Goddess of Victory: Nikke has been everywhere as of late. The game is clearly making developer ShiftUp some good money considering they’re buying out stadiums and sending ads to outer space.
In their latest takeover, they were parading a massive inflatable chibi version of Dorothy around the Hudson River. They also opened a pop-up shop with some various goodies to attract fans from New York City and put Doro next to some of the world’s most recognizable landmarks.
However, across Nikke’s variety of IRL activations, one thing is true of all of them: They don’t really show what the game looks like. All of their advertising is designed to make you aware that it exists, but not of what the actual game is.
That trend continues with Dorothy’s summer trip to New York City.
Nikke gets yet another big IRL event with no gameplay
Through all of Nikke’s advertising across the past few years, it’s clear that the game is doing well. This is surely aided by the low-stakes entry fee of free on the app, with the Nikke having relatively low specs that are easy to run on most mobile devices.
It’s an on-rails shooter that plays similar to old-school arcade games like Time Crisis and House of the Dead, and it has a relatively simple gameplay loop of shooting everything on screen until it dies.
However, the key to a lot of Nikke’s appeal is what happens when you’re behind cover, specifically how the recoil affects the bodies of the main cast of characters that’s comprised almost solely of women. If you’ve seen footage of the game, you’d know why it isn’t embedded here.
It’s at the point where they had an hour long concert performing music from the game, and they showed virtually no gameplay through the entire thing despite having images that accompany each track played at the concert house.
They hired animators and outside artists to create promo images to avoid having to show any of the actual game. They’d sooner send a literal satellite to space than show what the game looks like in general, public-facing advertising.
This dichotomy puts Nikke in a place where it’s beloved by fans and clearly profitable, but also where devs have had to figure out innovative ways to advertise the game without showing any of the gameplay. That said, the solutions they’ve found are clearly working.