit in the Dungeon Keeper gameswho certain people, for certain reasons, decided really needed to become the focus of all marketing and large parts of the imagery Dungeon Keeper 2 onward,. by which I mean Dungeon Keeper 2 and the Dungeon Keepr mobile game.  The character is a fascinating case study in the myth of sex sells.

Horny (that’s… that’s actually his name) got t appear as an extra in the promotion for his own game (in which he’s an apex unit)

Now, since it took 15 years between Dungeon Keeper 2 and Dungeon Keeper mobile/online, you can probably guess that support for the game was not super remarkable - particularly given they spent so much time on graphics updates, hiring models to dress up as dominatrixes, etc and sold only about 61% of the previous title which used advertising like this:

Now, we could put this down to there being a terrible misunderstanding about what the “fantasy genre” is commonly meant to understand - but more likely there as an over belief that now they could render enough polygons to render Dark Mistresses as cartoon babes, that would do the marketing for itself.

The real absurdity is that the original game is leaned heavily into the idea that you get to play as an avatar of evil, destroying those pesky adventurers as you conquer the world.  The second game… seems to like pitch you, that guy but he gave up and decided to set up a fetish club instead (which honestly could have been an interesting premise in itself).

Honestly it seems like it’d be awful awkward if someone just came across that strategy guide lying about… it’s about tactics and  strategy, I promise!

As for the mobile game like… all I can say is good work making it look like every piece of shovelware that gets advertised on Instagram.

- wincenworks

So, apparently it’s being reported that Amazon is looking for actors and actress’s who are comfortable with doing some nude and sex scenes for their Lord Of The Rings series… Sounds more like a Game Of Thrones series to me.