Just an interesting observation; the marketing around this DLC has been…weird.
Firstly the steam page goes up. Nothing too out of the ordinary here; mostly focusing on the 3K civs, and putting the Jurchens and Khitans almost like an afterthought (in fact some initial posts were confused if they were even in there at all).
Then content creator videos pop up, and things seem normal. Videos on all the civs, regionals and clips of their theme music. Before I get to the meat of this post; another observation. All the videos of the 3K civs, their theme music etc have lower viewer count than the Khitans and Jurchens, sometimes as much as half (and not in the smaller numbers, thousands less).
Now, let’s talk about the official marketing.
No video on release, and still nothing now. Only video footage of the DLC is a short section at the end of the PS5 trailer.
Meanwhile everything else has been 2 youtube shorts, and some posters on twitter and FB both relatively barren sites compared to several years ago. But what’s really interesting is the focus. Khitans, Jurchens, UUs, regionals…but no mention of the 3K civs outside of talking about all 5 together.
And then…the content creator videos. Several people covering the civs did overviews of them, but didn’t finish the 3K ones. TheViper did one on each…but stopped before finishing with the Wei and is now back to his usual videos and almost ignoring the 3K DLC altogether. T90 has only made a video of Khitans vs Jurchens, and has not covered the Three Kingdom civs at all. And SotL hasn’t done individual analysis outside of the initial video.
Now add the random discount of AoE2, and the packaging of 3K into a bundle. Neither are positive signs for a DLC selling well when you try to cut prices/bundle it in try to and shift the dial.
This is all rather unusual. Is it too much hope to think that this “sweeping under the rug” of these “factions” might be an indication that things might be moving to have them removed from ranked? Or major changes to them to make them into real civs? (One can hope). Perhaps it’s just trying to avoid too much more controversy, or trying not to enflame the situation?
But what we can see for sure is that attention has shifted drastically away from them in the last week or two.
But I think with most DLCs bringing new civs over the past few years, I tend to notice the first couple waves of marketing info, and then let the info simmer until launch date at which time another announcement goes out, in like Steam page or I find out about in the forums. I think their Marketing pushes to me work, but then I don’t know what goes on in addition to or on the edges of that. So for this latest DLC, it doesn’t seem different ‘to me’